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T-Mobile started to support the RCS Universal Profile – a new standard for messaging that is supposed to make a traditional text message look like a cat in a modern messaging application, with read receipts, keystrokes, etc. .
The deployment, spotted by Android Police is from Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge and is expected to come to more Android devices later in the year. ;year. There are a million qualifiers here on how and when everyone will really use it, but it's still an important step towards improving the basic texting experience on Android.
RCS messaging has been supported by T-Mobile customers for three years now, but it is not now that T-Mobile has adopted the RCS "Universal". Universal RCS, if all goes as planned, will allow RCS messages between phones supported on all major carriers, rather than just in the same carrier.
T-Mobile says that every Android device that it sells supports RCS, many recent T-Mobile devices will receive updates to support it. And one could imagine that eventually all new Android phones will support it out of the box.
But as I said, a lot of qualifiers. At present, the only other major carrier supporting Universal RCS is Sprint. Thus, only T-Mobile and Sprint customers – who have supported phones – can use RCS messaging together. These customers must also use the correct email application (the default one built into their phone) in order to take advantage of the new features. Oh, and the iPhone does not support RCS yet (if that's the case), so it'll probably be between Android phones for a while.
T-Mobile had said it would start rolling out Universal RCS this quarter, and it's really sneaking in there in the last days. It is not clear how quickly the deployment will continue, nor how many additional phones the deployment will reach.
"We plan to activate RCS Universal Profile 1.0 with a software update for other Android devices this year," a mobile spokesman said in an email to The Verge . "Customers with RCS Universal Profile 1.0 will see the new features in the native messaging application on their device."
But the big question is when Verizon and AT & T will activate Universal RCS. Both agreed to support the standard, but neither one nor the other set a timetable for deployment. And that means that even people who are able to use RCS will not have the benefits by talking with about two-thirds of wireless customers in the United States.
Google has recently fallen far behind RCS, and the company seems to believe that a much wider support is expected to begin to occur between 2018 and 2019. "By the end of the year, there is still a lot going on. year, we will be in a very good condition, and by the middle of next year, we will be in a place where A large percentage of users [will have] this experience, "Anil Sabharwal, who runs the Google RCS push, said The Verge earlier this year.
We still have a lot to see. But today 's news shows that there is at least movement in Google' s big RCS push. There is still a long way to go.
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