PremiumGoogle has barred businesses from using RCS for promotion in India, the company's largest market by users, in a setback for the standard that the company is expecting to help become the future of SMS messaging, following accusations of excessive spam by some corporations.
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Google has barred businesses from using Rich Communication Services (RCS) for marketing in India, the company's largest market by users, in a setback for the standard that the company is expecting to help become the future of SMS messaging, following accusations of rampant spam by some companies.
In May, during the Android portion of Google I/O 2022, Google disclosed that RCS messaging has more than 500 million users around the world. The company was specifically referring to monthly active users of RCS using the Google Messages app.
According to TechCrunch, RCS is the result of a collaboration between a number of industry players to enhance traditional SMS with modern features like richer texts and end-to-end encryption.
RCS support has been scaled out to hundreds of millions of people throughout the world in recent years by Google, Samsung, and a number of other companies, including telecom providers. Google reported in May that the number of monthly active users using RCS messaging in the Android Messages app had topped 500 million. RCS is also geared at enabling businesses to reach out to users in a more participatory way, and the company urged "any mobile operating system" (a sly jab at Apple) to support it at its developer conference.
According to TechCrunch, the issue is that a lot of Indian organisations, including big banks and other lending institutions, have been misusing the function to send unsolicited promotional materials to any phone number they can discover in the country.
RCS is a next-generation texting system that is expected to eventually replace SMS by most operators throughout the world. It has read-receipts, high-quality attachments, and typing indications, as well as the majority of the features you'd expect from a modern messaging programme. RCS is referred to as "Chat" in Google's Android Messages app, which is a more consumer-friendly term for the service.
RCS providers may be able to view the contents of your messages and, if properly requested, may provide them over to the government. When they are transmitted to your phone, Google said it'd destroy them from its servers, The Verge reported in 2019.