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.
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!
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:
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.
