The Vergecast - Let's Chat about RCS

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

The Verge's Dieter Bohn dives into the messy past and uncertain future of Rich Communication Services, or RCS, a new texting standard that Google had been pushing for Android users. Guests include: Sanaz Ahari, Senior Director of Communications Products at Google Ron Amadeo, reviews editor at Ars Technica Relevant links: RCS: What it is and why you might want it AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile have finally agreed to replace SMS with a new RCS standard A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps Google is rolling out end-to-end encryption for RCS in Android Messages beta SVP of Android offers open invitation to help Apple put RCS texting on the iPhone Produced by Andru Marino, Liam James, and Dieter Bohn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sorry to interrupt. I'm going to go because there's breaking RCS news. The carriers have basically formed a consortium to hijack it and steal it away from Google. And I'm the only person that can write this story. So I got to go. Okay. I'll just tell people that you had to drop for breaking RCA. I'm going to just tell them exactly what happened.

Yeah. Okay. I got to go make some calls. Bye. This is amazing. Bye. That's hilarious. Back in October 2019, I was out in some rented podcast studio doing the Vergecast.

I couldn't get back to the office in time. And even though it's really not a great idea to do during a podcast recording, I happened to check my email. And I saw something nuts. The big four U.S. cell phone carriers had agreed to form a new coalition to support a new texting standard. I immediately bailed on the Vergecast. Sorry, Nilai. I ran out to my car that was parked in this random street and I started making calls. I was trying to get to the bottom of the so-called new cross-carrier messaging.

initiative, the CCMI. It was a consortium that could mean that we might finally get rid of SMS texting and move on to a new standard that Google had been pushing for Android users. It was called Rich Communication Services or RCS. As I sat at my car reporting and making calls, I learned that the carriers were promising to create their own texting app, which sounded horrible. So we all waited for a long time for this bad plan to go in effect, and it never did. That blockbuster announcement was pretty much the last thing we heard about CCMI. T-Mobile eventually bought Sprint, and it took until April of 2021 for the carriers to admit,

and only under lots of reporting pressure, that they had given up on the CCMI. Here's the thing about this new texting standard RCS. Almost every story about it ends up feeling like this. There's a big splash that makes you think maybe, maybe we're going to finally be able to replace SMS with something that's not limited to 160 characters of text. Then time goes by and not much happens and we wait some more. I'm Dieter Bone and this week on the Vergecast's special run of topic-specific Tuesday episodes, I think it's finally time that we really dig into RCS, where it came from, why it matters, where it's going. and of course whether or not Apple will ever support it on the iPhone. Support for the show comes from Retool.

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Tap in with us. If you've heard of RCS, it's probably because you heard that it's supposed to be Google's solution for texting on Android phones. It is better than SMS because it's internet-based instead of using a weird network hack. It offers features like better group chats, red receipts, typing indicators, and bigger image and video attachments. RCS is not controlled by any single company, but instead it's handled by the carriers to route messages, or if they don't want to, Google can do it. There are a lot of details to get into, but that's the basic gist of what RCS is. But to really understand why Google has gone all in on RCS, you need to understand that there's a rich and complicated history of messaging apps at Google, and that RCS has its own history that's actually entirely separate from Google. So let's start with the history of RCS and actually look back at SMS and what it meant.

But I promise this isn't going to go for like three plus hours like Dan Carlin's hardcore history podcast, but it is going to take a minute. It's just that there are some foundational concepts in this history that we're going to need to know to understand what's happening with RCS. So SMS stands for short messaging service and it's been the way that phones can text each other since phones started texting each other in the 90s. In fact, phone carriers back then didn't realize that texting would be. be a thing that people wanted to do. So it came later than regular phone calls and worked by taking advantage of some of the parts of the phone networks that carriers used for other technical things. That's why SMS is text only and why it's limited to 160 characters, because that's all that will fit. It's difficult to imagine now, but for a long time, SMS messaging was a big business for

carriers. They literally charged by the text and it took a long time for so-called unlimited messaging to be included in most plans. Who are you texting 50 times a day? I decay my BFF gel. And then MMS multimedia messaging was a hack on top of the SMS hack and it cost even more money per message. That high price is actually super important to our story here because that high price was a big mistake from the carriers. Because SMS costs so much and provided so little, when smartphones came around, there was a rush to make texting apps that cost less or were free. They sprouted up everywhere and they jockeyed for market share.

