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. Almost a dozen more hot devices will come with Advanced Messaging this year alone, and, in the future, we expect it will be a standard feature on new smartphones sold.
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With T-Mobile Advanced Messaging, consumers “won’t need to search out, download, install, setup and register an extra app” to engage is such messaging activities as “near real-time chat”, being able to see what others are typing, getting notified that a message has been read, and sharing high-res photos and videos up to 10MB as if sending a regular text message, he said.
Advanced Messaging, which T-Mobile said runs on a standard that any carrier can use, allows you to fire off group messages or have a near-real-time chat with another person. Today, T-Mobile announced a new feature for its customers that addresses a number of those limitations while still preserving the ease and ubiquity of standard text messages. Instead of looking to the past with SMS and MMS, however, Advanced Messaging takes some cues from modern messaging services like Facebook Messenger, Skype, Snapchat, and even Apple’s iMessage.
T-Mobile said it was working to get more phones using Advanced Messaging, which runs on an industry standard called Rich Communications Services. The carrier says that it built the service to work “across all devices, makers and operating systems, and wireless operators”, though for now, it is the only carrier in the USA that supports RCS. Advanced Messaging is available on only a single smartphone: the Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime.
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Want to send a big video file? RCS requires a Wi-Fi or LTE connection, as you’re likely imagining, and the system will automatically drop back to basic texts if it needs to.
