Verizon Finally Embraces RCS, Now the Lone Holdout Is Apple

Starting subsequent yr, Verizon will make Android Messages the default texting app on all its Android units.

Verizon announced it’s becoming a member of the ranks of its rivals, AT&T and T-Mobile, in prioritizing Google’s Messages app app, which natively helps and implements Rich Communications Service, or RCS. The provider is working with Google to supply Android customers “a robust messaging experience that allows them to engage with loved ones, brands and businesses in new and innovative ways.”

Forget the manufacturers. With this transfer, Verizon customers received’t be vulnerable to the bloated Message+ app, which is what the provider has been preloading on its Android units. We have an specific roadmap from Verizon detailing the way it won’t solely assist RCS know-how however actively work to implement it, too. RCS permits for messaging options like high-resolution photographs and video, end-to-end encryption, correct learn receipts, and even message reactions—all issues that iPhone customers have been having fun with with each other for years.

Apple’s technically the final holdout on this journey to get a unified messaging customary throughout all platforms. Google appears to be doing just a little cajoling to get Apple on board.

“Going forward, the default messaging experience on Android is going to be more secure,” Hiroshi Lockheimer, senior vice chairman of Android, Chrome OS, and the Play Store, informed The Verge. “The fallback messaging experience on the other platform will not have encryption if it’s still SMS. I think that that is a pretty interesting dynamic and I would hope that as everyone focuses on security and privacy it becomes an important part of the discussion.”

There have been no confirmed discussions between Google and Apple concerning the implementation of RCS on iOS units. But it might be good to have Apple play alongside, notably to profit the present 473 million world RCS customers, a quantity which is likely to increase as soon as extra U.S. customers get on board. Analysts count on the variety of customers to shoot as much as the billions within the subsequent 5 years.

Although the Play Store provides a bevy of SMS apps, the native answer from Google has been in fixed flux. With Allo haunting the Google graveyard and Hangouts quickly evolving into its closing kind as Google Chat (hopefully), it’s about time that Google settled on the way it will deal with textual content messaging. This cross-platform answer depends on RCS infrastructure to work, so it was essential to get all main carriers on board.

Verizon Message+, or Verizon Messages, will stick round, as a result of it’s one of many methods subscribers have been backing up textual content messages within the cloud. Verizon stated that the app would obtain “full access to RCS capabilities” by the top of the yr, which bodes properly for the general rollout.