With the Pixel 3A, T-Mobile just proved how broken the RCS Chat rollout has become
The Pixel 3A and Pixel 3 are coming as officially supported and sold phones on T-Mobile.
The Pixel 3A and Pixel 3 support the next-generation texting protocol called the Universal Profile for RCS (or Rich Communication Services, or Chat).
T-Mobile supports RCS.
But the Pixel 3A and Pixel 3 won’t have RCS chat on T-Mobile’s network. How is this so broken?
When Google first revealed its plans to support RCS Chat on Android back in April of 2018, I wanted to believe that it could move quickly to replace SMS on Android phones. RCS Chat is still not an end-to-end encrypted communication service, but at least it would provide better chat features like read receipts, group chats, and higher-quality attachments.
Pixel phones do support RCS on...