Google Messages falls another version behind the RCS standard it was meant to lead

The GSMA published the RCS Universal Profile 4.1 specifications this week, and this release is quieter than the last. You get privacy controls over your name and picture in chats, while the rest is background work on encryption and speed.

RCS 4.1 is here, and it is mostly maintenance work

The announcement comes from Tom Van Pelt, Technical Director at the GSMA, the industry body that writes the RCS standard. Where Universal Profile 4.0 brought video calls and rich text formatting, 4.1 aims at the parts of the system you never see.

Here is what the specification covers:

• Profile sharing that shows your name and picture, pulled from your Google, Apple or carrier account, in individual and group chats, with toggles for who gets to see it
• Refined end-to-end encryption (E2EE) rules so encrypted messages behave the same way when two people are using different messaging apps
• A lighter way of moving messages between networks, which the GSMA says brings faster delivery, less battery drain and steadier group chats

That is a refreshing thing for a standards body to admit, and it sets the right expectation.

The standard keeps advancing while the app stands still

Universal Profile 4.0 was published in March, and as far as I can tell, none of its features have arrived in a stable Google Messages release since. So 4.1 is now stacked behind a version that has not shown up yet.

We covered the 4.0 announcement at the time, and the expectation then was that Google would adopt it quickly, because Google usually does with RCS. However, that hasn't exactly been the case.

If you are on an iPhone, the wait is longer, since Apple only got encrypted RCS into a stable release in May after pulling it out of several betas first, and it has never publicly committed to anything past 2.4.

What you would actually notice

Profile sharing is the one piece of this you would see. A group chat currently identifies people by whatever your own phone has stored, which is why people you have not saved show up as bare phone numbers.



The transport change matters too, just invisibly, since faster delivery and less battery drain are the sort of improvements you only notice when they are missing.

Google Messages was supposed to carry this

For a while, Google Messages looked like the app that would make cross-platform texting normal for the rest of us, the counterweight to iMessage. However, I went back through our own 4.0 coverage while writing this, and we were already waiting then, which is a strange place to still be four months and one whole version later.

Meanwhile, iMessage keeps doing what it has always done, working beautifully for the people already inside it and treating everyone else as a compatibility problem. When we asked you what would fix texting, close to 45% of you said the same thing, which is that everyone needs to be on one app.

I would like to be wrong about the timeline here. If Google ships even the profile controls before the end of the year, I will happily say so.

• Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra review
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