Here at Mobile World Congress 2016, the annual Barcelona-based flesh-pressing of the telco industry, Google and a bunch of carriers have put out a press release talking up how they are apparently ‘aligning’ to try to drive adoption of RCS.
Aka the Rich Communications Services interoperable messaging standard that carriers have been trying to push for years.
Carriers’ aim with RCS (formerly called Joyn) was to try to evolve SMS with a new standard that baked in richer features, such as instant messaging, group chats, file sharing and so on; i.e. the sorts of features now routinely found in over-the-top messaging apps like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger. So really that ship has sailed, and the latter apps are continuing to pull users away from SMS, diminishing the old carrier cash-cow even further.
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/22/after-jibe-mobile-buy-google-to-provide-carriers-with-android-rcs-client/
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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