I’ve long maintained that Apple’s support for RCS was a red herring. The industry had a ton of work to do—everything from customer onboarding to brand education—that could be tackled while waiting for Apple to change its mind.
Infobip’s Messaging Trends report reveals that while that argument was directionally correct, it was incomplete.
According to Infobip, RCS traffic has spiked exponentially since Apple’s announcement. And it makes sense. Few things light a fire under a product organization like clear customer demand. Once Apple confirmed its RCS bridge, the brands that already understood the power of RCS rushed to jump on board. You can see it in the traffic explosion in Spain and France—markets where RCS was already mature. What changed? Those same brands now had a path to the iOS consumer with their statistically deeper pockets and higher margins. That mattered.
And this is what I got wrong.
I kept arguing that we needed to focus on automating and scaling RBM agent onboarding and monitoring. And I still believe that. Just look at the swamp that is the US onboarding experience. It’s proof there’s still real work to do. But here’s the thing: The industry was never going to invest the time and energy required until it had a compelling reason to do so.
Apple’s support created that reason. It lit a fire. It gave RCS the urgency it lacked. And none of that would’ve happened otherwise.
Sometimes I’m wrong—or at least incomplete—in my analysis. That shouldn’t be a surprise. With over 190 posts and a weekly publishing schedule, it’d be unrealistic to expect every take to be perfectly correct.
But I don’t mind being wrong one week. Because I get to iterate and revisit it the next.
This is one example.