About RCS

What RCS is, what you can send with it, and what has to happen before your first message goes out.

RCS — Rich Communication Services — is the upgrade to SMS that lives in the phone’s own messaging app. There is nothing for your customer to install. Where SMS gives you 160 characters from an unfamiliar short code, RCS gives you your brand name, your logo, images, carousels and buttons, inside the same conversation thread.

Google runs the business side of it as RCS Business Messaging, which reaches customers on Android and iOS.

What you can send

	RCS	SMS
Sender shown as	Your brand name and logo, with a verified badge	A sender ID or a number
Message body	Rich text, images, video, audio	160 characters of plain text
Layouts	Rich cards and carousels of 2–10 cards	None
Buttons	Suggested replies and actions — open a link, dial, share or request a location, add a calendar event	None
Feedback	Delivered, read, and which button was tapped	Delivered only

That last row is the one people underestimate. On SMS you learn whether the message arrived. On RCS you learn whether it was read and what the customer did next, which makes the channel measurable in a way SMS never has been.

Who is involved

RCS has more parties than SMS, and that is why setting it up takes longer than switching on a sender ID.

Party	Role
You, the brand	Own the content, the templates and the customer relationship
OneXtel, your agent	Registers you, submits templates, and sends on your behalf
The operator — Jio, Airtel or Vi in India	Carries the message and approves the sender on its network
Google	Runs the RCS Business Messaging platform underneath

Each of those is a gate. A template is approved per operator, and a sender profile is launched per operator, so “RCS is live” usually means live on one network before the others.

Before your first message

1. A sender profile, launched

   Your brand identity on the channel — name, logo, colour, description. It has to be created and then launched with each operator you want to reach. See Sender profiles.

2. Approved templates

   Message content is approved in advance, like DLT for SMS. See Templates and the template guidelines for what gets rejected.

3. A plan for handsets that cannot receive RCS

   Not every device, network or subscriber is RCS-capable. Configure SMS fallback so those customers still get the message.

Fallback is not optional in practice. RCS coverage is good and growing, but it is never total. A campaign without fallback silently reaches fewer people than you think.

Where to go next

Send your first campaign

Build and launch RCS campaigns from the portal.

Set up the channel

Sender profiles, templates, billing and reports.

Send from your own code

The RCS API — templates, sends, callbacks and error codes.

Send from your marketing platform

MoEngage, CleverTap and the other connectors.

Reference

• RCS Business Messaging — Google’s own documentation for the platform underneath
• RCS error codes — what each operator rejection means