Millions Of Android Users To Get This Killer New WhatsApp Alternative

WhatsApp has become the dominant messaging platform, dwarfing all other contenders with the exception of its Facebook stablemate Messenger. In doing so, this hyper-scale “over-the-top” platform has also pushed legacy SMS messaging into the background, which given its limitations is no bad thing. But now the latest move from Google’s Android is likely to be WhatsApp’s sternest challenge yet.

If you haven’t caught up with RCS yet, you soon will. Rich Communication Services is a reinvention of cellular messaging, a halfway house between the SMS ecosystem run by network operators and platforms like WhatsApp and iMessage. The wide-scale RCS rollout is being driven by Google as Android’s iMessage equivalent, but it has always had one critical flaw. Until now. Maybe.

WhatsApp popularized the shift from network-based SMS to a separate messaging platform. The cross-platform app enabled users to exchange richer data, to send messages over WiFi at a time when many users still paid for each SMS sent. This was followed by groups, voice and video calls, and its now trademark end-to-end encryption. Messaging had been reinvented.

A couple of years after WhatsApp, Apple jumped into the game with iMessage—its obvious drawback, that senders and recipients had to be using iPhones, was overcome by integration with the standard SMS platform on those phones. If a recipient was not on iMessage or was offline, the message would revert to SMS.

The thinking behind RCS was to deliver a best of both worlds solution—the cross-platform ubiquity of SMS with the functionality of WhatsApp and iMessage, but built right into the core network infrastructure. And for the networks, who have lost billions in revenue to the dominant over-the-top platforms, this was an opportunity to try and pull some of this back.

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