That's a lot of letters. I'll break them down, then talk about the future.

First stop, SMS. SMS stands for Short Message Service. When you send "Hey!" with a smiley emoji in a text message, that's SMS. SMS is simple, it's easy. However, it's got a few limitations: it has a character limit and it can't send multimedia. Want to send somebody an essay? Good luck. Send somebody a picture? Nice try. There are ways around this, for example modern phones can usually split texts into a few different SMS messages, and then reconstruct them back into a single message. For multimedia, if you get the link of the picture you're trying to send (Google Photos is amazing for this), then it works. However, that's a bit annoying.

Next stop, MMS, aka Multimedia Messaging Service. It's fine. It solves our multimedia problem, by allowing files to be sent, at the cost of quality. It has a relatively small file limit, so receiving pictures results in lesser quality. It also provides group messaging, something that can't be done with SMS. That's right, if you send the same text I mentioned above to a single person, it sends as an SMS, but if you send it in a group chat, it's sent as an MMS message. However, even that is still limited: adding and removing people from groups requires starting a whole new thread, which can be even more confusing since MMS has group size limitations, so threads get split into a certain amount of the total intended people and... it's a headache. At least the transition between SMS and MMS is mostly* easy! (Ever get that "Downloading multimedia message from ___" on your phone? That's why it's just mostly.) You can use one app to do both, and you don't have to manually switch it, and there's never any confusion about which one is which because it doesn't matter. They're behind the scenes.

iMessage is great, because it solves those problems. Other apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger do exactly the same thing. Instead of using the SMS and MMS standards, they use their own servers to send data to each other. This way, you get to ignore all of the limitations that plague the two standards, so long as you're willing to use your cellular data plan or wifi, and the person you're trying to message has the same app. If you can't do either of those, then sorry, nothing else you can do.

RCS (Rich Communications Services) is the solution to all of these things. It basically implements the same ideas as iMessage, Messenger, WhatsApp, blah, blah in a way that makes things easy. If both your phone and your carrier support RCS, then you don't have to install any extra apps (theoretically), and you can enjoy easy group chats, better picture sharing, practically unlimited character counts, chatbots, you name it. You don't even have to use data to use it!* The problem here? Once carriers heard about it, things got messy: carriers like Verizon and T-Mobile both have RCS, but with a catch. Up until a couple months ago, if a Verizon customer wanted to use RCS, not only did they have to use Verizon's Messages app to do it (which is objectively ugly and sometimes inconsistent), but the person they're texting has to also be a Verizon customer with the same app.

To make things easier for everybody, the GSM Association (which creates standards for others to adhere to) finally announced the RCS UP (Universal Profile). The idea is that all carriers could stick to the same profile, so that anybody in the world can use RCS with each other seamlessly. As they've worked on the technology over the last decade, they've ultimately reached RCS UP version 2.3, released just last month.

Google has been big on supporting this standard as well, buying a company called Jibe a while back to create a platform so that carriers can easily implement RCS UP in their networks, which may take a long time otherwise. There has also been a lot of push from other people who know about the technology and are excited about it, being frustrated with the current state of messaging.

RCS UP will change texting. No longer will Android users have FOMO on iMessage features. No longer will people cry from the pain of receiving a photo of a flower at half quality. No longer will people be frustrated by being in 30 different text threads all centered around the same general people. But there's one thing that may worry people.

Apple, in all its stubbornness, may not support RCS in its iOS platform for a while. This means that there will be an even stronger divide amongst smartphone users, split between Android users and iPhone users. Android users will be able to text Android users comfortably, will all the same features as iMessage, but technically cheaper (since it won't use up your data plan if you're not connected to wifi), while iPhone users will still be able to live in their green bubble-free lives. There are rumors about Apple considering it, but there are always rumors circulating Apple that end up being false. Further, Apple is consistently fashionably late to implement services available on other hardwares (USB-C, NFC payments, face unlocking, keep going?) Until Apple decides to support RCS UP, there'll still be the green bubbles that keep driving the stake between text conversations of its users and Android users.





* Technically, RCS messages do use data, but shouldn't be counted against your data plan. I don't need to go into that too much, there's a whole pertinent story about voice calls and LTE that uses the same idea as RCS.