Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

T-Mobile subscribers can now to people on other phone networks, so long as everyone involved has an Android phone and support for the new messaging standard.

There are still a bunch of caveats here, but this appears to be a big step forward for RCS. The messaging standard is meant to be the successor to SMS, but its rollout has been slow and messy. Many carriers — T-Mobile included — began supporting RCS years ago, but it generally only worked between subscribers of the same phone carrier and often only while they were using a specific carrier-made app, meaning it’s been basically useless.

Today’s launch gets us a lot closer to a world where RCS just works. T-Mobile is supporting RCS Universal Profile 1.0, which is the…

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