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Once it has won over the geeks and early adopters, new technology needs to win the heart of the everyday user. You do that by solving a problem begging to be solved or improving a solution clamoring to be improved. For Rich Communication Services or RCS, that is the confirmation of a delivered text message.
Thanks to WhatsApp, Slack, Facebook (now Meta) Messenger, and yes, iMessage, acknowledgment of message delivery has become an expectation for any messaging provider. Yet, the green bubble that signifies a text message only promises the message left your device and not that the recipient received it. Among the many things RCS can do, it can confirm message delivery, and thanks to the recent announcements around interoperability, it can finally make good on its promise.
Why SMS Refuses to Die
Randal Munroe, that great explainer of things, has a brilliant comic that explains why SMS refuses to die: it may not be the most modern or the most secure, but it works everywhere. The comic shows why, despite many proclamations that SMS is dead, text messaging remains the universal digital bullhorn.
Its ability to work on every device and mobile network makes SMS the only global cross-generational, cross-platform messaging medium. Regardless of their age or mobile device, a mobile user can send and receive a text message without downloading an app. And all they need is a cellphone.
Mobile World Congress LA, 2018
In a past life, I had the opportunity to help bring a real-world use case to RCS. EZ Texting (then CallFire) worked with ADP to build a working use case for password-less two-factor authentication (2FA).
2FA implementations are two password implementations. You first enter your password and then are prompted to send in a password via SMS or enter a code sent to your phone on the app. It is a horrible user experience but, unfortunately, a necessary one.
The ADP demo showed how you could have 2FA authentication without two passwords and maybe even make security a pleasant experience. As the ADP Product Director presented the solution, phones in the audience went up to snap pictures and take videos. This was the first presentation where the use case wasn’t some fancy bot that could tell you the weather or some brand-heavy marketing use case with a built-in image carousel. It solved a clear-and-present pain for a wide swath of the public, and that hit home for everyone attending.
One in six people in the US gets paid by ADP, and in any given month, 2-3M of those people complete first-time registrations or request new passwords. At that time of the workshop, Sprint was the only US carrier committed to RCS support. So while the use case had solid corporate backing, it was hard to justify spending significant resources on a solution that only 1/3 of the population can use. The use case retained its status as an R&D showcase, nothing more.
The Interoperability Problem
Despite the many impressive demos that day (and since then), the fact is RCS has been under construction for decades. Anyone who saw all it can do, especially under Universal Profile 2.0, was excited and wanted to build apps for the new medium. They were limited to building apps that worked only on specific devices and select Carriers. Even on carriers that supported it, the process of getting a device approved (white-listed in industry terms) to send and receive RCS messages was onerous.
For a new technology that relies on wireless carrier support, friction in provisioning is standard. For that technology to be a standard, every wireless device on every carrier network has to support it. Given how big networks have gotten, this is a huge lift.
For RCS, interoperability is a chicken-and-egg problem. There has to be enough critical mass to warrant the effort, yet the critical mass is dependent on investments in the wireless network.
Given the recent wins that the Google RCS team has had in getting US carriers to standardize on the Android messaging app, interoperability can only improve. Once that happens, then the ticker to build meaningful use cases starts.
The Apple Punching Bag
It is popular in some RCS early adopter circles to make Apple’s lack of support a punching bag, the go-to for why RCS hasn’t won wider adoption yet. The only way to get Apple to play along is to get iPhone users to ask for that feature.
A little-known fact, the first iPhone in 2007 didn’t support MMS. Apple finally got on board in 2009, and not without some noise from the press and the public. That same tactic will work here. Fix RCS support for the non-Apple ecosystem, and then there will be enough market demand to support it in the Apple walled garden.
Finally
The RCS killer app will have to remove the dread of uncertainty that comes with the green bubble. The only way to do that is to fix the interoperability problem. Once that is solved, RCS app developers will face no friction in convincing users to do their banking, hail their ride, and order their sandwiches all through one app. The RCS dream will then have arrived.