Google undermines US carrier RCS initiative by launching its own

Less than a month after the four US MNOs announced a joint RCS initiative for Android, Google has decided to launch its own.

Google was conspicuously absent from the announcement of the Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative by AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile US and Sprint last month. Considering it was all about championing RCS on Android you have to assume there had been some dialogue between the operators and Google, but the omission of the latter from the press release indicated progress had been slow.

Now, having not done anything significant about RCS in the US for over a decade, Google has suddenly found the motivation to upgrade all SMS messaging on Android to RCS. In a brief blog post Sanaz Ahari, Product Management Director at Google, explained all the cool new things US Android users will now be able to do via the text function. It could almost have been a CCMI press release.

It’s hard to see this as anything other than a direct attempt to undermine the nascent CCMI project. The US operators saw Google’s RCS apathy as an opportunity to add some value themselves, so Google acted quickly to pull the rug out from under them. It could be that some of the features operators reckon they’re able to uniquely offer, such as keeping user data out of Google’s hands, might still give them an advantage, but this looks like a major setback for them.