RCS is a far more featured messaging platform, offering features such as native group chats, read receipts, larger message file sizes, encryption, and others
It’s intended to make the default messaging apps more like many popular 3rd party messenger apps. Although on the other hand, since it’s controlled by Jibe (Google) for most implementations and not your cell carrier it’s an additional terms of service agreement that must be obeyed, or you could face a ban from RCS.
RCS is a replacement for SMS and MMS. It is a new standard agreed upon by mobile carriers, phone manufacturers, Google, and now finally Apple. It has many features that you’d expect from a modern messaging app, like group chats, photo/video sharing, read receipts, reactions and encryption. So there’s really no reason to continue using SMS if the person you are texting supports RCS (and your phone/messaging app will most likely switch you to RCS automatically).
Different companies had ways of doing these things, but they didn’t work between phone brands. So iPhones could do this stuff with other iPhones but not if they texted a friend who was using Android.
Now everyone gets to do this stuff regardless of who they’re texting.
RCS is better than SMS in every way. On top of the cool features, it’s a lot more secure than SMS.
SMS and MMS are very, very old. SMS is especially old, with it having turned 30 a few years back. The core of the technology goes back to pagers.
MMS was an attempt to improve it, but even that is 20+ years old by now.
That means it can’t do a lot of things we take for granted in our messaging apps now – some of them are user features, like sending high quality images, making group chats and seeing if someone is typing or saw our message, while others are more technical, with SMS in particular being very insecure.
RCS (Rich Communications Services, with Rich being in the computer sense meaning “can have a lot of stuff in it” rather than anything to do with money) is the replacement for S/MMS. It’s actually been around for a long time, but it’s been having a hard time getting off the ground for a few reasons:
Phone Carriers are terrible at coordinating anything ever. They don’t want to spend money to support something until the other kids do it, and so everyone just looks at each other and does nothing.
Apple thought “iMessage is fine, everyone should just buy iPhones and we’d all be happy” so a bunch of people never could use it.
That’s changing now, partially due to regulatory pressure and partially due to manufacturers telling carriers to get off the couch. Hence, it’s seen significantly more use recently.
TL;DR: It can do more things and is more secure. It’s been slow to adopt because carriers are slow behemoths.
Comments
RCS is a far more featured messaging platform, offering features such as native group chats, read receipts, larger message file sizes, encryption, and others
It’s intended to make the default messaging apps more like many popular 3rd party messenger apps. Although on the other hand, since it’s controlled by Jibe (Google) for most implementations and not your cell carrier it’s an additional terms of service agreement that must be obeyed, or you could face a ban from RCS.
RCS is a replacement for SMS and MMS. It is a new standard agreed upon by mobile carriers, phone manufacturers, Google, and now finally Apple. It has many features that you’d expect from a modern messaging app, like group chats, photo/video sharing, read receipts, reactions and encryption. So there’s really no reason to continue using SMS if the person you are texting supports RCS (and your phone/messaging app will most likely switch you to RCS automatically).
RCS is just the new SMS (texting).
It does cool things that SMS can’t do.
Different companies had ways of doing these things, but they didn’t work between phone brands. So iPhones could do this stuff with other iPhones but not if they texted a friend who was using Android.
Now everyone gets to do this stuff regardless of who they’re texting.
RCS is better than SMS in every way. On top of the cool features, it’s a lot more secure than SMS.
SMS and MMS are very, very old. SMS is especially old, with it having turned 30 a few years back. The core of the technology goes back to pagers.
MMS was an attempt to improve it, but even that is 20+ years old by now.
That means it can’t do a lot of things we take for granted in our messaging apps now – some of them are user features, like sending high quality images, making group chats and seeing if someone is typing or saw our message, while others are more technical, with SMS in particular being very insecure.
RCS (Rich Communications Services, with Rich being in the computer sense meaning “can have a lot of stuff in it” rather than anything to do with money) is the replacement for S/MMS. It’s actually been around for a long time, but it’s been having a hard time getting off the ground for a few reasons:
Phone Carriers are terrible at coordinating anything ever. They don’t want to spend money to support something until the other kids do it, and so everyone just looks at each other and does nothing.
Apple thought “iMessage is fine, everyone should just buy iPhones and we’d all be happy” so a bunch of people never could use it.
That’s changing now, partially due to regulatory pressure and partially due to manufacturers telling carriers to get off the couch. Hence, it’s seen significantly more use recently.
TL;DR: It can do more things and is more secure. It’s been slow to adopt because carriers are slow behemoths.