Google’s RCS Chat celebrates a billion monthly users with 7 new features

While we’re still a month away from the end of the year, it wouldn’t be too early to say that 2023 has been a crucial year for RCS Chat. The messaging standard was already popular on Android phones and has been on its way to replace SMS/MMS for years. However, major improvements in the past month have ensured RCS Chat is headed right where we expected it to go.

One milestone was Apple agreeing to incorporate RCS messaging into iMessage in 2024 after some pressure from the European Union. The other, is RCS officially crossing a billion monthly active users. To celebrate the latter, Google has introduced seven new features to RCS Chat that take the experience up a notch. Here’s a deeper look at all of them and how they can be used.

Photomoji

Photomoji uses pictures on your phone and turns them into emoji icons which users can then use as reactions to messages on RCS. These can be photos of you, a friend, or even your pet. The feature will be powered by on-device AI and all Photomojis will be saved in a separate tab for quick reuse.

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Voice moods

RCS Chat users will be able to deliver voice notes with more context and emotion with voice moods. The feature allows voice note senders to also superimpose an animated emoji over their message, adding more life to the voice note, and helping listeners understand what to expect before they even begin listening to one.

Screen effects

As the name implies, screen effects bring in full-screen effects on cue with specific messages. Saying “I love you”, for instance, will also send out a big full-screen animated heart with the message. Google has implemented 15 such animations, but has not revealed which text cues they are for, leaving us to hunt for these mysterious phrases like Lord Voldemort’s Horcruxes.

Custom bubbles

To add fuel to fire after Apple was forced into adopting RCS, users will also soon have the ability to change the colour of message bubbles, irrespective of whether the other person is using Android smartphones or iPhones. Now that’s one feature iMessage will never bring in, unless the EU decides to interfere again.

Reaction effects

The top 10 most popular reactions will now be animated. When users react using the thumbs up, heart or another emoji, a small animation will replace the bland reaction. While these aren’t full screen, they’re large enough to grab just enough attention, and make the conversation a little livelier.

Animated emoji

Some popular emoji also get their own animations now, available every time you send these emojis as individual messages on the chat, similar to how popular emojis on WhatsApp and Telegram have their own animations.

Profiles

Profiles allows RCS Chat users to better set up their own identity via a dedicated profiles page. This includes a profile name, and a profile picture. As Google puts it, Profiles will address “the problem of receiving messages from phone numbers not saved in your contacts”.

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Note that none of these features will come to RCS users immediately. Instead, Google is choosing to play it safe by adding “many” of these features to beta channels starting today. This means two things. First, stable RCS users must wait a while before they actually have access to these features. Second, not all features may arrive at once, and some of these new additions could take longer.

Until then, most Android users must still turn to third-party messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram for these advanced features.