Gadgetory

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 the pictures are bad 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 want to go inside because it's noisy out here and tired of walking so let's go chat okay so we're in a quieter place and I want to 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 twelve 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 going to 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 want to do a brief history of all of 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 because that's what you do in 2009 the iPhone got pushed 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+ which had yet more chat apps in it had puddle for text and hangouts a video for video chat not the same hangout such you know though it was just confusing anyway in late 2011 iMessage and Facebook message are lost and they were way simpler than Google what Google had 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 combine them into a single app and everything was great for a couple of years and then hangouts didn't get updated Google+ 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 a low for text chat and duo go for video chat duo super popular a low mm-hm not so much meanwhile hangouts turn 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 experiment schools have been doing it's been a rolling ten-year disaster and Google has to fix it I mean look at all this stuff what the what yeah okay all that's ancient history you don't need to know about it anymore it's still interesting though right I think it's insane here's how our CS 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 rip 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 server that other carrier be like oh the recipient has our CS 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've a text messaging rates if they get this special new chat message it won't cost anything because it'll be the same races all their stuff on their data plan but if you are sending it to somebody who doesn't have RCS their carrier hasn't supported yet or yeah if they're using an iPhone it's going to fall back to SMS if you look at this graphic of all 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 is 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 our CS 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 our CS 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 I message 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 because 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 a message and it goes up to Google Google figures out whether or not you're in the system and if you already get it and if you're not it falls back to SMS that's how I message works why aren't they doing that at Android the answer if you ask Google I did is they'll tell you that Android is open and they can't make the default the 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 you know swing their big Android cloud around then you know people make it mad and that's not what Android is about and it's a hard situation that Google's in like do we 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 your Google like you're more likely to partner with everybody because I don't 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 on board like they're gonna happen they're gonna become the green puffle and that would suck for Apple so I do think that there's a really good chance that the iPhone is gonna pick up our CS support the billion users of Android are going to have their own version of the blue and they're still I don't know a trillion text messages sent a year and so if they can make that experience not suck because it's us right now 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 end 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 going to 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 a 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 going to 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