Google unveils Chat, an RCS-based carrier messaging service to supplant SMS, with typing indicators, full-res pics, video, group texts, no end-to-end encryption
A top-tier Android phone can cost upwards of a thousand dollars, and for that money, you'll get some amazing features.
Context & Ripple Effects
Chat is the payoff of the groundwork laid in February 2017, when Google signed up more carriers, rebranded Messenger as Android Messages, and made it the default on LG and ZTE phones [[a:916845]]. With that distribution in place, Google is now putting an iMessage-style feature set — typing indicators, full-resolution photos, video, group texts — onto carrier-run RCS infrastructure instead of building another proprietary app.
The conspicuous gap is security: Chat launches with no end-to-end encryption, meaning message content sits readable on carrier and Google servers. That gap defines the story's next five years, from Google eventually shipping end-to-end encryption for one-to-one RCS chats in 2021 to the 2023 update that turned RCS on by default with group-chat encryption.
First-order effects
- Carriers get a modern messaging experience layered on their own networks without building apps themselves, while Android users gain rich texting but send content unencrypted through carrier infrastructure.
- Google positions Android Messages as the default SMS replacement across its carrier partners' phones, deepening its control of the Android messaging surface.
Second-order effects
- Slow carrier rollout pushes Google to route around them: by mid-2019 it offers UK and France users RCS Chat provided directly by Google rather than waiting on operator support, shifting the dependency from carriers to Google's servers.
- Moving messaging off per-message SMS onto data-based RCS erodes the carriers' legacy texting revenue line and makes the carrier a pipe rather than a service provider.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, carrier-dependent messaging features steadily migrate to Google-controlled defaults — with encryption added years after launch rather than built in, setting a template where platform owners retrofit privacy onto infrastructure they don't own.
- The encryption gap at launch becomes the structural argument against carrier-hosted messaging, pressuring the industry toward default-on encrypted chat as table stakes.
The trend: Carrier-based messaging is being absorbed into Google-controlled defaults, with encryption retrofitted years after the initial launch rather than designed in.