Sorry to interrupt. I'm going to go because there's breaking RCS news. The carriers have basically

formed a consortium to hijack it and steal it away from Google and I am the only person

I can write this story. So I got to go. I'll just tell people they had to drop for breaking

RCS. I'm going to just tell them exactly what happened. Yeah. Okay. I got to go make

some calls. Bye. This is amazing. Bye. That's hilarious.

Take an October 2019, I was out in some rented podcast studio doing the Vergecast. I couldn't

get back to the office in time. And even though it's really not a great idea to do during

a podcast recording, I happened to check my email and I saw something nuts. The big four

US cell phone carriers had agreed to form a new coalition to support a new texting standard.

I immediately bailed on the Vergecast. Sorry, Neely. I ran out to my car that was parked

in this random street and I started making calls. I was trying to get to the bottom of the

so-called new Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative, the CCMI. It was a consortium that could

mean that we might finally get rid of SMS texting and move on to a new standard that Google

had been pushing for Android users. It was called Rich Communication Services or RCS.

As I said at my car reporting and making calls, I learned that the carriers were promising

to create their own texting app, which sounded horrible. So we all waited for a long time

for this bad plan to go in effect and it never did. That blockbuster announcement was pretty

much the last thing we heard about CCMI. T-Mobile eventually bought Sprint and it took until

April of 2021 for the carriers to admit and only under lots of reporting pressure that

they had given up on the CCMI. Here's the thing about this new texting standard RCS.

Almost every story about it ends up feeling like this. There's a big splash that makes

you think maybe we're going to finally be able to replace SMS with something that's not

...