For years Google has been pushing
RCS as a new replacement for SMS, the current messaging standard. There are many reasons why
RCS is superior including support for higher resolution images and video, bigger file sizes, send/receive notifications, and much more. Of course, the standard doesn’t matter much if no one adopts it. Thankfully, the standard is slowly catching on with
even Apple adopting it with a few caveats. Of course, there’s another elephant in the room when it comes to RCS: just because a device supports RCS doesn’t ensure wide feature compatibility with other RCS-enabled devices. Each company is free to adopt certain aspects of the standard while deemphasizing other features.
To ensure improved interoperability the GSMA utilizes something called the Universal Profile, which includes a set of RCS features that its partner carriers can adopt universally but this is a pretty slow process, to say the least. Below we take a look at carriers that officially support RCS features, as well as those that adopt the Universal Profile standard. Before we do that, let’s talk about Google Messages.
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