There was Blackberry messaging and WhatsApp and Kakatok and Line and MSN Messenger and IMessage and Facebook Messenger and so on and so on. All of them either had or some of them still have lots of users depending on what part of the world you lived in. In fact, if you're not in the United States, all of this drama around RCS or IMessage seems really silly because the chances are better that you and all of your friends and family have already all agreed to use one single app to talk to each other. So when it comes to making money off of texting, the carrier is eventually lost out. Boo-hoo, right? But even though a lot of those apps replaced SMS for a lot of people, they didn't kill SMS entirely because SMS is the default. It's the basic fallback that you can pretty much trust will work with any mobile phone.

You might not know if I can receive a group me message, but you definitely know that I can receive an SMS text. Anyway, because of all of that free competition, the carriers were forced to eventually stop charging extra for texting on most of their plans. But, and this is the key part, that meant that texting was almost never going to be a moneymaker for carriers again. Not really. So in 2007, way before you thought, a bunch of carriers got together and said, hey, this SMS tech is old and dumb and we should replace it, and a bunch of them said, sure. But there was no incentive for them to actually do the work to change it. That was the beginning of RCS, but it would continue to be a total nothing burger for over a decade. So that's the history of SMS and the very beginning of RCS.

Now, what about the history of messaging at Google? Look, I don't have time to get into everything that Google tried, and I definitely don't have the emotional energy. But there is a short version that I already did in a YouTube video when Google first announced RCS. So let's listen to that. 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 push 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 Plus, which had yet more chat apps in it. It had huddle for text and Hangouts Video for Video.

Not the same Hangouts that you know, though. It was just confusing. Anyway, in late 2011, IMessage and Facebook Messenger launched, and they were way simpler than what Google had. And 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 combined them into a single app, and everything was great for a couple of years, and then Hangouts didn't get updated. Google Plus 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 going to fix it again.

They launched Allo for text chat and Duo for video chat. Duo, super popular. Allo, not so much. Meanwhile, Hangouts turned 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 experiments Google has been doing. It's been a rolling 10-year disaster, and Google has to fix it.

I mean, look at all this stuff. What the what? We made that video in 2018. That was 10 years after RCS was first proposed, and it was the moment that Google made its big announcement that it was going all in on RCS as the default texting solution for Android. Carriers around the world said, oh, hey, that's right.

We had this RCS thing. Okay, good luck with that, Google. When we made that video in April 2018, Google told me that it expected the switchover to RCS to take six to 12 months. It's now November of 2021, and RCS is still not fully rolled out. Okay, with all of that history under our belt, now it's time to answer some questions.

The most important one, I think, gets to the central tension of RCS as a standard. Is it a carrier thing or is it a Google thing? So I spoke to Sanazahari, who is the Senior Director of Communication Products at Google, about precisely that question. You know, Google didn't create RCS. And like around 2015, where we got more involved, there were even like different flavors of RCS.

There was like a European RCS and a U.S. one. And so there was, you know, deviations before there was even any scale. The role that we played in, you know, it was us as well as everyone else that was already engaged, given that it is a telecom spec, was we really pushed for kind of alignment on the set of capabilities, which ended up manifesting itself as the universal profile. file, which is now the GSM standard. You know, we were participating along with the rest of the industry in terms of aligning on one common definition of this and having one common spec.

Now, there are a lot, and I mean a lot of technical details behind what SNAWS is talking about here. For example, when she refers to different flavors of RCS, what she means is that carriers literally used to have their own proprietary versions of RCS that were incompatible with each other. So like AT&T and Verizon, for example, have their own custom texting apps that you could install if you hated having good apps. And those technically had RCS on the back end. But hopefully those days are going to be behind us soon.

