TECHNOLOGY
The RCS Revolution is Getting Left On Read
Despite tremendous promise , a series of setbacks are throwing serious doubt on the potential for RCS to successfully challenge OTT platforms .
WRITTEN
WRITTEN BY BY : HARRY HARRY MANEAR MENEAR
Since its earliest days of development in 2007 , Rich Communications Service ( RCS ) has existed inside a growing bubble of hype . The technology has been lauded by everyone from telecom carriers , who see it as a way to coax users away from so-called Over the Top ( OTT ) platforms with the spiritual successor to SMS , to marketing execs who want to use direct RCS messaging to open up new , more profitable routes to consumer eyeballs left cynical and disengaged by a lifetime of online ads .
That bubble swelled again in 2019 when - after a few tepid years in the care of various telecom carriers , who largely had other fires to fight at the time - Google took the reins of the project from the GSMA to orchestrate a worldwide rollout . Updates were pushed , improvements were made , and over the past two years , RCS adoption has exploded throughout the Android community . Last year , Juniper Research found that the global RCS user base reached 1.2bn people . By 2025 , they predict , that figure will swell to just shy of 4bn ( more than all the people
92 September 2021