RCS’s emergence has greatly improved communication between Android phones and, more recently, has assisted in closing the messaging gap between iOS and Android. If you frequently use voice messages, this update may be about to improve your experience.
The most recent revision to the standard governing Rich Communication Services (RCS) was announced by the GSMA today. The High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (xHE-AAC) codec is now supported by the new Universal Profile version 3.1 specification, which also brings a number of other backend modifications. This makes it possible to send sound of noticeably greater quality with less data. Nowadays, in order to conserve bandwidth, audio delivered through messaging apps is frequently severely compressed, which causes tinny or muffled playback. Much more of the original audio fidelity is preserved during the decompression process when xHE-AAC is integrated.
This implies that shared music clips or ambient sound will sound richer, and your voice messages will sound clearer and more natural. Additionally, a chatbot like Gemini will have less trouble actually interpreting what you or someone else said if you ever need to send it a voice message. Specifically, this codec is excellent at improving the quality of speech and non-speech audio.
Beyond this innovation, Universal Profile 3.1 pays particular attention to onboarding, a crucial but less obvious component of the user experience. “New mechanisms for connecting RCS clients to operator services,” which essentially means expediting the initial setup procedure, are introduced in the update. For most users, activating RCS is rather simple, but occasionally it can become a little clumsy, needing manual intervention or failing to connect. Although we’ll have to wait and see if they truly produce improvements, these new “mechanisms” are meant to solve that and make things more smooth.
It will take time for these changes to manifest. Carriers and client app developers are now responsible for putting the standard into practice after the GSMA released it. It is anticipated that Google, the main force behind the adoption of RCS through its Android Messages app, would incorporate these modifications in a later version. Apple may take some time to execute this on its own; perhaps it will do it with a small update to iOS 26 later this year or early next year.