Another thing is that when you send a text with, say, WhatsApp, for example, there is one company that's in charge of making sure it goes where it's supposed to, the company that owns WhatsApp, Facebook or I guess meta or whatever. But when you send an SMS or an RCS, there are a lot of companies involved. in routing that text message and making sure that it gets to you. So that universal profile that's now referred to is the standard way for that routing to happen so that everybody can talk to everybody. So Google has been pushing for universal profile adoption, but a bunch of carriers haven't updated to support it or even support RCS itself yet. They just don't seem to be interested.

Lots of companies are also reticent to make deals with Google, it turns out. So even though Google is pushing, standards take a lot of time to get going. Obviously, the more people are involved in any problem that requires consensus, you know, it takes longer, regardless of the problem. However, you know, the benefits are pretty high because, you know, especially in a world where we believe that communication is a right and everybody should be able to communicate with their phone in a reliable and rich way, you know, the benefits are worth the extra effort that's required to get into this. And, you know, this is by nature, you know, we're replacing something else that is a goal.

global standard. SMS, as old as it is, it has lasted the test of time in the sense that it does have global adoption. And so I do feel like it's a responsibility that we should not take lightly. And the standard approach is very, very important, given that, you know, it is replacing something that does meet the bar on that. However, I do think, you know, obviously we have exercised some flexibility on top of the standard in terms of how we can advance our client to meet the end user needs of the modern user needs for messaging as well. Just a little bit more technical detail to understand some of the complication here. For messaging app to work, there's basically two parts.

There's the servers, but then there's also the client, aka the app on the phone. And unlike SMS on Android, RCS only works with specific approved client apps. And so the features of what RCS can do end up being a mix of what can be routed through all of those servers, but more importantly, what features get added to the client apps. So I started this whole section by asking if RCS is a carrier thing or a Google thing. And now with all these technical details, we can answer that question. It's yes, it's both. The carriers are in charge of the standard and the servers,

and Google is in charge of the app where the rubber hits the road, or where the emoji hits the chat box. And also, technically, Google can also run some servers to route messages. The bottom line is that it's messy. and Google knows a thing or two about messy, messy drama with messaging apps. Recently, Ron Amadio, reviews editor at Ars Technica, wrote an amazing overview of every single messaging app that Google has tried over the years. We're going to link it in the show notes. I really encourage you to read it because he brought up a bunch of apps that I had completely forgotten about.

But I wanted to talk to Ron because he is a person who can take all this high-falutin, open-standard RCS talk down a peg. He's not a fan. I mean, RCS, because it's a 12 or 13-year-old standard, has ideas that we thought were a great idea 12 or 13 years ago, but it's missing a ton of things you would want from a modern messaging standard, like device support and encryption and a ton of other features. It's going to make SMS better, but you're going to go from the worst messaging platform in the world to a slightly worse messaging platform, but still the worst messaging platform in the world. Oh, wow. Yeah. So was the idea to replace SMS way back when they first were? performing it in the GSM or was it some other random thing?

Yeah, I mean, SMS as carrier messaging used to be important. Like, they used to charge us money for SMS. Right. It was a huge revenue stream. And so it made sense to kind of keep that going and keep updating carrier messaging. But I think as messaging became commoditized, you know, everybody has an unlimited texting plan now. There's really no reason for them to be interested in updating it anymore.

So it's been, it's just kind of been hanging out and nobody's really sure what to do with it. I would assume that the carriers would want to get off of SMS. They can, I don't know, do something more interesting or I don't know, use that random weird channel that it uses for something else or whatever. Why do you think it took Google to start saying, hey, no, this is our thing and everyone should start doing it to, you know, get carriers to even think about bothering with it in the first place? Well, like I said, revenue. I don't think the carriers are that interested in getting off of SMS. Like, why would they? There's no bottom line opportunity for them.

