Google Messages is expanding its new delivery indicators to more people
Google Messages remains its parent company’s weapon of choice totake digs at Applefor refusing to play nicely with the RCS messaging standard. RCS chats include a bunch of handy features like read receipts and end-to-end encryption which place them up at the same level asthe best instant messaging utilitieslike Signal and WhatsApp. Some features like the checkmark-style delivery and read indicators were only available in beta until recently, but appear to be rolling out more widely now.
In October 2022,Google started beta testinga replacement for the spelled-out Sent, Delivered, and Read delivery indicators in the Messages app. The iconography based replacements are check marks in circles, where a single indicator appears for sent messages, two indicators appear side-by-side for delivered ones, and the checkmarks appear filled when the text gets read. These checkmarks seem to bearriving for a whole lot more beta testersrecently in the Messages app. We are currently seeing them on at least two phones enrolled in the beta that didn’t have the feature when testing began.
Old read indicator(left); new read indicator(right)
A wider rollout of the new message delivery indicators would be a pleasant visual change, bringing the Google Messages app one step closer to feature parity with rival services. However, we don’t think the tweaks we’re seeing in the app here imply anything for the RCS standard itself.
RCS on Google Messagesmay not yet feel like the mainstream replacement for instant messaging apps like Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram, but it is poised to get there, eventually. DespiteGoogle’s attemptsto highlight the advantages of RCS at CES, Apple shows no signs of backing down from its position of incompatibility. If you’re running one of the latest beta builds of Google Message, open an RCS-enabled chat and check if you’re seeing the new checkmark-style delivery indicators.
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