Chances are that, by now, you've heard a little bit about Rich Communication Services, or RCS. It's the latest messaging channel taking off in the U.S. that provides an interactive, engaging, app-quality experience — without the app!
Now the question has become: will RCS be the death of mobile apps? We explore this mobile marketing question below to help you decide the answer.
What is RCS?
Rich Communication Services, or RCS, is the much-needed upgrade from SMS and MMS by being even more interactive, more visually exciting, and built with the goal of helping businesses engage more meaningfully with their customers.
Instead of plain texts with generic messaging and links, brands can now send high-quality images, videos, and clickable buttons — all within a user’s native messaging app. This makes communication more dynamic and helps drive higher engagement and stronger customer loyalty by creating a more seamless, app-like experience without requiring a separate app download.
What are Mobile Apps?
A mobile app is a software application built specifically for use on smartphones, tablets, or wearables. Brands from all different industries have opted to create a mobile app to allow consumers to do a variety of activities — from shopping and ordering online to reserving a vehicle and managing one's finances — directly on their handheld devices.
The intended goal of mobile apps is to deliver an easy-to-use interface that uses data to deliver a more personalized experience.
Benefits of RCS vs. Mobile Apps
Here are a few key benefits RCS offers that mobile apps do not.
RCS has a much wider audience reach.
While mobile apps are a high-engagement channel, the engagement often comes from only your most loyal and engaged customers, the ones who are voluntarily taking up precious storage space on their phones with your app — and that’s fantastic.
There just aren’t enough of them. They are expensive to acquire, and only a select few highly motivated consumers are willing to download apps from the brands whose products and services they use.
RCS is available on all Android smartphones and on all iPhone X models onward with iOS 18 or higher, and it’s simply enabled by default because it comes through the text messaging app native to every device. Every US wireless carrier is also now RCS-capable.
If you’re wondering what that translates to in terms of market coverage, Google recently reported that over 1B P2P RCS messages are now sent daily in the US, based on a 28-day average.
No development time required to launch RCS.
All of the messaging capabilities within a mobile app, such as Push and in-app messaging, are capabilities that have to be built out or integrated via an SDK.
RCS, on the other hand, is built directly in the native messaging app on smartphones, which means no development work is required to start using RCS as a messaging channel.
RCS provides a more seamless customer experience.
While both RCS and mobile apps provide more interactive and conversational experiences, it’s a bit more disjointed with mobile apps. Consumers cannot have a conversation with your brand through push messages; rather, the push message is a means of getting consumers into your app to then interact with you further.
RCS offers both the messaging and interactivity that consumers expect from a mobile app today, allowing consumers to respond, scroll through products, click to take the next step in their buying journey, and more, all through the messaging app they already have and use — no additional downloads required.
RCS can be more cost-effective.
If you're starting from the ground up with a mobile app, you're looking at initial build costs, followed by incremental expenses for ongoing maintenance and enhancements. While the total spend range is wide — dependent on factors such as scale, competition, regulatory complexity, or how aggressive you are with features/functionality — many of these factors don't need to be considered by marketers for RCS because Apple and Google essentially foot the development bill.
The majority of ongoing costs incurred for RCS are the fees charged by the aggregator whose platform sends and receives your brand's RCS messages and the associated messaging fees charged by the wireless carriers.
So if you're a brand with a mobile app, keep in mind you're looking at having to keep pace with Apple and Google, which could mean a large reinvestment just to keep features at parity and to keep performance and security as current as possible.
Is RCS Better Than a Mobile App?
In a lot of ways, yes. RCS brings app-quality experiences to life without requiring users to create a new account or download yet another app on their phones. And as previously mentioned, RCS has a much bigger audience reach and can be a much more cost-effective solution compared to building and/or maintaining a separate mobile app.
Here at Vibes, we believe there’s a great opportunity to bring some of the elements users interact with in mobile apps today into RCS that creates a much easier, frictionless way of doing something: making a dinner reservation, checking in for a flight, checking a balance on an account — these are all examples of quick tasks that are well suited for RCS where you have the ability to tap your way through prompts.
That said, mobile apps still have a few capabilities that RCS currently does not.
When to use a Mobile App
- More design control. The ability to scroll or swipe through elements in an RCS conversation is determined by Google and Apple’s protocols. If you want to be in more control over whether your users can tap, swipe, drag, pinch, etc., a mobile app gives you more design freedom to do that today.
- Your main use cases don’t require an internet connection. Although mobile apps require the internet to perform most of their tasks, they can offer basic features to users without requiring the user to be online. Some health & wellness apps, for instance, can offer users stats and alerts without connecting to the internet.
- For completing an online purchase. Currently, RCS does not have the ability to allow users to complete a purchase directly in their conversation; they need to be redirected to either a brand’s web browser or mobile app.
How Vibes’ RCS Platform Will Get You Launched Successfully and Quickly
Vibes has partnered directly with the US carriers, Google, and Apple to help build the RCS ecosystem in the US, lighting the RCS path for brands and businesses like yours. Our direct relationships with the carriers as a Tier 1 Aggregator give your brand direct, unmediated access for fast, compliant campaign approval.
And even if you already have a mobile app, only Vibes allows you to combine RCS and Mobile Wallet to drive offers or your loyalty program to your entire customer base — not just those select few with your app downloaded to their phones.
We already have 300+ RCS agents in market — get in touch with us now and we can have you up and testing within 24 hours!
The Bottom Line
RCS is bridging the app world and messaging world, combining app-like functionality with the reach and convenience of native messaging apps, without the app download barrier in the way.
In other words, RCS is helping brands solve age-old problems such as reach and trust with modern simplicity, and it offers something all brands want: a universal, trusted messaging channel that your customers will actually use.
Early adopters, including dozens of Vibes' enterprise customers, are already seeing RCS drive measurable increases in revenue for their businesses.
Let’s talk about how Vibes can help you and your brand get started with RCS today.