So, the carriers had this RCS thing, but they had no incentive to do anything with it. Google, on the other hand, had year after year of bungled messaging apps, so Google had a huge incentive to figure out messaging for Android. But Google knew it couldn't just launch another app again because Google had tried that and it didn't work. It was just too much of a fight to get anybody to use a brand-new Google app. But maybe they could get this RCS thing to work and that the carriers would go along if they did.

You know that old Winston Churchill quote about how democracy is the worst form of government except every other one has already been tried? Yeah, RCS is kind of like that for Google. But also, as Ron points out, don't forget that Google is massive. And one reason it's tried so many things is because it's such a big, chaotic company. I don't like talking about the company as like a monolith. I think the motivations are individual product managers trying to launch a product. And I think we've seen, you know, some product manager will launch Allo and then it won't work. And then they will leave and go join Facebook.

And then a new person will show up and launch a new messaging app. And I think RCS, you can give the Utopia sales pitch for it where, oh, it's going to work on every smartphone. And I think that's why they started. Like, they've done every messaging idea in the world. And this is just the next one that no one has tried yet. So whether it's a genuine desire to fix SMS, an honest attempt to spread a stand. or just PTSD from all those failed attempts,

Google is committed. It is all in on RCS going forward. Okay, we're going to take a break, and when we come back, we have got another question to answer. How's it going with RCS, Google? Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade,

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In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Gramerly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. We're back for our special Vergecast episode focusing on RCS as the new way that Android phones are supposed to text. Now, Google announced this RCS change for Android in April 2018 and figured it it would take a year or so for most carriers to switch over. But by June 2019, barely any had. It was not going well. So, Google took matters into its own hands. Now, do you remember how

RCS requires both a server and an app? Well, Google just started offering RCS services to people who are using its messages app on Android, whether or not their carrier had turned it on. Google just started connecting people to Google's own servers. We have also really invested in ensuring that RCS is accessible, even in markets and where carriers don't have any plans or haven't built RCS yet. We just offer the availability for users to be able to have RCS, even before their carriers were kind of offering it within their markets.

In many ways, we've just accelerated the adoption. And again, you know, we've done this in partnership with the ecosystem as a whole, but we do feel that it's a responsibility we have in terms of having our users have a better messaging experience. That's not 30 years old. Here's how it works. If a carrier wants to connect you to its servers via RCS, Google lets the carrier handle routing for your messages. But if your carrier doesn't want to do RCS or can't get around to it or whatever, Google will just do it for them.

Now, the technical details of how that happens and how RCS messages work are about as interesting as you might guess the technical details of routing messages through servers might be. But there is one thing that might seem really obvious, but we should explicitly talk about it. The way that you get RCS messages is via your phone number, just like SMS. This is a carrier standard, after all, even if it's Google that seems to be the one doing all the work to push it. Now, this is a whole other podcast, but phone numbers, they're very annoying and how it goes so far as to say horrible identification technology. Here's Ron Amadio again. The problem I have with RCS is that because it's made by the GSMA, it relies on a phone number and a SIM card and a phone bill.

And that means anything that's not a phone cannot like natively send an RCS message. Google has cooked up a few like weird pairing systems where like you can pair a website to your phone with a QR code. And then if you type a message into the web browser, it gets forwarded to your phone, which gets forwarded to the internet. But that's still not a native application. Like, I want a messaging service to work on a tablet and a laptop and a desktop and a smartwatch and, you know, a brain implant and whatever other weird devices we come up with. So, like, you can't go jogging and leave your smartphone at home and get a message because everything, your phone is the center of your, it has to be the center of your messaging life if you use RCS. Yes. And like picking the phone number seems like that that was definitely like a carrier capture thing.

