Okay, say you have an Android phone and you want to send a message, it’s highly likely that you will open up one of the famous chat apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger and in a few case send an SMS. But we all know that SMS sucks, its only 160 characters and you are never sure if the receipt will get it , the pictures are bad generally everything is bad about it. This whole situation is clearly a mess for Android users and it has been that way since the very beginning of the platform and guess what? Google thinks it has finally found a fix to this whole test messaging conundrum, so lets talk about Google’s new initiative in messaging called chat.
An iMessage for Android
At some point in the next 6 months of so, the default texting app on your Android phone (called Android Messages) is going to be upgraded so that it’s going to feel more like Apple’s iMessage, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. It will come with features like read receipts, high quality pictures and videos that you can share and high quality group texts. Its not a brand new app, it will be just a feature with a simple name called CHAT on every single phone it will be available on.
So when you open up your SMS app, you will send a text that will just magically be this nicer version of SMS. Let’s explain it in more detail– but before that, lets first take a trip down memory lane of Google’s failed attempt at messaging.
A brief History
In 2005, Google launched Google Talk also known as Google Chat, it was really popular and really good. When Android launched in 2008, they included it along side SMS because it was the natural thing to do by then. In 2009, the iPhone got push notifications which made apps like WhatsApp super popular and when it came to Android also, it got popular there. So Google had a problem to solve. In 2011 they saw Facebook and they thought they would share a piece of that Social Media pie, so they Launched Google Plus, which had yet more chat apps in it like Huddle for text and Hangouts video chat. Okay this is not the same Hangout that you know though, it was just all confusing.
In the 2011, iMessage and Facebook Messenger launched and they were way simpler with what Google had. So they had to go back to the drawing board to fix it yet again and by 2013, they launched Hangouts that took all those other apps and combined them into a single app and everything was great for a couple of years, only were late to the market. The competition was miles ahead and had a huge share of the market. This saw the death of Hangouts and Google Plus as well.
By 2016, Google thought they finally has yet another fix with two apps, ALLO and DUO for text chat and video chat respectively. Duo became popular in the western world but in developing nations like ours, video chatting has always failed to pick up due to the high data costs. Meanwhile, Hangouts turned into this enterprise Slack competitor thing. I have not even mentioned Google Voice, Google Wave and all the other crazy experiments Google has been doing. It has been a rolling ten-year disaster and Google has to fix it. Just all those failed Google chat apps!
The Future: How Chat will work
All that is ancient history, and you many not need to know about it any more, but we have to admit its interesting and insane. In comes RCS (Rich Communication Services), which Google has branded as Chat and here is how it it will work.
If you have Android Messages and your mobile network (carrier) supports it, you are going to send a test which will go to your carrier server and they have to figure out where it goes. They may have to re-route it to the other carrier server so that other carrier will also have to figure out whether the recipient has RSC too and then they will get the rich message and if they don’t or have a feature phone they will get a standard SMS. Thus text messaging rates apply, else it will be the usual charge from your data bundle.
But if you send the message to someone who doesn’t have RCS or their mobile network provider doesn’t support it yet, or it they are using an iPhone it will as well fall back to SMS.
MTN and Airtel on board
From the image below you can see that very many mobile network companies are on board. And if you have a smartphone, am sure you’ve noticed Airtel’s latest custom colorful SMSes that it sends you. (yes that’s part of this whole Google RCS initiative). So when it comes to Uganda, MTN and Airtel are fully on board with Google’s future on messaging. Android phone makers like Samsung, HTC, Huawei, LG, Alcatel, INTEX are also all onboard and they will supporting it in their default text messaging apps. I will also need to mention that it will also be supported on Microsoft as well. Will there be a texting app on Windows? Well, only time will tell.
Security Alert
All the above sounds great but there is one problem. RSC chats aren’t protected from government snooping in the same way that a fully encrypted chatting platform like WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal and Telegram are. The reason is that RSC basically follows 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 since they are closely regulated and its not like WhatsApp where everything is encrypted and the government can’t get to it even if they wanted to.
Has Google tried everything?
To me, I feel Google is not doing very thing that I think is obvious. They are not just making and Android equivalent of iMessage where you text a message and it goes up to Google servers and Google figures out whether you are in the system and if you are, you get it in and if you are not you fall back to SMS. That’s how iMessage works. Why aren’t they doing that on Android? The according to Google its that Android is Open and they can’t make the default messaging app that is exclusive to Google only as they have to make it available for other people to build on.
Google hopes that with partnering with the carriers and phone makers, CHAT will be a run-away success. Assuming the billion of Android users adopt the use of this text messaging standard, I don’t think the likes of Apple cannot get on board as Google would have dominated this space and this would suck for Apple. And, i do think there is a really good chance in the future that Apple will pick up RSC support.
If Google can make the whole texting experience not suck, they can win and if it controls the most popular text messaging app on your phone, they can get all the stuff that they want like doing Google Assistant inside SMS and also tie in Duo for video chat. The bottom-line if you are an Android user you will get CHAT and your text messaging experience will be pimped up. It may not be as good or as secure as you expect it at first but it is coming. It will be a huge upgrade over SMS and I think Google deserves some credit for managing to get the likes of MTN and Airtel onboard to all agree on something. So SMS is going to get a huge upgrade and hopefully if we are lucky this RSC thing is going to finally kill and render SMS dead.
Do you think Google’s plan to kill SMS for RSC will work? Leave us a comment below.
