Pay close attention to the RCS football as Google tees it up again

You have to wonder a little if Google is afraid of getting messaging right. That’s maybe the only explanation that’s left following its most recent failure to take encrypted messaging seriously, and for the latest lip service paid to RCS — the next generation of sort-of-not-really text messaging that Google’s been pushing for the past couple of years.

Here. We go. Again.

If you’re not all that well-versed on the various ways our words fly from phone to phone, a quick recap: SMS — traditional “text messaging” is old, limited, and not at all secure. It’s a feature of the carriers themselves, and it’s always been clunky. But it still works everywhere.

Then there’s iMessage, which Apple has seamlessly built into iOS for what seems like forever, is a proprietary, end-to-end encrypted system that only works on Apple devices. And it works very, very well, so long as you never want to leave it.

There’s also WhatsApp, WeChat, Signal, Telegram and the like. They’re all perfectly great…