I think that one of the points you made in your piece was there's like an immoral aspect to making the phone number, the source of identity because it's the thing that fundamentally you're leasing. You have to pay a monthly bill to keep it. Yeah. I mean, that's as opposed to like an email address. Nobody technically really owns their email address or their phone number. But like I probably have an email from Yahoo that's been abandoned for like 15 years that probably still works. Whereas a phone number, if you ever stop paying the bill, they like take your identity from you if you're using a phone number as identity. And they will like give it to someone else, like pretty quickly, which is, which is crazy.

And if something happens to you, you know, if you end up in the hospital or go to jail or something to where you can't continually pay a phone bill, you just lose your identity. And I think it causes a lot of problems for people that want to borrow a phone also. Like if you can't afford a phone, it's pretty easy to get on the internet. Like you can go to a library in New York City. They replaced all the telephone booths with like kiosks that you can just walk up to and go on the internet. And if you use a phone number for identity, you are locked out of all of these services. Now, from Google's perspective, it really did want RCS to be a universal standard, not a Google technology, even though everybody associates it with Google right now. And since RCS started as a telecom spec, well, what else were they going to use but phone numbers?

You know, A, we were looking at the RCS as a telecom spec that was in place. Phone numbers are a core part of that. And also the lens that we ideally really want SMS to be upgraded. So in some ways, it's really important that the identity works for the global user base that uses SMS today. And, you know, there are many Google users, but not the whole world uses a Google account. That may also have its own challenges in terms of whether people want to use that as their identity or not. And SMS for all of its problems, like, you know, it is kind of a known notion and it is a known identifier that from a global perspective has a pretty broad reach and understanding.

And again, you know, we were very much kind of aligned with the spec overall and what the identifier should be. And so from that perspective, it's global and it's reachable. And I think that's really, really important when we think of this being a messaging protocol that works for anybody anywhere in the world. Okay, we're going to take one more quick break, and then we're going to get into what's next for RCS and Google's Messages app. And, you know, we also need to talk about whether or not it's coming to the iPhone. Support for this show comes from What Not.

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And check out ClaudePro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude. A.I. slash vergecast. We're back. And it's time to talk about what's next for RCS.

The good news is that after five years of mucking about, Google just up and spent much of 2021 cutting deals with the big three U.S. carriers.

There's only three now. Sorry. The deals were this. In 2022, Google's Messages app will be the default texting app on every Android phone sold by Verreche.

Risen, T-Mobile, and AT&T. That seems like not a big deal, but actually it's a huge deal because, again, remember that for RCS to work, you need both the server and the app. And in the world of Android, not everybody uses the same texting app, and a lot of those apps don't support RCS. So if different people are using different texting apps, RCS doesn't happen. Having everybody on the same app means that RCS can finally get going, but also having everybody on the Google Messages app

means that Google can build stuff on top of RCS. If both people are using the Google Messages apps, then those apps end up talking directly to each other and Google can turn on extra features, like end-to-end encryption for one-on-one chats. Sanazahari also hinted that maybe some other features might be coming, like encryption for group chats or better multi-device support.

But, you know, first, there are some baby steps we still have to take. Let's just take the US as a market. We actually need to launch our CS with the US carriers. We need to make sure all of these carriers can talk to each other and be able to talk to users in Europe, in India, et cetera. So the global vision needs to, in many ways, the execution really, really needs to land.

And then, you know, it's really important that this happens multi-device. So we need to make sure that this works, not just phone, but on watch, on desktop, on all the different devices that users really expect their messaging experience for. And then obviously we have started the journey on end-to-end encryption. We still need to kind of fill that out. Obviously, we've started with one-on-one. We need to complete that picture holistically.

And then there's other things that I can think of, like, we see so many communications move from email to messaging. When I look at like capabilities on messages versus like Gmail, there's so many capabilities that we built in Gmail for users to just be able to manage their inbox. A lot of those things, I think, also messaging, clients as a whole need to evolve in terms of we get personal messages, we get business messages. There's different ways of managing important things, priority things, et cetera, that I think

those capabilities are going to evolve as more and more communication kind of centers around messaging as a whole. By the way, there is one other confusing bit about RCS that I haven't mentioned. It's that in the app itself, Google calls it chat, but Google also has another app that's called Google Chat, but there are two different things. It's very annoying. It's not my fault. Hopefully, in a year, that might be the only confusing thing about RCS that we have to worry about. I'm just kidding.

