How to turn off chat features on an Android phone

If you recently switched from an Android phone to an iPhone and suddenly stopped receiving texts from your Android phone-owning friends, don’t panic. It’s a nerve-racking but easily solvable problem, and it’s one that we’re all too familiar with at The Verge since some of us tend to switch phones a lot.

The likely culprit is the protocol called RCS, which is short for Rich Communication Services. There are a lot of reasons to like RCS in Google’s Messaging app. It provides read receipts and emoji reactions and enables higher-quality media sharing than the older SMS protocol it replaces. But as much as Google would like it to be, RCS isn’t a universal standard — Apple uses its own iMessage protocol, so if you’re switching between Android...

Continue reading…