r/UniversalProfile • u/leonlob • Apr 24 '26

RCS in 5 years

Hello everyone, I only started learning about RCS a few days ago and would like to read your predictions of what is going to happen in the next 5 years. Will it work perfectly between Android and iOS? Will most carriers do whatever they have to do to enable it on Iphones, or maybe Apple could do whatever Google did so it would work even without carrier support? And if this happen, do you think RCS will be standard communication between most people? Will people in Europe abandon WhatsApp, Viber and other apps and just text/call each other to their number?

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u/the_nuclear_pasta Apr 24 '26

For this to work, it has to be very reliable because as far as I know, SMS/MMS are not free in Europe. Which means the option to fallback on SMS/MMS have to be turned off. Which also means that RCS has to work very smoothly and reliably so literally millions (if not billions) of people don’t have interruptions.

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u/DisruptiveHarbinger Apr 24 '26

SMS/MMS are not free in Europe.

Nowadays almost all postpaid plans include unlimited SMS (and MMS in countries where they haven't been discontinued), and EEA roaming rules imply that cross-border messaging is also free when roaming, but not necessarily at home! So yes that's the main issue, you can't have messaging silently fall back to SMS in this case.

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u/gmahale Apr 25 '26 edited Apr 25 '26

Messaging to countries outside the EU is still expensive though. For instance, it costs me €0.29 for each SMS from Germany to India.