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.
If you are still placing the two channels against each other, what RCS messaging is sets out the standard, the reach, and what a business message can carry.
- After Apple’s 2024 support, Infobip reported business RCS traffic on its platform growing 5x that year (vendor-reported).
- Google reported more than 1 billion RCS messages sent per day in the US as of May 2025.
- The dated US figures behind this sit in US adoption at a glance.
Is SMS dead?
No, SMS isn’t dead, it’s being upgraded, not replaced. SMS remains the most universal messaging channel on earth, reaching virtually every phone, and it’s the fallback beneath RCS. What’s changing is its role: rich, branded, interactive messaging is moving to RCS where it’s supported, while SMS handles universal reach and critical, plain-text messages like one-time passcodes. The realistic future is “RCS-first with SMS fallback,” where SMS quietly underpins everything rather than disappearing.
Predictions of SMS’s death miss how much infrastructure depends on it. Its universality is precisely why it survives: no app, no data connection, no device requirement. For years to come, the safest assumption is that SMS becomes the reliable base layer while RCS captures the rich, high-engagement traffic on top.
So the better question isn’t “is SMS dead” but “what belongs on SMS versus RCS”, and the answer keeps shifting toward RCS as its reach grows, without SMS ever fully going away.
- SMS reaches essentially every mobile device, and that universality is why it persists; its often-quoted 98% open rate is an estimate, because SMS has no read receipts.
- SMS is the automatic fallback for RCS, so it underpins RCS programs rather than competing with them.
- The trajectory is RCS-first with SMS fallback, not the disappearance of SMS.
Is RCS replacing MMS?
Yes, where it’s supported, RCS effectively replaces MMS for sending media, and does it far better. MMS was the old way to send an image or video by text, but it’s low-resolution, size-limited, and costs more than SMS. RCS sends high-resolution images, video, carousels, and interactive buttons natively. As with SMS, MMS remains a fallback for devices that can’t receive RCS, so the practical model is RCS-first with MMS/SMS fallback.
For a business, this means you no longer compress a product photo into a blurry MMS, RCS delivers full-quality media with tap-to-act buttons, and only drops to MMS when necessary.
- MMS in the US typically costs around $0.02+ per message and caps media quality; RCS carries richer media over IP.
- RCS supports carousels and multiple high-res assets in one message, impossible in MMS.