RCS Business Messaging 2026: The SMS Upgrade, the Apple Effect and Kenya’s U-turn

By the Connect Media Editorial Team · Published 15 October 2026 · Methodology · Sources

The text message turns 34 this December. In that time it has gained emoji and lost nothing else: 160 characters, no pictures, no buttons, no proof of who sent it. RCS (Rich Communication Services) is the telecoms industry’s long-promised replacement, a version of texting with images, read receipts, carousels, tap-to-reply buttons and a verified badge showing which business is writing. For a decade it stalled. Then, in September 2024, Apple switched it on in iOS 18, and the maths changed. This report asks how far RCS has really come, who is using it for business, and why it is going backwards in Kenya.

Key findings

1. Why texting needed an upgrade

SMS is universal because it is simple. It is also limited in ways that matter to businesses: no images or links that look trustworthy, no delivery-to-read tracking, and no reliable way for a customer to know a message really comes from their bank rather than a scammer using a look-alike sender name. Our SMS fraud report shows how criminals exploit exactly that gap.

RCS was standardised by the GSMA, the mobile operators’ association, from 2008 onwards. It runs over mobile data or Wi-Fi rather than the old signalling channel, and offers what chat apps offer, but inside the phone’s default messaging app with no download. For business, the key features are verified sender profiles (a logo, name and tick approved by the platform), rich cards and carousels, suggested replies and action buttons, and read receipts. If a phone cannot receive RCS, the message falls back to ordinary SMS.

2. The Apple effect

For years RCS was an Android-only feature, which made it useless for any business whose customers include iPhone users. Apple’s support in iOS 18 (released September 2024) removed that barrier. Infobip, a messaging provider, estimates that RCS penetration jumped sharply in markets with many iPhones [1]:

The country-level evidence is consistent. In Germany, Mobilesquared estimated about 2.8 million iPhone RCS users in 2024 and forecast 11 million for 2025, with RCS marketing traffic rising from about 23 million messages to more than 178 million [2]. Juniper Research expects global RCS business traffic to grow by about half in 2025, from 33 billion to 50 billion messages [3].

Encryption is the next step. GSMA’s Universal Profile 3.0 added end-to-end encryption based on the IETF’s Messaging Layer Security (MLS) standard, and Apple, which helped write it, has been testing encrypted RCS in iOS 26 betas, initially between iPhones only [4]. Encrypted person-to-person chat matters for privacy; business messages are a separate channel and remain readable by the platforms that carry them.

3. Who pays, and why operators hesitate

RCS business messaging is sold through aggregators, usually priced per message (often split into “basic” text-only messages and dearer “rich” ones) or per conversation session. Juniper forecast in early 2024 that operators’ RCS business revenue could reach US$8 billion in 2025, up from US$1.3 billion in 2023 [5]. Treat that as a pre-launch projection: newer Juniper work talks about traffic, not revenue.

The catch is that operators are not the only gatekeepers. Google runs the RCS Business Messaging platform on Android, approves brand verification, and in many countries hosts the RCS service itself through its Jibe cloud. For an operator that earns well from SMS, RCS can look like a way to swap a profitable product for one it shares with a tech giant. That tension is clearest in Kenya.

4. Kenya: the market that switched it off

Since about August 2025, RCS has been effectively unavailable for many Safaricom subscribers, with Google Messages telling users their carrier does not support it. Rather than fix it, Safaricom began sending customers SMS messages asking them to turn RCS off [6]. Business Daily linked the decision to economics: Safaricom’s SMS revenue fell 10.9% to KSh 5.5 billion in the six months to September 2025, and RCS chat, which travels as data, competes directly with paid texts [7]. Earlier in 2025, MTN was reported to be still studying RCS feasibility.

Two other facts limit RCS in Kenya regardless of operator policy. First, about 27 million mobile connections are on feature phones that cannot run it, as our State of SMS in Kenya report shows. Second, WhatsApp already fills the “rich messaging” role for smartphone users (see SMS vs WhatsApp). Infobip and Omdia still forecast Africa and Middle East RCS traffic growing from 545 million messages to 8 billion by 2029 [8], but in East Africa that growth depends on operators deciding to join.

5. What to do now

• Sending abroad? For campaigns to the US, UK, Germany, France or India, ask your provider for RCS with automatic SMS fallback, and A/B test it against plain SMS.
• Get verified everywhere. Register your sender ID locally and your brand profile on RCS and WhatsApp where you use them. Verified identity is the single biggest defence against impersonation.
• Write for the lowest common denominator. Every RCS message may land as SMS. Make sure the fallback text works on its own.
• Measure, do not assume. Vendor case studies claim very high conversion rates for RCS. Run your own tests before shifting budget.

Methodology

RCS user and penetration figures are vendor and analyst estimates (Google, Infobip, Mobilesquared, Juniper Research, Omdia) and are often produced by firms that sell RCS services; we label them as estimates. Kenyan service status comes from Kenyan technology and business press reports; we found no official Safaricom statement explaining the change. Apple’s encryption status reflects beta releases reported by May 2026.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Infobip, “Key RCS statistics & market insights for 2026”. infobip.com
2. iBasis, “RCS in Germany: recent statistics and forecasts” (Mobilesquared data). ibasis.com
3. ICT Business, “RCS business messaging traffic to grow 50 percent in 2025” (Juniper Research). ictbusiness.biz
4. Privacy Guides, “Apple confirms RCS E2EE will ship with iOS 26.5”, May 2026. privacyguides.org
5. TelecomTV, “Apple factor to boost telcos’ RCS business messaging revenues”, January 2024. telecomtv.com
6. Tech-ish, “RCS is unlikely coming back in Kenya as Safaricom starts urging users to turn it off”, November 2025. tech-ish.com
7. Business Daily, “Google RCS message interruption pushes Android users back to third-party apps”. businessdailyafrica.com
8. Capital FM, “RCS messaging in E. Africa to grow by 2029: Infobip”. capitalfm.africa