Google is making a major change to the way Android handles text messages, and it’s a direct attempt to stay competitive with Apple’s iMessage dominance.
Google’s Messages app — the standard text-messaging app on Android — will become “Chat,”according to The Verge. With that change comes the ability to send prettier photos, longer messages, and lots of other “rich” interactivity.
As it is now, Android uses standard SMS text messaging, which is limited to a certain number of characters, and multimedia (photos, video) is highly compressed (it looks bad).
With Google Chat, Android text messaging will become much more like Apple’s beloved iMessage.
All these new features in Android text messaging are due to the adoption of RCS, or rich communications services, a new standard for text messaging. In short, the RCS standard operates on data networks (like Apple’s iMessage) instead of phone networks (like traditional SMS text messaging).
