Google Messages will let you annoy friends who don’t use RCS
Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- To take full advantage of RCS messaging features, everyone in the chat needs to have RCS enabled.
- Google Messages is working on a feature that would prompt you to send friends without RCS a message asking them to turn it on.
Messaging on Android is better than it’s ever been, and a big part of that is due to the arrival of Rich Communication Services (RCS) support. While that’s absolutely helped start pulling down some of the walls between Android and iOS, RCS’s support for everything from emoji reactions to high-quality media attachments has seriously upgraded the texting experience even when you’re just chatting with fellow Android users.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
While all that’s great, using RCS has one big asterisk attached to it: everybody involved needs to be on board. With Google Messages, at least, the carrier doesn’t matter so much, but both you and the person you’re talking to need to have RCS in Messages flipped on.
Today we’re looking at Google’s new messages.android_20250618_00_RC00.phone.openbeta_dynamic build of the Messages app, and within we spotted a few very interesting text strings:
Code
<string name="get_rcs_campaign_banner_button_title">Text an invite</string>
<string name="get_rcs_campaign_banner_subtitle">"You can share high-quality media and send secure messages when we're both on RCS."</string>
<string name="get_rcs_campaign_banner_title">Invite this contact to RCS chat</string>
<string name="get_rcs_campaign_message">"Hi! I noticed you're using SMS to text. We can share high-quality media and send secure messages when we're both on RCS. Want to try? https://messages.google.com/get-rcs"</string>With a little more finagling, we were able to coax the app to show us one of these notices:
Once this feature is live, Messages will be able to detect when the person you’re texting with isn’t using RCS, and offer you the option to send them a “friendly” reminder to get with the program and turn it on — or to actually get the program, and switch to Messages in the first place.
We can imagine that RCS hold-outs will quickly find themselves peppered with these texts from their more RCS-friendly contacts. Will that be enough to annoy them into making the switch? Looks like we’ll find out!
