Google's rollout of RCS chat via Jibe in its Messages app has just about enveloped the world — we haven't covered every new country, but we've seen a steady trickle of reports from new markets as it slowly makes its way around the globe. But while chat is useful, sometimes it doesn't quite work as it should, and though fallback mechanisms are in place, they can take a bit to kick in. So here's a recently spotted tip that lets you quickly and easily force any RCS/chat message in-progress in the Messages app to immediately fall back to SMS.
The menu that appears when you tap a chat message being sent.
If a chat message is stuck sending (or you can be quick enough), tapping the message while it's in the process of being sent will trigger the menu you see above. From there, you can either halt the message from being sent entirely or immediately force an SMS/MMS fallback.
This is actually pretty handy, as Google seemingly removed the options the Messages app used to have for customizing when and how it would fallback to SMS/MMS from chat. Since you can't really change that now, you're just sort of stuck with whatever logic Google has decided is best, and at worst, it could take up to eight days and require a full deregistration — though, in our experience, the fallback usually happens in just minutes without needing to go quite that far. Still, this can be faster if you need it.
We don't know when this feature rolled out, but we've never noticed it before. So far as we can tell, it's new-ish, but it's either a more recent server-side change, or it rolled out sometime before Messages v.6.3 (the oldest version I could test before I ran into activation issues).
However new it might be, now you know: Forcing an SMS fallback in messages in messages is just two quick taps away.
Thanks: Nick Cipriani