RCS or Rich Communication Services is a messaging protocol first developed in 2007 by a group of people and then adopted by the GSMA (GSM Association). The protocol is heavily promoted by Google and is often called "a replacement for iMessage", which makes sense from both Google's and the user's point of view, given how iMessage still uses the less secure, old SMS protocol and the blue/green. bubbles controversy. So what exactly is RCS and is it the next evolution in communications? Let us find out the same in this article.

RCS stands for Rich Communication Services and is a messaging protocol that was made to replace the old SMS/MMS protocol. Unlike SMS/MMS which has character and media size limits and only works on a carrier network, RCS has no character limit and supports sending all types of media in high quality.

Google added initial support for RCS in Android 2019 and named the protocol "Chat". Since then, it has gained a lot of traction with both Google and Samsung adopting the same in their respective messaging platforms – Google Messages and Samsung Chat. There are many reasons to use RCS instead of SMS and some of them are the ability to send high-quality text messages, read receipts and all kinds of media using mobile data or Wi-Fi, end-to-end encryption in the case of chat in Google Messages, among other advantages compared to SMS.

As we mentioned earlier, RCS is more of a technical name. A friendlier name Google gave it is "Chat Protocol." It's like WhatsApp in many ways except it's tied to your carrier. Therefore, carriers need to enable support for RCS (Chat) in order for you to send text messages via Wi-Fi and mobile data. At first, Google wanted phone manufacturers to integrate it into their platforms, but since most of them did not want to do so, they decided to add RCS to their own messaging platform "Google Messages."