Quick answer. RCS is upgrading and gradually replacing SMS, but it isn’t fully replacing it yet. RCS is designed to be the successor to SMS, and adoption accelerated sharply after Apple added support in 2024. However, SMS remains the universal fallback — it reaches every phone, every carrier, every time — so well-run messaging programs use RCS where it’s available and fall back to SMS where it isn’t. The practical answer for businesses today is “RCS first, SMS as the safety net.”
SMS will remain important for years because of its universal reach and reliability, especially for critical messages like one-time passcodes. RCS layers richness and branding on top where the device and carrier support it.
The right strategy isn’t SMS or RCS — it’s an RCS-first program with guaranteed SMS fallback, which is exactly how SimplyRCS sends.
Key facts
- Apple’s 2024 support reportedly drove a roughly 500% surge in global RCS traffic that year (industry estimate).
- Google reported more than 1 billion RCS messages sent per day in the US as of May 2025.