#GalaxyTechfluencer
Hey members,
Hope all are doing good and are safe at quarantines especially when this pandemic (COVID - 19) is at peak in some of the major geographies.
Let's begin with our topic of interest - SMS and it's worthy successor RCS
Let’s face it: Text messages as we’ve known them throughout history (i.e., since the 1990s) are tired. They don’t support read receipts, group messaging, or the animated stickers your pals trade on apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat. They rely on a cellular connection — which is restricted to places with a signal — and they stop you at 160 characters.
To make the service more valuable and competitive with popular, feature-rich messaging apps, smartphone manufacturers, carriers, and the cell phone industry’s governing agencies have developed the Rich Communication Services (RCS) protocol known popularly as Chat, a modern take on texting that rolls features from Facebook Messenger, iMessage, and WhatsApp into one platform. Chat is a new interactive protocol that allows group chats, video, audio, and high-resolution images, and looks and functions a lot like iMessage and other rich messaging apps. You can get read receipts and see when someone is replying to your message in real-time. And it may already reside on the smartphone in your hand.
The text messaging backstory:
The invention of text messaging predates the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Palm Pilot. SMS was first proposed in 1982 for the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), a second-generation cell standard devised by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).
The initial idea was to transmit texts via the signaling systems that controlled telephone traffic. ETSI engineers developed a framework that was both small enough to fit into the existing signaling paths (128 bytes, later improved to 160 seven-bit characters) and modular enough to support carrier management features like real-time billing, message rerouting (routing messages to a recipient other than the one specified by the user), and message blocking.
After nearly a decade of tinkering, SMS deployed commercially in December 1992 — a milestone that Neil Papworth, an engineer, marked by texting “Merry Christmas” to Vodafone customer Richard Jarvis. In the years that followed, handset manufacturers including Nokia and carriers like Fleet Call (now Nextel) and BT Cellnet (now O2 UK) climbed aboard the messaging bandwagon, spurring adoption.
Despite the explosive growth of SMS, it didn’t evolve all that much from the systems of the early ’90s. Even as phone form factors changed and Apple’s iPhone popularized the modern-day touchscreen smartphone, SMS remained the same — right down to the original 160-character limit. RCS changes all that.
RCS arrives:
Rich Communication Services (RCS) is the protocol that will replace SMS, but it got off to a very slow start. It was formed by a group of industry promoters in 2007 and brought under the wings of the GSM Association, a trade group, in 2008. But carrier participation and other factors kept it from gaining much traction for nearly a decade. In 2018, Google announced it had been working with major cell phone carriers worldwide to adopt the RCS protocol. The result is Chat, the protocol based on the RCS Universal Profile — a global standard for enacting RCS that lets subscribers from different carriers and countries communicate with each other — intended to eventually supersede SMS.
Google’s customers in the U.K., France, and Mexico have been able to opt in to Chat instead of having to wait for carriers to roll it out. And now in the U.S., Android users can get in on the new Chat action as well. Last month, Google announced the rollout of RCS as Android’s primary texting platform for anyone who uses the Android Messages app, and many Android phones come with Android Messages installed. Last year, Google and Samsung announced a partnership that allows RCS features to work seamlessly between the Samsung Messages and Android Messages apps, the default SMS apps on their devices. Or, you can hop on to the Google Play Store to download Messages yourself.
But Chat is missing one critical element: While the original RCS protocol allowed the implementation of client-to-server encryption, Chat does not offer end-to-end encryption like iMessage or Signal. Rather, it retains the same legal intercept standards as its SMS predecessor.
Chat is a protocol, not an app !!!
