Google raised an “Over 1 Billion Served” banner for its implementation of RCS messaging Thursday, announcing that more than a billion monthly active users of its Messages app for Android now have this upgrade from SMS and MMS enabled.
Reaching that 10-digit mark is a legitimate milestone that might have seemed implausible when Google was struggling to get US carriers to support RCS. But most Android users probably still text without RCS: Google’s Messages app reached a billion installs in May 2020, while Google said in May 2022 that more than 3 billion Android devices were active worldwide (but does not seem to have updated that figure since).
To mark the billion-user occasion, Google unveiled sets of new features for Messages—as well as Google’s Android, Wear OS, and Google TV platforms—many of which attempt to elevate your emoji experience. Thursday’s feature drop for Messages includes the following options for post-literate prose between RCS users:
A “Photomoji” feature lets you turn a photo—Google’s photo suggests you start with a pet picture—into a canned emoji you can send alongside the hundreds of emoji already available to express your thoughts.
“Voice Moods” allow you to send a voice message (weren’t we all supposed to hate voicemail already?) with a set of nine emoji-laden backgrounds.
“Screen Effects” kick off when you type phrases like “I love you,” which will cause the screen of the chat to fill with such suitable animations as floating hearts. Google’s post says more than 15 “prompt words” exist but leaves discovering them as an exercise to users.
“Custom Bubbles” let you repaint the bubbles appearing around people’s messages and recolor the background, which might make it easier to tell frequent threads apart.
“Reaction Effects” sounds like Screen Effects, except that in this case reacting with a tapback emoji will cause Messages to animate the conversation with further emoji.
“Animated Emoji” is another way for Messages to supersize emoji—for example, turning your tap of the heart emoji into a larger, animated pink heart.
Finally, “Profiles” lets you set a portrait and name that go with your phone number and will show up on the screens of people who don’t have you in their contacts list.
Google also announced a separate set of features for Android, Wear OS, and Google TV.
The major non-Messages Android feature on that list also involves emoji, in the form of a new set of “Emoji Kitchen” mashups available via its Gboard Android app for use in other messaging or mail apps.
Android’s TalkBack screen-reader software can also now use AI to generate descriptions of images, and the Live Captions feature that debuted in Android 10 will support more languages (Google’s post doesn’t say which ones) and let you “speak” during a phone call by typing a response that then gets read aloud.
Finally, security-minded Android users will be able to set a PIN to allow use of an external security key with their phones.
Wear OS, meanwhile, gets more controls for smart-home devices, such as shortcuts to adjust groups of lights for particular times or events and the ability to set your Google Home status to home or away, the ability to start Google Assistant routines from a Wear OS smartwatch, and an Assistant At a Glance watch-face shortcut.
Google TV, in turn, gets another 10 free TV channels to watch on top of the large selection of no-charge channels now available in this software on board current Chromecasts and on many connected TVs.
Google should be able to announce a much larger number of RCS users sometime next year, when Apple says it will support the industry-standard version of this specification in its own Messages app for iOS. That will finally bring encryption in transit to chats between Android and iPhone users (messaging between RCS users on Android and between iMessage iPhone users is also encrypted end to end), along with such interactive upgrades as read receipts, typing indicators, and higher-resolution images and video.
Google could also goose RCS adoption if it could convince Google to add RCS support to its Google Voice calling and messaging service.
But that often-neglected platform remains stuck on SMS despite such acknowledgements of the problem as this October 2022 comment from Messages lead Jan Jedrzejowicz on a press call: “We recognize that every messaging app that supports SMS, including Google Voice, should update to RCS, but we don't have any news today.”
