WHEN TEXT MESSAGING and phones were simple, SMS worked
beautifully. You could send 160 characters to anyone with a cellphone, and
they’d receive it the same way they would a phone call. In the age of flip
phones and nine-key texting, that was all anyone needed. But when texting gave
way to group messaging, video calls, and (Sent with Fireworks), the SMS
standard just couldn’t keep up anymore.
And so users ran to solutions like WhatsApp, which grew huge
audiences on the back of one simple idea: it’s like texting, only better and
free. Apple built a huge devoted fanbase for iMessage by adding features right
on top of texting. SMS squandered its tremendous inherent advantage—it’s built
into your phone, so everyone has it—by steadfastly refusing to
evolve. It raises a fascinating hypothetical: if
carriers had stopped charging for texts and added in new tech like group chats
and stickers, would the likes of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and GroupMe even
exist?
Over the last couple of years, Google has been working with
hundreds of carriers and manufacturers around the world to bring the text
message into the 21st century. Using a standard called Rich Communications
Services, the group plans to make a texting app that comes with your phone and
is every bit as powerful as those dedicated messaging apps. This would make all
the best features available to everyone with an Android phone.
Oh, and the plan’s working. New carriers have been slowly
announcing RCS support over the last few months. Sprint, Rogers, Telenor, and
other global giants all bought in. Now Deutsche Telekom, Globe, and Orange are
on board, as is Vodafone on a limited basis. In all more than a billion
subscribers now have access to RCS messaging tools. If you’re building a
messaging app, those are pretty good user numbers.
Return to Sender
This adoption is a long, long time coming. The ideas behind RCS
date back as far as 2007. That’s when a group at the GSMA, the trade group
representing 800 or so carriers around the world, began to think about the
future of messaging. It imagined a new service, carried the same way cell data
is, that would enable voice calls, video and photo sharing, group chat, and
more. There would be no signing up, no usernames—it would be as simple and
ubiquitous as texting. GSMA CTO Alex Sinclair wrote in 2008 that RCS “will enable mobile
users to see at a glance whether their contacts are available to talk or
exchange instant messages, easily initiate chat sessions with a group of
friends or exchange pictures or videos during a voice call, regardless of which
device or network they are using.”
In retrospect, the GSMA’s proposal was dead right. But the
standard almost immediately devolved into a complicated morass of spin-offs,
politicking, and branding confusion.
“It’s infected with bureaucracy, complexity, and irrelevance,” industry analyst
Dean Bubley wrote in 2015. He called RCS a zombie: dead,
but somehow still ambling around. “I meet virtually nobody in the industry who
thinks that RCS anything other than a joke,” he wrote, “apart from a couple of
tired-looking vendor representatives.”
Google sees it differently. For the company with seemingly thousands
of messaging platforms, each one with different features and different
audiences, RCS presents an opportunity. It could help Android compete with
WhatsApp and Facebook, as well as with Apple’s iMessage. iMessage is so
appealing because it’s so simple: you just send a message, the same way and in
the same app for everyone. It either sends with stickers and balloons to
another iPhone user, or gracefully reverts to a simple text message for
everyone else. The only difference is the bubble color. iMessage is one of the
best (and hardest to leave) features of iOS, a reason lots of people pick
iPhone in the first place. Google can’t simply build the same thing and force
its success: if it goes to carriers and demand they use it, they may just say no. Since manufacturers can customize Android
to their liking, Google has to woo them one by one as well.
Fortunately, Android’s marketshare is so large, particularly in
developing countries, that anything supported across all Android devices would
effectively be universal. If Google can convince everyone to play along, RCS
offers all the new-fangled features users want, with a fallback to SMS for
those who can’t use it. It could be effortless and foolproof. Just like
iMessage. Just like texting.
Sweet Talk
Google bought Jibe, a startup focused on this exact issue, in
2015. Jibe’s up-until-then CEO Amir Sarhangi was promptly placed in charge of
making RCS happen. The team worked with a new implementation of the GSMA
standard called Universal Profile, powered it with Google tech and integrated
it into the Messenger app. Then they started talking to carriers about
integrating the new tech. Ordinarily, Sarhangi says, a carrier has three or
more different vendors dedicated to making messaging work. “We walk in and say,
‘Mr. Carrier, we just need a couple of integration points with you around
authentication, and then it’s a matter of working with the product and
marketing teams to get ready for the launch.'” Convincing carriers to work with
them is much harder than actually implementing anything.
Many carriers see messaging as one of the three pillars of service
they provide, along with voice and data. They also see it as a place they can
differentiate. Sarhangi and his team’s challenge has been convincing those
carriers and manufacturers that messaging is not a place to try something new
and funky and exclusive. Everyone could roll out their own GSMA-approved
version of RCS, but that would likely lead to stagnation and fragmentation the
way SMS did. Google believes everyone has to use the same version of RCS for it
to work. “No single carrier can make this be a big hit,” Sarhangi says. “Even
if one carrier is completely devoted to it and launches it, they can’t move the
industry.”
App Factor
The Messenger app is the key to the whole equation, since it’s
where users will actually engage with all these new features along with the old
SMS and MMS messages. It’s no longer called Messenger, by the way—it’s now Android Messages. It’s very important to Google that
this app is seen as an Android thing, not a Google-specific thing. Google’s
working with mobile manufacturers around the world to pre-install Messages on
all their phones rather than let those companies build their own texting apps.
Google also recently put Messages in the Play Store, so it can be updated
without waiting for huge Android updates that often never come to existing
phones. “On older devices, we will continue to upgrade the experience to give
people new experiences,” Sarhangi says. Plus, this puts the onus for
improvement on Google, rather than the carriers. Which is probably good news.
It’s easy, and
probably right, to be skeptical of Google’s plans. Carriers are not notoriously
great at working together or producing innovative technology, and Google’s
track record in messaging is, well, bad. There are still lots of carriers not
on board with the RCS plan, and lots of versions of the standard floating
around. Google is a hugely powerful player in the mobile world, but it can’t
just snap its fingers and change things. In the US alone, one of the world’s
biggest SMS markets, it’s a mess: AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint all have
different ideas about how RCS should be implemented and supported, and Verizon
has no support for the platform at all. If this is going to work—and that’s a
real if—it’s going to take a while.
Still, for once it feels like Google’s on the right path in
messaging. More than 8 trillion SMS messages are sent every year, despite the
tech’s antiquity. Texting won’t die until something comes along that’s
radically better and just as painlessly universal. If Google, the carriers, and
the manufacturers can pull that off, messaging could be easy again. And this
time, we won’t have to remember how to type on numerical keypads.
Interop Technologies™, a specialist in advanced communication
networks and managed IP services, now holds severas U.S. patent on Rich Communication Services (RCS) technology. .
Interop’s RCS solution is part of CorePlusX℠, a complete IMS Core and IP
services suite that was designed to integrate and work with traditional and
advanced messaging, as well as with Voice over LTE (VoLTE), Voice over WiFi
(VoWiFi), and Voice over Data (VoDO). Each solution can be deployed
independently and in any order, and RCS can be deployed in a pre-IMS or
full-IMS environment.
Dr. Rob Longwell
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