Google Voice has been around for a very long time. And while it’s available for personal use, some businesses also rely on it too. And while it’s a pretty good service, it is severely lacking when compared to other VOIP services. While it won’t be fixing one of its most glaring issues, the brand is now rolling out a new look through its web interface.
Things are looking good
Credit:Â Android Authority
The change was spotted by the folks at Android Authority, and although you can’t see much in the screenshot provided, there is a new color contrast being applied that makes each section of the app more clear.
There’s also changes in behavior, with the app now visually grouping messages that are sent together over a short window of time. Users will now get a clearer indicator when sending out MMS or SMS.
For the most part, there’s nothing too exciting here, but it’s good to see that the Google Voice team is still alive and kicking. And to be honest, we welcome any and all updates to the app and service that make it even a touch better.
We wanted something else
Again, we love any change that comes to Google Voice, but we’ve really wanted to see something else instead. Perhaps the most glaring problem at the moment is that there is no support for RCS messaging.
The perplexing thing about this is that Google pushed hard for RCS just a few years back, so it would only seem natural that the brand would integrate it into one of its own products.
When is Voice upgrading to RCS?
Despite the app not being as popular as it once was, those that still continue to use it have been asking for RCS support on the platform for a very long time. RCS was first established nearly 20 years ago, but didn’t really hit the mainstream until Google started to get involved.
While carriers at the time were trying their best, Google made a huge effort to make RCS mainstream by pushing the technology through its own Messages app. Just a couple of years ago, it even got Apple to finally play nice, adding RCS support to iOS.
For the most part, the experience has been pretty good. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than anything SMS can provide, and it doesn’t cost consumers a thing to use it. With that said, RCS on Voice would be a fantastic upgrade. Of course, no one really knows when it will arrive.
Android Authority did manage to dig up some clues. The news outlet did a deep dive into the code of a recent version of Google Voice app. They found that there was evidence that suggested RCS integration was being worked on.
Naturally, this has been a very slow process, just because the code shows glimmers of RCS doesn’t mean that it will appear in the app next week. We hope that this will all come together, but we won’t hold our breath.
