Google has been working hard to push RCS adoption among carriers and OEMs. Developed as a replacement for SMS, RCS (Rich Communication Services) offers an enhanced messaging experience as it allows one to send interactive messages, emoji, media files, and more.

Today, Google has provided an updated on RCS and what plans it has for it in the future. The company says that RCS is now supported by over 43 carriers across the globe and it is working with device OEMs to add RCS support to more devices.

Google also provided an update on RCS business messaging. Meant for businesses, Google provided certain businesses with access to RCS last year. Since then, the enhanced messaging experience has been used by businesses to send customers beautiful images of their products and various other scenarios. Google will be bringing RCS business messaging to more businesses across the globe later this year, and it will also demonstrate how businesses can use RCS to offer an enhanced experience to their customers.

Over the last one year, major carriers across the globe have added support for RCS messaging to their network with others slated to roll out support later this year. Collectively, Google says that all carriers that support or plan on supporting RCS have a combined subscriber base of 1.8 billion. It also announced that TCL, BLU, Essential, and a few other smaller OEMs will start supporting RCS on their devices by pre-loading the Android Messages app on it.

Earlier this year, Google announced that Huawei would start using the Android Messages app on its devices as the default messaging app so as to support RCS messaging.

Our Take

If Google ends up getting all major OEMs and carriers to support RCS messaging, it could very well have its own formidable iMessage competitor. The company should also look into consolidating its mobile messaging strategy which is currently divided between Allo, Hangouts, and RCS. By focusing its energy and resources into one, Google has a better chance of building a formidable messaging platform with a substantial user base.