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Google has a plan: replace text messages with another “smart” messaging technology that breaks the monopoly of Whatsapp (and Apple). RCS messages, Rich Communication Services, a protocol for mobile telephony that aims to replace text messages. RCS messages have many new features: They can send multimedia elements, high-resolution photos and videos, audio messages, but also large files, and then have group chats, encrypted messages (privacy-proof) and much more. If all this sounds very similar to what WhatsApp does is why this should be, according to Google, the not too secret weapon to undermine the Facebook-owned multimedia messaging service from the phones of two billion active users.
But there is an obstacle. Which, surprisingly, isn’t Facebook or the mobile operator cartel either. Instead, it’s about Apple, which is firmly opposed to the development of this standard on its appliances, effectively blocking the market because it makes them incompatible with a large proportion of smartphone users who use iPhones.
The advantage of texting
Texting has a remarkable past and a still bright future. They were born by chance when it was created the GSM standard, at the end of the Eighties of the last century: had to be an operator service communication system and a broadcast information mechanism (a kind of Teletext on the mobile phone) but have been transformed by the will of the users into a very widespread personal communication mechanism.
In the beginning they were a gold mine for operators: with an operating cost equal to almost zero but very expensive for customers: there are those who had calculated that it cost less to download data from the Hubble Orbital Telescope than to send the equivalent in bits via text message. Now they are almost always free and included in flat offers. But despite this, they are very valuable because telemarketing, for example, revolves around them: in 2025 only for the USA SMS marketing will be worth $ 12.6 billion.
Google’s plan
Over time, various standards have been proposed to enhance text messages. For example, Ems and Mms, both wanted by mobile phone manufacturers in the 1990s and 2000s (Samsung, Ericsson, Motorola, Siemens and Alcatel) but without success. Until the GSM Association proposed the RCS standard in 2007. Equivalent to instant messaging systems like Apple’s Whatsapp and iMessage, RCS have remained little more than a technical curiosity (although Samsung was the first to integrate them on its phones) until, in 2018, Google decided to take the field.
The company, which sought to develop its internal Whatsapp called Google Allo, has decided to abandon the product and embrace the RCS standard. The system was tested in France and UKin 2019 and then Google added end-to-end encryption that was required by privacy protection associations. And it began lobbying of telephone operatorsstarting from the USA, for the adoption of the standard.
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