It seems that Google has been working on RCS for as long as I can remember. The company has had many setbacks and delays in rolling out RCS messaging on Android, partly due to issues with getting carriers on board.

Well, according to reports, RCS is now finally working in India, and there’s some interesting stuff here. For one, Google has decided to kind-of circumvent carriers completely by baking in RCS to its Messages app, and reportedly, any Android user can enable RCS in the Google Messages app regardless of the carrier they are on.

Note: While RCS is working on phones with Vodafone Idea SIM cards in our testing, we weren’t able to enable it on phones with a Jio SIM for some reason. We’re looking at how this is working, and will update the article when we know more.

That’s great news for Android users, considering that there existed no baked-in RCS messaging service on Android, while iPhones have long had the famous iMessage with its blue-bubble/green-bubble war.

We’ve tested RCS features on Rupesh’s OnePlus 7T Pro McLaren Edition with a Vodafone Idea SIM and George’s Poco F1 with a Vodafone Idea SIM and they seem to be working pretty well. RCS brings support for features such as typing indicators, emojis, read receipts, and more.

Enabling RCS features is fairly simple, all you need to do is go into the Google Messages app, tap on the three dot button, head over to Settings -> Chat Features, and turn on the toggle next to “Enable Chat Features”.

Note: If the option to enable chat features isn’t available on your phone, you can try to Force Quit the app and relaunch it. That seemed to work for us. Let us know your experience.

So what do you think of RCS on Android? Is it working on your phone? Let us know in the comments.