How to get Chat/RCS working on T-Mobile

[david 929]

Chat (= RCS = Rich Communication Services) is the revamped texting protocol that allows for guaranteed delivery, full sized images and videos, read receipts, typing indicator, longer message limits, wifi chat, and other features (NOT including encryption).  It has to be supported by the messaging app and the cellular provider.  Google provides the app for Android, called "Messages", and has worked with the cellular providers to make things work on the back end.  It will still fall back to SMS/MMS if the other side doesn't have Chat.  Formally, non-OEM, 3rd party texting apps aren't allowed access to the APIs yet.  There are some apps that claim to support it, so I'm not sure how they are doing that.

When I first tried to test this with the Pro1, I found that I couldn't enable the Chat features in the Messages app.  It gave me an error about it not working with my provider (T-Mobile) yet.  That didn't seem to jive with everything I've read about the timeline of this new protocol in the USA, so I googled around a bit.  I found a lot of people complaining about the same problem.  It appears that T-Mobile was playing some games about only allowing it to work on certain T-Mobile branded phones.  That didn't sound good at all, as one of the big selling points of Chat is that it is supposed to work across all providers and devices.  

Just before I was about to implement a work-around to see if that would get it working, I realized that the version of Messages that came with the Pro1 wasn't up-to-date.  I updated it and was immediately asked to verify that I wanted to enable Chat.  It took a second for the system to configure things and then everything showed as enabled in the settings.

If anyone else faces a problem with Chat in Messages on the Pro1, for T-Mobile (or any other provider, for that matter), update to the latest version in the Play Store to see if that fixes the problem for you.