T-Mobile starts very, very slow rollout of RCS Universal Profile messaging

Android Authority

• T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray announced that the T-Mobile RCS Universal Profile rollout has begun.
• However, the rollout only is for the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, and doesn’t work with Android Messages.
• This is a good start, but the vast majority of T-Mobile users won’t be able to take advantage of the update.

---

RCS Universal Profile – the technology that will finally bring text messaging into the modern era for all Android users – isn’t accessible to everyone yet. In fact, it’s barely accessible to anyone.

However, T-Mobile committed to being one of the leaders when it comes to bringing RCS to all its customers, and yesterday it made good on that promise…sort of. According to a tweet from T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray, the Universal Profile update is rolling out now to owners of the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge only:

GSMA Universal Profile 1.0 sw updates have started rolling out, extending @TMobile’s long history of RCS leadership, bringing up to 100MB transfers and 100-person group chats natively. Starting w/ Galaxy S7/S7 Edge devices & more to come over time!

— Neville (@NevilleRay) June 29, 2018

The Galaxy S7 line is over two years old at this point, so one would assume the amount of T-Mobile users on that device is probably a small number. But at least this is a start!

Editor's Pick

What is RCS messaging and why is it important?

SMS and MMS seem positively archaic by the standards set by today's popular data based messaging platforms, and the industry could do with a refresh to its default communication standard. Fortunately, carriers are already moving on …

According to the tweet, more devices will get access to the RCS Universal Profile soon, although Neville didn’t mention a specific timeline.

Oh, and one more thing: according to this tweet from the T-Mobile Help profile, this RCS update doesn’t completely integrate Google’s Chat platform, so even if you do have a Galaxy S7 you won’t have access to RCS messaging using Android Messages:

Great question! No news at this time, but stay tuned for updates. *NicholasTomchik

— T-Mobile Help (@TMobileHelp) June 29, 2018

In other words, this update only works on T-Mobile if you’re using a T-Mobile Galaxy S7’s native messaging app and communicating with another user of T-Mobile who’s also using the same setup. Nice.

Regardless, it’s great to see T-Mobile pushing forward with RCS Universal Profile, even if it seems to be at a very, very slow pace.

To read more about RCS and why it’s such a big deal, read this awesome write-up on the technology.

NEXT: Congress doesn’t understand RCS messaging, questions Google’s Huawei partnership

Share on Google Plus

About Unknown

This is a short description in the author block about the author. You edit it by entering text in the "Biographical Info" field in the user admin panel.