Obviously, there's another thing to worry about. There's an elephant in the RCS room. Or rather, there's a missing elephant. A ghost elephant. This is a bad metaphor. I'm talking about the iPhone. On the iPhone, you've got iMessage, and then it falls back to SMS. On Android, you have RCS and,

It will also fall back to SMS. But RCS isn't supposed to be an Android thing. It's supposed to be the thing that replaces SMS. So will the iPhone ever support the thing that's supposed to replace SMS? Will it ever support RCS? Because if RCS becomes a standard and actually replaces SMS, Apple's going to have to support it, right? Right? I have asked this question to Apple many times, and the answer is always the same.

No comment. I also asked Senaz over at Google what her perspective is. I don't work at Apple. I do believe that, you know, the point of an open spec is one that everyone can participate in. I think they owe it to their users as well. And it's time that, you know, the industry as a whole, a lot of the people that are still using SMS, they can have rich messaging. They can have typing indicators. They can message over Wi-Fi.

They can have unbroken group chats and send-ty. quality photos, and it's all based on an open standard. And, you know, I think that this can benefit all of our users. And if you think about it, that's actually kind of a strong statement that Apple would, quote, owe it to their users, unquote. Want an even stronger statement? Look no further than Google VP Hiroshi Lockheimer, who is in charge of Android and RCS and a whole bunch of other stuff. Here's the tweet from him on October 7, 2021, where Hiroshi was commenting on how SMS breaks iMessage group chats. Here's a quote. Group chats don't need to break this way. There exists a really clear solution. Here's an open invitation to the folks who can make this right. We are here to help.

By the way, really clear solution was in capital letters because RCS, it was an acronym joke. They make dad jokes at Google too, I'm just saying. It's cute, right? Well, if I've learned anything from Twitter, tweeting is not the same thing as doing. So I actually asked Sanaz about this tweet. I honestly, I don't know. I don't have knowledge to that. I do like Hiroshi's tweets, so. But you specifically aren't calling up Apple every day asking them if they're going to adopt RCS? I don't have them on sleep dial.

We ended last week's Tuesday episode by pointing out that the iPhone would probably never adopt USBC. And now we're ending this episode with a big old question mark about the iPhone and RCS. The fact that Apple is opting out of two messy and complicated standards with the iPhone is not lost on me. It makes sense for the company, even though I personally think that Apple could go a long way towards cleaning up both of these messes if it would engage with them. But we know that Apple thinks iMessage is a competitive advantage. We've seen the emails where executives shot down the idea of bringing iMessage to Android because it would be bad for iPhone sales. which means that, well, eventually RCS could be a real true universal standard, but in the meantime, it's messy and we live in the meantime.

If you're an Android user talking to other Android users in 2022, the default texting experience might finally, finally, finally, start to be decent and relatively modern. And if that happens, maybe it'll be the iPhones that start breaking group chats, and that could put some pressure on Apple. But here's my pressure. I think texting should be private by default, and SMS messages are not encrypted. So if a government wants to force your carrier to share those messages, the carrier is able to do it.

Heck, it doesn't actually take that much force sometimes. Now, there are lots of ways to encrypt text messages. I use signal, and I like it a lot. But none of those ways are universal, and none of them are the default across different devices in the way that SMS and theoretically RCS are. are. I know that Apple cares about privacy, especially the privacy of its customers. I just wonder why it seems to stop caring about protecting that privacy when those customers happen to be texting Android users. Hey, there's always 2023. This episode of the Vergecast was made by Andrew Marino,

Liam James, and me, Dieter Bone. Special thanks to Ron Amadio and Sanazahari for joining us this week. The Vergecast will be back on Friday for the chat show, and my Tuesday episode is going to return next week. Thanks for listening.