RCS and the future of mobile messaging: What you need to know

In 2008, something big happened in the world of mobile communications.

A group of people got together and decided to build something new. Something that would bring new features, functions, and capabilities to the world of mobile communication. Something that would replace and improve upon the simple text messaging service that was used by millions every day.

And they called that new thing RCS - Rich Communication Services.

The press release for the announcement promised great things:

“Supported by over 30 operators and vendors, RCS enables interoperable enriched communication including in-call multimedia sharing, conversational messaging and presence-enhanced contact management for mobile and fixed customers.”

Fast forward to 2024, and you might be wondering what happened to prevent RCS becoming as widespread as SMS.

Let’s take a brief look back at the past sixteen years so we can understand where things are at today.

A brief history of RCS

2008 - The original specification was developed by a small group of mobile industry carriers, device manufacturers and network hardware vendors, under the guidance of the GSMA.

2016 - Broad challenges with getting the original specification off the ground led to the creation of the “RCS Universal Profile” - an enhanced specification aimed at providing more features and a universal standard that could be easily deployed by individual carriers. This coincided with Google purchasing the JIBE platform, a company that had developed an RCS enabled app for android devices, and a messaging service that could be deployed to carriers, providing an alternative solution to developing their own service.

2018 - Google developed and tried to promote RCS Business Messaging, as a business grade competitor to applications like WhatsApp. While RCS Business Messaging met with some success, broad adoption required the support of both businesses and carriers, and availability being limited to Android devices proved a challenge to adoption.

2018 - 2023 - Most carriers that had developed their own RCS service retired their implementations and moved to using Google’s JIBE hub.

2023 - Apple announced their decision to add support for RCS Universal Profile in iOS 18. This marked the first chance that true, universal, cross-platform support might become a reality.

2024 - The world awaits the release of Apple RCS support in iOS 18.

What challenges lie ahead?

While there have been several successful RCS projects over the years, these have been confined to specific campaigns, carriers and companies, and so far, RCS has failed to match the universal availability of SMS.

With support for RCS Universal Profile coming to iOS 18, availability will still not be worldwide. For example, in September 2024, availability of RCS is still restricted to certain regions and carriers within those regions, so even though iOS 18 will have support for RCS, you may not be able to access it on Apple devices in your area until carrier support arrives.

Users of RCS Business Messaging will need to test their campaigns on iOS devices using RCS Universal Profile to ensure compatibility, and to provide fallback paths to SMS where issues arise.

How can I get started with RCS?

Rich Communication Services (RCS) represents a major advancement in mobile messaging, offering features like high-resolution media sharing, read receipts, and interactive buttons. Despite its growing global adoption, SMS continues to be the dominant messaging protocol in many regions due to its universal compatibility. This means in order to fully leverage RCS, it's important to have a tool that provides fallback SMS for areas where RCS is not yet supported.

If you’re new to RCS, the best place to start is by sending a simple text message, utilising the benefits of branded messaging. This simple yet effective improvement over standard SMS provides the benefit of clearly identifying your brand as the authenticated sender, and is ideally suited to:

• One Time Passwords
• Appointment reminders
• Outbound marketing
• Notifications

By using the ability to include buttons in RCS messages, your customer can reply by simply clicking on the appropriate response, speeding up the process and removing the possibility of errors that might occur when typing out a response.

Once this type of flow is established and you’re comfortable with setting up fallback paths for customers who don’t have RCS enabled, you can progress to utilising some of the more advanced features like rich media, images and interactivity to bring your conversations alive.

How Pendula can help you with RCS

Pendula understands that communication starts with knowing your customer. Preparing a cutting-edge, high tech presentation featuring rich multimedia isn’t going to deliver much value if your customer is on a connection that doesn’t have the capacity to receive that.

Pendula’s ability to gracefully fallback to alternative delivery formats and methods, and to handle exceptions and escalations means you can craft a single message and know that it will arrive in the best format for your customer and their preferred conversation method.

By integrating RCS and SMS capabilities, Pendula provides unparalleled versatility and future-proofing for your messaging strategies. As RCS adoption continues to grow, you'll be perfectly positioned to leverage our advanced features without losing customers who still rely on SMS. This omni-channel approach ensures maximum reach and engagement, allowing you to deliver rich, interactive experiences to RCS-enabled devices while maintaining reliable communication with all other users. Furthermore, our platform's intelligent fallback mechanism automatically switches to SMS when RCS is unavailable, guaranteeing message delivery and maintaining a consistent brand experience across all customer segments.

To learn how to get started, reach out to our Pendula experts, and we’ll help you to understand how the capabilities of Rich Communication Services can enhance your customer conversations today.