According to the Verge, the technology giant has been quietly lobbying with manufacturers to adopt a “technology to replace SMS“, which it calls rich communication service (RCS) or Chat for short. The aim is to “make that default texting experience on an Android phone as good as other modern messaging apps,” the Verge reports.
Chat will offer users many features that are standard in any other texting app, including read receipts, typing indicators, full-resolution images and video, and group texts. However, Chat is not a Google service, it is just Chat and Google plans to push the service out before the end of the year.
The service, however, is not end-to-end encrypted like you find in WhatsApp or iMessage. It will follow the same legal intercept standards.
If you are texting somebody who doesn’t have Chat enabled or is not an Android user, your messages will revert back to SMS — much in the same way that an iMessage does.
Major phone makers already signed on to Chat from Samsung to LG to Huawei and HTC but not Apple, and it is not known when (or if) the iPhone will support RCS.
