Yesterday, a few reports announcing that some select T-Mobile customers have stared seeing RCS support in Google Messenger app – made headlines across the web.
If you’re not familiar with RCS (or Rich Communication Services) let us tell you the term refers to the next-gen text-messaging standard, where users are allowed to send messages larger than 160 character, take advantage of improved group chat, share high-res imagery and type indicators. T-Mobile has been offering a RCS solution ever since 2015 and now it was taking the next logical step by tapping into Google’s Universal RCS platform.
But fast forward a few hours later and the report(s) turned out to be fake.
The source of yesterday’s reports was a Reddit thread entitled “RCS seems to be active, anyone confirm?” But as it turns out the person who started the topic isn’t even a legit T-Mobile customer, as he was simply citing various tweets by random Twitter accounts. The initial account was then given more credibility by another Reddit user who claimed to have been in contact with a source who confirmed that T-Mobile is currently testing the feature for a select few users.
Subsequently, an alleged screenshot showing how the RCS feature would look like for T-Mobile users appeared online, which was evidently staged.
Bottom line, everything was a sham. T-Mobile is not testing RCS in Google Messenger, or at least not for now. Basically all the story revolved around a few tweets by people who wrongly believed they had Google’s RCS offering active on their T-Mobile device. In all possibility they were merely confusing it with T-Mobile’s Advanced Messaging system.
While the prospect of having RCS support enable in Google’s Messaging app sounds exciting for T-Mobile users, it’s probably going to take a while until we’ll truly see that happen. However, we begin to feel hopeful, if we look towards Sprint. Back in November 2016, Google begun the rollout of enhanced RCS messaging on Sprint Android devices.
