Added Android website new landing page for Google Messages, which talks about a first-party messaging experience, while also noting that RCS will arrive on iPhone in the fall of 2024.
The section describing the benefits of RCS – higher quality photos/videos, typing indicators and a better group chat experience – talks about how it’s “Coming to iOS”.
Apple has announced that it will adopt RCS in the fall of 2024. Once that happens, it will mean a better messaging experience for everyone.
When Apple announced RCS In November 2023, he introduced a “later next year” timeline. Most people assumed this meant iOS 18 rather than iOS 17. Google’s announcement today more or less confirms this. Meanwhile, it’s unclear if it will arrive with the initial 18.0 release or the .X/point update in the last few months of 2024.
In this section, Google also states that animated emoji reactions are “coming soon with RCS.” The current approach is handled by the Google Messages client, with iOS having something similar. This may indicate that reactions will be part of the RCS specification in the future.
This is actually the second product page that is original to Google Messages messages.google.com. (That site has not been updated to reflect the removal of the Google Photos integration.)
Meanwhile, Google identifies Screen Effects and Custom Bubbles as “currently in beta mode.” Speaking of Voice Moods, interestingly there is no beta tag.
Only a few beta users have received the redesigned audio recorder with noise cancellation, but we haven’t seen any reports of Sound Moods being available yet. This is due to Google rolling out all the other features we reviewed last year.
Elsewhere, Google is doing a great job with Photomoji highlighting, spam blocking, end-to-end encryption, Magic Compose, the Wear OS app, the tablet experience, nudges/reminders, and voice transcription.
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