Google Voice’s lack of RCS support is ruining my group chat

Every friend group is going to have its black sheep. Maybe they’re the one who’s most likely to need bailing out, the one who’s always canceling plans at the last minute, or the one who’s never jumping at the chance to buy the next round. I’m the black sheep in my friend group, and it’s all Google’s fault.

Like many friends do, we keep in touch through a group chat, and at first, everything was fine. But one by one, over the past few years everybody started upgrading to RCS, getting access to new features — and having their expectations for text messaging evolve. The big problem, though: I’m using Google Voice, and Google Voice feels like it’s never going to get RCS.

As you’re probably well aware by now, RCS (Rich Communication Services) is the big upgrade to modernize text messaging that smartphones have needed for a long time. Android has been building out its support for years, and when RCS arrived for iPhones in 2024, a major hurdle in the way of cross-platform communication finally came down.

This is all great, with RCS delivering everything from support for reactions, to read receipts, to large media attachments. At least, it’s great … up until you’re the last person in your group chat without access. Reactions come through awkwardly as messages unto themselves. Sometimes images don’t show up at all. And once in a while conversations seem to randomly drop messages and arrive out of order.

Especially with that last one, I can’t even say positively that this is specifically an RCS problem causing it. But it keeps happening, and I can’t blame my friends when they all point their fingers at the one guy insisting on using decades-old SMS in 2026.

I’ve been using Google Voice since before Google even acquired it, back when it was still GrandCentral. For someone who works with a lot of devices (as smartphone journalists tend to do), the ability to grab any one of them and have access to the same conversations — whether or not that phone even has a SIM in it — is a huge plus. And being able to pick things right up in any web browser, even when my phone is nowhere near me, is all kinds of convenient.

Things were great for ages, but now the goalposts have moved, and rather than rushing to catch up, it feels like development on Voice has positively stalled out. I could not tell you the last time Voice changed anything really substantive. The few improvements we do get tend to be focused on paid Workspace usage, like the conference-call mode from last year.

What’s maybe most frustrating is that expanding RCS is clearly still important to Google. Back in December, Google Fi got a long-overdue upgrade to its RCS support, expanding from phones to now work with Fi’s web interface. And that’s great for everybody on Fi! But for every update Google deploys like that one, it becomes just all the more obvious that Voice is being passed over.

To one extent, I get it. Voice doesn’t have ads. Voice needs to interface with the public phone switching system. It’s got to be expensive to run. I doubt it was ever even much of a loss leader, helping draw people into Google’s ecosystem. Instead, it’s this ongoing financial burden. Maybe there are a few of you out there who actually purchase credits for VoIP calls, but for someone like me, mooching off Voice for decades, there’s little motivation for Google to spend even more money just to keep me happy.

I’m more than a little surprised that Google simply hasn’t pulled the plug already. The signs are certainly there that Voice could not be less of a priority for Google. If the lack of RCS weren’t telling enough, try this on for size: Google Voice has ZERO Gemini integration, whatsoever. I challenge you to find any other Google service that’s been less touched by Gemini than Voice. Some of you may be laughing, thinking this is a good thing and wishing Google were as apathetic towards forcing Gemini into all its other apps. But the reality is that in 2026, this inattention is a very, very bad sign for Voice’s future prospects.

So, where does that leave us? For my little group, they’ve given up on Voice ever getting its act together, and are pushing hard to move our chat to another platform altogether. While that might resolve my issues with them, I’ve still got the rest of my text messaging life all tied up with Google Voice, and I’m hesitant to burn it all down when I honestly still really like the core Voice experience — it just needs to get with the times.

As every year passes, though, it feels less and less likely that it ever will. On some level, I know this: If Google cared enough to bring RCS to Voice, it would have happened by now. But there’s still that lingering possibility that maybe I’ve got Voice all wrong, and it’s just one more update away from its big RCS renaissance.

It’s like I’m in a bad relationship that’s no longer working for me, yet I’ve got so much invested that I’m far too hesitant to cut ties and start fresh. I wonder how many other long-time Voice users feel similarly, and how much time all of us really have left before so many do leave that it becomes not worth Google keeping the lights on for the rest. The smart thing to do would be to get ahead of it. But that doesn’t make me any less sad that it’s come to this.