What is RCS, the Successor to SMS?

Author: Cameron Summerson / Source: howtogeek.com

SMS, or Short Messaging Service, has been around for a long time. And like most tech things that have been around for a long time, it’s due to get replaced. That’s where RCS comes in.

RCS, or Rich Communication Service, is the future of “texting” on your phone.

As its name suggests, this service adds a much richer experience to text and multimedia messages. We’re talking higher image and video quality, read receipts, and the like.

To make this a little more clear, think about instant messaging, like with Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp. You can see when someone reads your message or is typing, shared images are much higher quality, and so on. That is what you can expect from RCS once it rolls out.

So, basically, this is going to turn text messaging into more of a full chat experience—assuming both users have RCS support. It will be very akin to what Apple is already doing with iMessage, but instead of a proprietary system that requires everyone to have a specific phone or operating system, RCS will work across many phones, carriers, and OSes.

And in the case where only one person has RCS, it will default back to SMS, so no messages are lost.

What Phones Will Support RCS?

That’s an excellent question, and the answer is actually bigger than just which phones will get RCS—but we at least have an idea of where to start.

First off, RCS isn’t just something your phone gets, but also something your carrier and operating system has to support—there are a lot of wheels turning to get RCS into play.

But here’s the kicker: many carriers already support RCS. However, there wasn’t a specific set of mandatory features in place upon implementation, so it was sort of a mess. Some carriers offered certain features of RCS, but not others, and many of those features weren’t even compatible between carriers.

In order to fix this, the Universal Profile was born. This lays out a general set of features and functionality that RCS is to support, and everyone who’s on board agrees to support all these features.

Fortunately, the number of carriers, manufacturers, and OS providers that are on board…

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