Upgrading Messaging on Android in the U.S. with RCS
There was a time when I really thought Google was going to shake things up. Nexus Phones, Google Fiber, Google Fi, etc all sounded awesome. I bought a Nexus 5, switched to Fi, went through the super fun process of mixing around my google voice numbers, (breaking all kinds of stuff) but eventually I was mostly setup and functional. I&#x27;d lost some core parts of gVoice, but I figured it was just a matter of time before it was back up to a similar level.<p>Having Hangouts as a full featured SMS&#x2F;Voice&#x2F;MMS replacement, which also let you do all of those things from your computer was an awesome experience. GV features like Spam filter wasn&#x27;t supported with Fi, and just accessing your GV account with a Fi subscription on your google account was difficult.<p>Then they split SMS&#x2F;Hangouts (although Fi users were somewhat grandfathered in), which broke basically every text convo I had going on, and made it <i>more</i> difficult to text Hangout friends compared with SMS only friends. Then they rolled back the gVoice&#x2F;Fi plans, and made it clear that Hangouts was going away, and gVoice wasn&#x27;t going to be an option. Then the Nexus phones started to get worse instead of better. The 6P was mediocre at best, and &quot;Stock&quot; Android was starting to make compromises, while somehow getting worse. The Pixels have continued this trend of decline, Hangouts can&#x27;t really even send Gifs anymore (size limit of like, 3mb or something) Fi has made almost no progress, and when Hangouts goes away I&#x27;ll be retiring the last of my Android devices.<p>Kind of a long rant, but my point is I don&#x27;t trust google to do anything competent in this space, and even if they did, I wouldn&#x27;t trust them not to fuck it up 6 months later.