Kellen
RCS has been slowly trickling out to Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL owners on Verizon over the past week. That has meant excitement (the message above) before loneliness, because there are so few people these Pixel 3 owners can have a conversation with over RCS. With that said, just an FYI here, if you have friends on Sprint, US Cellular, T-Mobile (sort of), and various MVNOs that have access to Verizon, your available RCS conversation pool includes them.
I know that Google and the various players in this Rich Communication Services (RCS) that want a Universal Profile to be adopted are not good at explaining any of this, but yeah, the whole point of RCS is to get you having richer conversations across carriers, between all sorts of phones. And that’s probably why this is all taking so long and such a pain in the ass. We’re only baby steps into this utopia of messaging, so things are rough and confusing right now.
If you have seen the message pictured above in your Android Messages app, giving you all of this sh*t, think about who you know and which carrier they are on. There is a chance you’ll be able to RCS-it-up with them! Sprint is all about RCS and has been. US Cellular is about that life too. Samsung is going to try to push it soon. T-Mobile wants you to think they are, but they’ve only semi-enabled RCS on the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge. Even some Verizon MVNOs (prepaid) are getting the prompt for RCS.
Want to chat with other people over RCS or about RCS because you know no one in real life that can? Reddit is here! This is a good thread to see confirmations of cross-carrier RCS action and others who will get to know you because of RCS.
In short, the point of RCS is to get you having better messaging conversations with others on other carriers. Some of you seem surprised by this, and that doesn’t surprise me, because Google and its friends suck at this whole messaging thing. So yeah, message away, RCS newbies!
Cheers Tom and @jspring86az!
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