One of the best features across smartphones is also the most poorly implemented. That’s right, I’m talking about RCS texting.
RCS, or Rich Communication Services, has been around since 2017 and is the successor to SMS and MMS texting, which have remained in use despite their limited features.
While RCS improves on these standards in every way, it hasn’t replaced them entirely yet.
The problem with RCS is that while the standard can be used by every carrier and anyone can develop a messaging app that supports it, there are too many problems to let it completely replace SMS.
SMS, despite its age, remains a crucial part of our digital lives, whether we like it or not.
Google Messages is preinstalled on most Android phones, and if the device and carrier are compatible, RCS is enabled by default.
While device and carrier support is widespread, there are enough exceptions to mean you’ll rarely be able to use RCS, even if you have no immediate problems setting it up.
While the Big Three carriers in the US support RCS messaging, many of their associated Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) don’t.
In other countries, major carriers (such as Vodafone in the UK) don’t support RCS. In India, iPhones only started supporting RCS messaging in September 2025.
In short, it is impossible to reliably use RCS for all your messages. While Google is trying to alleviate the problem by prompting you to invite friends to enable RCS, this won’t help people who are limited by their carrier or location.
For RCS to replace SMS, all carriers (including MVNOs) and device manufacturers must adopt RCS.
While newly produced smartphones can support RCS, “dumb phones” cannot, which means we cannot phase out SMS, perhaps for decades.
However, as around 87% of cellular phones are smartphones, this isn’t a significant problem. A bigger problem is older iPhones and Android devices.
If you’re still hanging onto an Android 5.0 or iOS 17 or earlier device, you cannot use RCS. However, this is a problem that will slowly become less significant over time.
While RCS-compatible device saturation will never reach 100%, eventually exceptions will become so rare that SMS will become almost invisible, similar to how 2G is still around to support older devices.
A bigger issue is the technical problems of RCS, which are still widespread.
When Apple implemented RCS support for iPhones running iOS 18 or later, it seemed like a major breakthrough in the push for RCS support across devices.
However, our excitement swiftly waned when we realized there was no end-to-end encryption, leaving iPhone-to-Android chats exposed. Apple plans to implement encrypted RCS soon; until then, we wouldn’t recommend using RCS with iPhones.
On Android, things aren’t much better. End-to-end encryption only works for RCS if both users are texting via Google Messages.
Hopefully, the RCS Universal Profile 3.0 update (which made end-to-end encryption a standard) will allow secure communication across all devices.
If not, Google Messages may simply cause the same problems as iMessage, rendering RCS’ cross-app and device functionality mostly irrelevant.
But RCS isn’t working consistently for compatible devices.
Recently, there has been a spike in complaints that RCS has suddenly stopped working. While the exact cause is unknown, some users have received a text from Google informing them that RCS messaging is now provided by their carrier.
Where carriers didn’t support RCS, Google stepped in with Jibe, a platform that provided RCS support for carriers.
However, these messages indicate that Google may be offloading the responsibility for RCS to carriers, which may be under-equipped to handle the standard.
In the long run, this may cease to be a problem as more carriers support RCS. Nevertheless, Google’s hamfisted approach to deploying RCS is causing significant problems in the short term.
The end-to-end encryption problems and poor carrier support are not unsolvable.
We know that encryption will soon be a standard for all RCS communication, and carriers have the ability to support RCS.
The issue is that Google is pushing RCS on us before these problems are fixed.
I love RCS, it’s a significant improvement over SMS in every way. However, I’m reluctant to push my friends to adopt it because of the encryption and support problems.
It’s often impossible to get a clear answer on why RCS isn’t working on your device, so my previous attempts to help them have often ended in frustration.
The botched rollout of RCS is also creating distrust of the standard, so even when properly implemented, I expect many people to refuse to use it.
SMS is more consistent, easier to use, and I think it’ll remain like that for years.
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It should have been opened up to all messaging apps years ago. Being stuck with Google Messages is a sacrifice when coming from apps like Textra that actually have legit customization. The barebones approach Google has is something I’m trying to adapt to but when you’re used to making it work and look the way you want, it’s very very very basic.
Google Messages isn’t a problem but interconnect servers need to talk with each other. Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA) created a RCS standard TTAK.KO-06.0410/R7 over and above GSM RCS standard. The TTA certificate compliance is another regulatory hurdle and cost.
Now this is the scenario.
South Koria Android users can talk within South Koria only so South Korian Apple iMessage users can talk to Apple iMessage South Korian users and with Android chatting + users in South Korian. However Apple US and Android US users won’t be able to talk to them and vice versa. I remember Verizon Message app wasn’t talking to Google Messages. It was a hit or miss. In Japan, users were able to use +Message for iOS, which was on RCS, but it wasn’t talking to outside of those three networks.
So customisation is least of my concern currently. Because currently I want a reliability in communication and even if Textra gets RCS capabilities but if Textra users won’t able to talk to others due to all these fragmentation I’ve mentioned earlier so that would discourage users to be on RCS.
I agree. I miss textra customizations. If/when textra become rcs I’m going back to them asap
Technology adoption of a primary protocol takes work…. and someone to push that change. Google is doing leaps and bounds more than anyone to get this a standard protocol across carriers and OEMS (looking at Apple). Chalk it up to growing pains, but rest assured this will get better.
Most of these problems will solve themselves with time. Now that Apple’s on board too, at the very least. Although they need to fix their implementation.
SMS will always be a fallback simply because of potential emergency situations, whether it’s no data or flaky data.
We will make it, don’t worry.
RCS is definitely hit or miss as far as reliability is concerned. One day it works and the next it doesn’t.
I’m in Canada. Android to android – rock solid RCS. With my iPhone friends it’s so variable. Some people, it always works. Some people have yet to enable RCS. These two groups are fine – at least I know where I stand. It’s the few iPhones that randomly switch between RCS and SMS. Usually at the most inopportune times. You know, when they want to send a video of something awesome and that’s the time that RCS craps out.
people use telegram everyday without the encryption feature (and they don’t even know)
I believe SMS people don’t care about encryption in the first place
As much as Google has been a problem in many things. The real culprit in all this as usual has been the carriers. Go back about say under 10 years you had Google pushing for the RCs standard and so did the carriers. The carriers even made their own group to support RCS. One problem, They decided to ice out Google in this and as usual they couldn’t agree on the standard and everything else fell apart. After that they had to go crawling back to Google to get something working with jibe. Fast forward to now. Apple finally has RCS that’s good but it’s still a mess. It looks like now instead of everyone going through jibe directly it’s gone back to the carriers to put in this working through jibe and Apple because of it. Being Apple They have to have it on the carrier service right. So in the end where are we halfway there and still a long way to go. Hopefully soon though this will all get shaken out and we can actually have something that works. 
