The truth is that there was no year of mobile, rather mobile incrementally became a more important part of consumers’ lives and because of this, an increasingly influential part of brand to consumer communications. This was driven by many factors including the adoption of smartphones and their growing sophistication; an increasingly global and digitalised economy; and consumer behaviour which lapped up apps, content and messaging.

And now I find myself increasingly thinking the same will be the case for RCS. There won’t, despite the promises of a thousand LinkedIn posts, be a single moment that we can point to that drove RCS to unseen heights. Instead, a series of catalytic events that have, are, and will occur, shall increasingly drive the channel to a position where it becomes the channel of choice. As Product lead for RCS at Infobip, I very much enjoy meeting clients, prospects and partners, or speaking at events to evangelise the channel, but I look forward to having to adjust my panel and webinar shtick to be about how to use the channel rather than what it is and why to use it.

Of course, the path will not be a smooth one and there will undoubtedly be a few false dawns along the way. Take iOS adoption as a perfect example of this. Rightly hailed as a hugely significant event, without which there is a credible argument that RCS would never achieve break-through, but since which we have seen availability with only some carriers in certain markets so far, and bugs and UX issues causing concerns to be raised about its implementation.

I have absolutely no doubt that RCS will become the de facto channel of choice for business to engage with their consumers, and importantly, also the one consumers choose to connect to brands with. I also feel that we will surely, as with mobile becoming the ubiquitous device it has, see a combination of factors compounding the influence of the others iteratively driving this growth. But adoption and traffic growth will vary by market and region, in some I expect we’ll see hockey-stick growth whilst in others this may be more measured.

So what will be those factors that influence adoption?

But currently RCS is still only available in a limited number of markets; and of these markets only some can be said to have full carrier coverage; and of these fewer then can be considered ‘mature’ – so realistically you are looking at less than 10 markets that can be considered to have full carrier reach, with an aligned onboarding process and pricing model, and a solid base of existing RCS traffic.

This is viable for local brands, or international brands with strong presence in these markets, hence some impressive activations in terms of scale or features in markets such as Germany, UK, India and Brazil. But for real scale, and importantly to justify the investment required of business to embark into a new channel, broad market availability is necessary alongside consumer reach.

We saw a limited number of new carriers coming into the fold in 2024 and realistically we can expect similar, at least for the first half of 2025. But importantly during this period, it is expected that the US carriers will become fully switched-on, which will bring multiple benefits as an influential market with influential brands and platforms.

As the process of RCS adoption becomes increasingly standardised with established commercial models, scalable GTM, and proven business case for carriers, we will see carrier adoption accelerate which, paired with iOS enablement similarly scaling, will be a primary factor in channel growth.

Where some lead, others follow

Why does every presentation include an appendix of case studies? Simply because brands want proof points. Whilst there will always be those willing to take a punt, where they do budgets are limited and this is often to develop these proof points. Examples of brands in the same vertical and with similar use cases showing positive results support the business case.

The more proof points, the stronger the case for the channel and the easier the decision on the part of a brand.

But there is another factor at play: FOMO.

In our increasingly digitised and dynamic consumer environment, where innovation is a key objective for many businesses, a competitor launching and having success with a new channel is rarely a good look. As we see more brands delivering RCS activations, and talking about their success with the channel, we will no doubt see many others looking to follow suit.

This ripple effect will take time. Following the innovators and early adopters there will be fast followers, the early then late majority, and finally the laggards completing the adoption wave years, not months later.

RCS P2A capability, allowing consumers to initiate an interaction with a brand in what has primarily been an A2P channel, will open up a swathe of new use cases such as customer support, and a host of new entry points such as search, OOH and other above-the-line media.

And brand enablers, platforms and ISVs, will add support for RCS and the richer and increasingly conversational use cases that the channel supports as they themselves witness the market shifts and react to their clients’ requirements.

Again, this adoption wave for both brands and their enablers will take time to affect the majority of the industry but it will be self-perpetuating as one innovation increases brand adoption, which catalyses the next innovation.

A consumer snowball effect

And a further piece of the jigsaw is the most important one, the consumer.

A channel’s success can only be tied to a consumer’s awareness, recognition and engagement via it. Some of the strengths of RCS – the branding, verification and ease of use are precisely tailored to consumer adoption.

Whilst knowing what RCS is would be nice, notwithstanding the “Text message – RCS” label when composing a new message, consumers shouldn’t really need to know or care what RCS is.

But what they should care about is what it brings them: instant recognition of the brand that’s messaging them, allied to being able to trust the message, and importantly trust clicking the link they’ve been sent; a richer and more effective way of interacting with the brands they want to; being able to pause and pick up a customer support query when possible, over an asynchronous channel.

And this familiarity generates a pull effect – consider a user receiving a branded and verified RCS, pushing to web, from one of their banks. Maybe they don’t particularly register this. But then consider them receiving then same message over SMS. Will they consider them both the same, or will they implicitly trust the SMS message less?

Look at them side by side and you know the answer.

Increasingly consumers expectation will be that they receive messages from businesses over RCS.  And the more they see it, the more they will expect it.