Google is seemingly making a serious effort to deliver a messaging platform that users want to be a part of. The continual improvement of Google Messages is testament to that, unfortunately, they have tripped a few times along the way. Most recently, the potential integration of Duo and Meet has popped up. Ignoring their foibles, Messages is going from strength to strength and now with a further RCS feature (via Android Police), it’s getting even better.
The latest addition to the features list is to choose to send a text rather than RCS style chat. Now, this probably isn’t going to be an issue for most users, if chat is working well then leave it alone. But depending on your data signal at the time then you may occasionally see issues with RCS.
In testing this because of the speed of connection, I couldn’t manage to get the popup on the screen let alone change the sending option. Much to the amusement of my Ausdroid colleague Duncan, but when I killed my Wi-Fi and Mobile Data connection it was a different story.
Obviously the message wouldn’t send without data, but that also highlights the potential use case for this feature if your signal is poor. It also became clear that the feature isn’t yet available in Australia.
