Summary

• Google's efforts in promoting RCS as an SMS replacement have paid off, with a billion RCS messages sent daily in the US.
• RCS is now widely available on Android phones and iPhones, allowing for multimedia sending, read receipts, and more.
• Although not as popular as iMessage or WhatsApp, RCS adoption is increasing very, very rapidly.

Google spent a long while marketing RCS as an SMS killer, and passively-aggressively pressuring Apple into adopting it too as an SMS replacement under its own iMessage app. It seems like efforts have paid off, because RCS seems to be really popular.

Google has just announced an interesting statistic—about a billion RCS messages are sent within the US alone every single day. This includes group chats as well as regular, one-on-one chats, and it means RCS is being used widely by users out there as their default messaging option. To put this into perspective, SMS, at its height back in 2011, moved a whopping 6.3 billion messages every day. This is a sixth of that, but it's still pretty good considering that RCS is attempting to replace SMS, and considering how there's a vast variety of messaging options out there, including Apple's iMessage, which is still the main messaging method for Apple users.

This came not only after Google helped make RCS widely available to all Android phones via the Google Messages app, but also after Apple added RCS support to iPhones with iOS 18. Now, when you're texting an Android user from an iPhone, thanks to wide RCS availability on the Android side of the pond, you'll still see a green bubble, but there's a good chance that it will default to RCS rather than SMS. This allows for multimedia sending, read receipts, typing indicators, and perhaps more importantly, not-broken group chats. RCS probably got a decent boost following Apple adopting it—while iMessage still supports a lot of other Apple-only features, RCS at least gets the basics right, so it doesn't get your friends to exclude you from their group chats.

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It's not immediately clear how it stacks up compared to iMessage or other messaging apps such as WhatsApp, which are vastly more popular—as a reminder, iMessage is only really "popular" in the US, and most people use WhatsApp globally, so it's estimated by some that a staggering 140 billion messages are sent through that platform every day. RCS, of course, doesn't get even near that, though I'm sure that we might be able to add a few billion messages to the statistic Google shared by counting in global users—that 1 billion figure is just in the US.

Still, it's great news for the adoption of RCS, and it means that SMS, while it might not be fully dead everywhere and is still actively used in some places, might be about to reach its long-overdue demise.

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