- Say you have an Android phone and you want
to send a text message, what do you do?
Well if you do what most people do,
you just open up the Messages app
and you tap on an SMS but SMS sucks,
it's only 160 characters and you never know if they get it
and the pictures are bad and
just everything is bad about it.
Well what else do you do?
Well you hope you remember what messaging app
your friend uses and open up WhatsApp or Messaging
or whatever and send it that way.
This whole situation is a mess,
it's been that way since the very beginning
of Android, and guess what, Google says
that it finally, basically for the first time ever,
has a fix to this whole conundrum
and I want to talk about it,
but to do that I wanna go inside 'cause it's noisy out here
and I'm tired of walking, so let's go chat.
Okay, so we're at a quieter place
and I wanna start with the basics of what is happening here
because it sounds really complicated when you get into it
but the end result is really simple.
At some point in the next I don't know
six to 12 months, we don't have exact timing yet,
the default texting app on Android,
it's called Android Messages, is just going to get
upgraded so that it's going to feel more
like iMessage or Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or whatever.
You're gonna get read receipts,
you're gonna get high quality pictures and video
that you can send, you're gonna get really good group texts,
it's not a brand new app, it's just a feature
and it's got a really simple name,
it's called Chat, it's gonna be called Chat
on every single phone that it's available on.
So when you open up your texting app,
you'll send a text and it'll just magically
be this nicer version of it so I'm gonna explain it
in more detail, but you know what, honestly,
before I do that I just want, just humor me a little bit,
I wanna do brief history of all the crap that Google
has tried to make messaging work on Android, come with me.
Okay, so in 2005, Google launched Google Talk,
you might know it as Google Chat,
it was really popular, it was really good,
so when Android launched in 2008,
they included it alongside SMS 'cause that's what you do.
In 2009, the iPhone got push notifications
which made apps like WhatsApp get super popular
and then when they came to Android also,
it got popular there so Google had a problem to solve.
So in 2011, they didn't solve it,
they saw Facebook and they're like we want some of that
so they launched Google Plus which had yet more chat apps
in it, it had Huddle for text and Hangouts video
for video chat, not the same Hangouts as you know, though.
It was just confusing.
Anyway, in late 2011, iMessage and Facebook Messenger
launched and they were way simpler than what Google had
and so Google had to fix it again and so a couple years
later in 2013 they launched Hangouts which took
all those other apps and combined them into a single app
and everything was great for a couple of years
and then Hangouts didn't get updated,
Google Plus was like failing, and they pulled texting
out of it and it was just a big mess again and so in 2016,
Google's like we're gonna fix it again,
they launched Allo for text chat and Duo for video chat,
Duo super popular, Allo meh, not so much.
Meanwhile, Hangouts turned into this like enterprise
Slack competitor thing, I don't know, whatever.
I haven't even mentioned Google Voice and Google Wave
and all the other crazy experiments Google's been doing.
It's been a rolling 10 year disaster
and Google has to fix it, I mean look at all this stuff.
What the what?
Okay, all that's ancient history,
you don't need to know about it anymore,
it's still interesting though right?
I mean it's insane.
Here's how RCS, this new chat feature is going to work,
it's actually relatively simple.
If you have Android Messages and your carrier supports RCS,
you're gonna send a text and then it'll shoot up
to your carrier server, and then they gotta figure out
where it goes so it'll go to a hub that'll reroute it
to the other carrier's server, that other carrier
will be like oh the recipient has RCS too,
and they'll get the rich message,
if they don't, they'll get a standard text message,
if they get a text message, they pay text messaging rates,
if they get this special new chat message,
it won't cost anything because it'll be the same rates
as all their stuff on their data plan
but if you're sending it to somebody
who doesn't have RCS, their carrier hasn't supported it yet
or yeah if they're using an iPhone,
it's going to fall back to SMS.
If you look at this graphic of everybody
that's supporting it, it's a whole lot of carriers
all around the world, it's a whole lot
of Android manufacturers, Samsung's gonna support it
in their default text messaging app, LG and Huawei
are on board, and then if you look at the operating system
providers, we've got Google obviously,
and hey, look at that, Microsoft is there,
I wonder if that means there's
gonna be a texting app on Windows.
That all sounds great, but there's one problem,
RCS chats aren't protected from government snooping
in the same way that a fully encrypted chat system is
so if you need something fully encrypted,
you're gonna need to use something like iMessage or Signal.
The reason that happens is RCS chats basically
follow the same rules as SMS, so the data gets stored
on the server, and if the government goes looking for it,
the carriers are probably more likely to give it up,
and it's not like iMessage where everything
is encrypted and they couldn't possibly
give it up even if they wanted to.
I want to shift gears here a little bit
'cause earlier we looked at all of the folderol
that Google went through chasing its own tail
trying to figure out messaging,
and it seems like they've tried everything
but they haven't actually tried everything,
even right now they're not doing
what to me seems like the really obvious thing,
they're not just making an Android equivalent
of iMessage where you text the message
and it goes up to Google, Google figures out
whether or not you're in the system and if you are,
you get it and if you're not, it falls back to SMS.
That's how iMessage works,
why aren't they doing that on Android?
The answer, if you ask Google, and I did,
is they'll tell you that Android's open
and they can't make the default
a thing that's just a Google thing,
they actually have to make it available
for other people to build on and if they were to
swing their big Android clout around,
then people might get mad and that's not what
Android's about and it's a hard situation that Google's in,
like do you fight every single carrier on the planet
by taking away like one more piece of their control
over what their customers do or do you partner
with everybody and if you're Google,
you're more likely to partner with everybody because,
I don't know, you play ball in a way that Apple doesn't.
If it works, if all billion of those people
have this new text messaging standard,
I don't think Apple can not get onboard,
like they're gonna have to, they're gonna become
the green bubble, and that would suck for Apple
so I do think that there's a really good chance
that the iPhone is gonna pick up RCS support.
The billion users of Android are going to have
their own version of the blue bubble
and there's still, I don't know,
a trillion text messages sent a year,
and so if they can make that experience
not suck because it sucks right now,
if they can make that experience not suck,
they could win and if Google controls
the most popular text messaging app on your phone,
Android Messages, they can get all the stuff that they want,
they can do Google Assistant inside that thing,
and they're gonna do that,
they can have crazy Google stickers,
they can have it tie in to Duo for video chat stuff.
The bottom line, I hope, is that if you have
an Android phone, you're gonna get Chat,
and your text messaging experience is gonna get way better.
Is it gonna be as good as I want?
No, it's not, it's not gonna be as secure
as iMessage or Signal, but it's gonna be
a huge upgrade over SMS and honestly,
Google deserves some credit for managing to get
50 something carriers and few dozen manufacturers
to all agree on something, that never happens,
so SMS is gonna get a huge upgrade
and hopefully, if we're lucky,
this RCS thing is gonna finally kill SMS dead.
So what do you think?
Is this crazy plan of Google's actually gonna work
or are you just gonna keep on using whatever
text messaging app you use right now?
Let me know in the comments,
and hey while you're down there,
hit the like button, that's fun.