RCS

[Serena_YC]

Hi @dfajardoc, 

At this stage, RCS support for Samsung devices is not available with Optus. That being said, I have flagged your post to be passed on to our teams for review as we are always on the lookout to roll out products and services that are of interest to our customers. 

Should there be anything else we can lend a hand with, do feel free to reach out to us here any time. 

[dfajardoc]

Thanks Serena for your response and reporting this to the team. It would be good to have RCS available in Samsung devices very soon as Google has already rolled out RCS to all devices since mid 2019.

Is there a network operator in Australia who is already offering RCS for samsung devices?.

[TheRealJoel]

@dfajardoc the advice given to you by @Serena_YC is incorrect; due to some carriers slow uptake (and in the case of Optus, unwillingness to honour commitments), Google deployed RCS messaging on its own platform which is independent of the carrier.

Ensure that you have Carrier Services and Google Messages installed and up to date and you should be able to activate RCS.

[jiminhno]

Make sure you have the beta version of Google messages to, as this will allow encryption of the messages, both parties need to have access to the beta build of messages but its well worth it, 👍🏼 I have it on my Surface Duo and my partner has it on her pixel 5, and it works fantastic, on a side note the rcs roll-out is all Google's doing and thank God they woke up and did not rely on the network provider's Optus is absolutely useless in regards to knowledge on rcs,

[dfajardoc]

Thanks @jiminhno @TheRealJoel for your responses. RCS is working fine in my Samsung S10e using the Google Message beta version as you suggested, thanks. No need of Carrier Services though.

I think @Serena_YC was referring is that Optus does not support RCS on Samsung Messages yet. Unlike RCS in Google Messages (that was rolled out directly by Google), it seems that RCS in Samsung Messages still need the support of carriers to enable it. Hopefully Optus can implement it very soon so Samsung users can also use their RCS in their native message app. In the meantime, I guess that Samsung users with Optus need to keep using Google Messages.

[TheRealJoel]

@dfajardoc good to hear that it's working.

Regarding RCS support in Samsung Messages, that's unlikely to happen. Samsung have stated that they will be / perhaps already are shipping new devices with Google Messages replacing their own app.

Secondly, many carriers around the globe adopted the RCS Universal Profile specification long before Google's recent deployment and Google's decision to deploy RCS independently was entirely due to carriers such as Optus committing to deploying and offering RCS and 2 years later, still nothing had been done (see the start of this thread).

The upside to this was that Google has built upon the Universal Profile RCS specification and now offers end-to-end encryption between Google Messages users so that's a bonus.