T-Mobile announced a new “Advanced Messaging” feature on Wednesday that brings a lot of the functionality from apps like iMessage, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp into your phone — natively.
The idea is to overhaul the industry standard carriers use for delivering messages, to create one common platform that comes with all the features people expect from texting apps these days, including typing notifications, read receipts and file sharing.
T-Mobile is the first to adopt the new standard, called Rich Communications Services, or RCS. A T-Mobile spokeswoman tells me the company has already had conversations with AT&T and Verizon about launching the service for their customers, as well.
If they do, it won’t matter what operating system your phone is running, who your carrier is or what messaging apps your friends are using. You’ll always have that iMessage-like texting experience.
Advance Messaging is only available on the new Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime for now, but it will come to the Galaxy S5 and S6 soon and will eventually become a standard feature, according to a T-Mobile news release.
This will come as welcome news for people — like myself — who have experienced the problems caused by so many messaging apps on siloed platforms that don’t work well together.
It’s known as “iMessage Purgatory” — that imaginary place where your text messages may end up when you switch from iPhone to Android smartphones. Apple sometimes keeps sending messages intended for former-iPhone users through its iMessage platform, which is a problem since there is no iMessage app for Android.
If RCS becomes an industry-wide standard, those headaches could become a thing of the past.