What Is RCS and How Does It Work?

Google just joined the world’s biggest mobile carriers to hasten the adoption of a replacement for SMS. In an effort to standardize the use of Rich Communication Services (RCS), Android will be made available as a catalyst to fully implement this new technology.

RCS is a significant upgrade over regular SMS which offers many of the features which come with chat applications like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, which all have the ability to send multimedia, create groups and send attachments.

The SMS protocol has become less patronized and outdated as a result of over-the-top (OTT) messaging apps and the carriers have realized that if they want to continue generating revenue through texts, the need to evolve.

Rich Communication services simply leverages data connectivity to deliver advanced messaging features. If you’re totally new to this, you’ll know just enough about this new development by the end of this article.

 

What Is RCS?

Rich Communication Services or RCS, is basically enhanced SMS or MMS. To use this, your carrier needs to support it, your device needs to support it, and you should have a compatible app as well. It works with texts, images, video, location sharing or group texts. RCS could work with your contacts app, in this case, you can see who else in your contacts is on RCS. It also enables you to share your location even while you’re having a phone conversation.

Since 2008, the GSMA has been promising RCS. As of now, 47 mobile operators in 35 countries are using RCS technology. Many operators already offer their variants of RCS messaging under various bring names. Currently, T-Mobile has deployed this technology, with the brand name as Advanced Messaging and Vodafone’s version of RCS messaging has also been branded Message+.

 

How Different Is It from Regular SMS?

RCS lets others see when you’re typing, when your message gets delivered, and lets you see when you’re being replied. It also enables you to send photos and videos up to 10MB, as compared to the 2MB caps set on MMS. Regular SMS is slower, does not tell you when your message has been read and does not offer most of the features RCS has.

 

The Future of RCS

RCS is growing rapidly in response to popular messaging services like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and WeChat, which have billions of users. With Google joining the bandwagon, this will give the operators hope.

Google acquired an RCS startup called Jibe mobile to provide the infrastructure to support RCS and also letting carriers plug into its servers. RCS technology will be embedded into the Android system, which accounts for 80{76ac33845123b25982ffda0eb6f606179ce899e677f3c86d035d7b9fa6b6d307} of the world smartphone OS marketshare, to help win the messaging war.

For those with iPhones, iMessage is an Apple-owned proprietary messaging service which doesn’t use RCS, and won’t be doing that anytime soon. If they enable it and your carrier supports RCS, high chances are third parties will finally be able to see what you’re typing and when.

Do you think mobile operators will win the war against OTT apps? Share your thoughts below.