When you hear the word “SMS”, you think of text messages, and for the most part, they mean the same thing. The only problem is, by modern standards, SMS is an ancient standard to send text messages over. RCS is where it’s at, bringing modern features like read receipts, group chats, and high-quality media.
After ages, Apple finally brought RCS over to its phones, enabling more modern texting between Android and iPhone. Google has been on the RCS crusade for a long time and may want to go a step further, by bringing native RCS support to your Wear OS smartwatch.
A Google Messages Update Could Bring Standalone RCS Support To Your Smartwatch
It might be easy to get carried away and think that smartwatches are all about fitness and health since those tend to be the features that manufacturers flaunt the most, but there’s a lot more to them than that. I’d say one of the biggest reasons to get a smartwatch is because of the convenience factor—letting you do many things without needing to bother with your phone. With LTE watches, you can even leave the phone at home.
Sending text messages is one thing that people can do straight from their wrists, but if you want to take advantage of the RCS standard, you’re going to need to have your smartphone connected and nearby. That’s because Wear OS doesn’t natively support messaging over RCS. However, that might change relatively soon.
According to an APK teardown of the latest Google Messages beta done by the guys over at Android Authority, it seems like standalone RCS messaging might be on its way to smartwatches running Wear OS relatively soon. This is all based on lines of code that mention “wear”, “standalone”, and “rcs”, with one seeming to specifically refer to enabling standalone RCS.
The Question Is, Do You Actually Need Smartwatch RCS Independent Of Your Smartphone?
The question that you might be asking, however, is whether this feature is even worth Google wasting time and effort on. How many people even send text messages from their smartwatches in the first place? Clearly, we can all agree that the answer is “less than those who send text messages from their smartphones”, but that doesn’t mean that wrist texters are a negligible group.
At the moment, all RCS messages that you send from your smartwatch are mirrored from your smartphone, regardless of whether you have an LTE or Bluetooth/Wi-Fi smartwatch. But what if you’re on a run, you forgot your phone at home, or you need to send a text in an emergency? Yep, that’s right, you won’t be able to text over RCS under those circumstances.
Even if you don’t message from your smartwatch, there’s really no harm in Wear OS being able to support RCS messaging on its own. All it does is empower the platform and add some extra flexibility to your wrist. So, hate it or love it, you should be glad to see it come.
