Aamir Siddiqui / Android Authority
TL;DR
- The GSMA has announced the release of RCS Universal Profile 3.1.
- This new RCS messaging profile introduces a new audio codec, enabling higher-quality voice notes and shared audio clips.
- The profile also enables a “more seamless and reliable” experience in areas with poor network coverage.
RCS has been around for over a decade, but the messaging standard gained a major boost when Apple adopted it in 2023. The GSMA has brought several features and improvements to RCS in recent years, and it’s just announced another upgrade.
The GSMA just announced the release of RCS Universal Profile 3.1, which brings better audio messaging capabilities. This RCS release specifically supports the xHE-AAC audio codec, enabling higher-quality voice notes and other audio clips.
It’s worth noting that the previous RCS release also supported the xHE-AAC codec. However, the GSMA told us that this initial release only supported decoding, while Universal Profile 3.1 also supports encoding. In other words, you can send and receive higher-quality audio clips instead of only receiving them.
Universal Profile 3.1 also offers “new mechanisms for connecting RCS clients to operator services.” The blog post mentions that this enables a “more seamless and reliable user experience, especially in challenging coverage conditions.”
The GSMA also elaborated on exactly what this means in response to an Android Authority question:
It’s not about enabling RCS, but rather at run time where up until now those (RCS) clients needed to have a permanently active connection to the RCS network. With the new release it would be possible to take that down, triggering the network to send a push notification when it has something to send to the client (e.g. an incoming message). Thus, clients would not have to update the network whenever their connectivity changes (e.g. moving to Wi-Fi).
In other words, it seems like RCS could behave more like messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram, which are more resilient to network changes.
This release comes months after the GSMA announced Universal Profile 3.0. That release offers long-awaited end-to-end encryption for iPhone-Android chats and easier subscription management with business messaging senders.
We’ve also seen plenty of RCS-related improvements in Google Messages this year. These tweaks include labels for contacts with RCS, a “delete for everyone” option, notification snoozing, and the ability to message yourself.
