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Somewhere in the second half of every evaluation, a sensible person in the room asks the question that stops the meeting: what about the customers who can’t receive this?
It’s the right question, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a deflection. So here is a straight answer, including the parts that are inconvenient.
Not every cell phone in your database can receive a branded, interactive RCS message today. The share that can is large and it’s growing every quarter without any effort from you. And the ones that can’t will still receive a message, because the fallback is automatic and decided per recipient. None of which requires you to make a go or no-go decision about the whole channel.
Four factors determine whether a cell phone can receive one
Capability is not a single switch. It depends on a short stack of conditions, all of which are knowable:
- The device and operating system. On Android, support is effectively universal through their default messaging app. On iPhone, Apple added Rich Communication Services support starting with iOS 18 in fall 2024, and the business-messaging portion began rolling out shortly after with iOS 18.1. An iPhone on an older major version will not receive it.
- The carrier. The three largest US carriers support it (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile.) A number of smaller carriers and resellers were slower to adopt, but now support on iPhone specifically has rolled out carrier by carrier and market by market rather than all at once.
- The market. Availability varies by country, so if your audience is international, capability will differ across your regions.
- The customer's own setting. It can be turned off in the messaging app. While it’s unlikely that’ll happen, some people have turned it off.
That is the full list. Nothing about it is mysterious, and all of it is measurable.
The honest scale, with the counterweight
As of May 2025, Google reported more than a billion of these enhanced RCS for Business messages were sent daily in the United States, measured as a 28-day average. That milestone arrived on the back of Apple adding support, which closed the gap that had kept the standard one-sided for years.
Here is the counterweight, because you will hear it from a skeptic if you don’t say it first: SMS and MMS volumes in the US remain substantially larger than that. A billion a day is a big number, but it isn’t the whole market.
You will also find vendor content quoting reach figures in the 80% range for major markets. Treat those with some care. They tend to be sourced loosely and they describe consumer messaging populations rather than your customer list. Your database is not a national average, and there is a better way to find out than believing a percentage in a blog post, including this one.
Stop treating it as a channel decision
The framing that causes the deadlock is treating this as a switch: either the whole audience can receive interactive messages or the project waits.
That is not how sending works. Capability is evaluated per recipient at send time. A device that supports the branded version receives the branded version. A device that doesn’t will receive an automatic SMS fallback carrying the same information in a different format. You set up one campaign with a trigger, a list, two versions, and let the platform take care of the rest.
Measure your own list instead of trusting anyone's percentage
Here’s the main taking away from the whole post: capability can be checked programmatically. You can run a capability check against the numbers in your own database and get a real answer for your own audience, segmented however you care about: by region, by customer tier, by acquisition source, by product line (we can do that for you).
That gives you something no benchmark can. If 62% of your list can receive the upgraded version, you’ll know the size of the improvement before you spend anything, and you can decide whether it clears your bar. If the number comes back lower than you hoped, you have learned something true about your audience rather than adopting someone else's average.
It also reframes the internal conversation productively. "What share of our sends would improve" is a question a finance team can evaluate. "Is RCS ready" is a question few can answer in a meeting, but we can help with that.
What to do about the segment that cannot receive it yet
Three things, in order of usefulness:
- Keep sending to them. They receive the fallback. Their experience does not degrade relative to today, because today is the fallback.
- Do not build a separate program for them. Maintaining two campaigns to serve one list is how this gets expensive and abandoned. The point of automatic fallback is that you set it and forget it after you build it one time.
- Recheck capability periodically. The non-RCS compatible population shrinks on its own as devices update, mobile carriers enable support, and new markets come online. A segment that is uneconomic to reach with the upgraded format this quarter may not be next quarter, and you will only notice if you look.
What to measure
If you run this on a portion of your traffic, keep the reporting honest by tracking both populations separately:
- Capability rate on your list, overall and by segment. This is your baseline number.
- Performance on the upgraded population against your current sender, same copy.
- Performance on the fallback population, which should be flat rather than worse. If it moved, something is wrong with the implementation, and you’ll want to know that immediately.
- Combined result across the whole list, since that is the number that decides whether the messaging program as a whole is worth it to continue.
The answer to the objection
The customers who cannot receive a branded message yet are a shrinking minority who continue to get regular text messages today. The ones who can are the large and growing majority who get something considerably better (images, videos, PDF, the works.) You do not have to choose between them, and you do not have to wait for the late adopters to catch up before improving anything.
Our general advice is to always start small, prove it works, and then scale.
See it on the device it lands on
Don't take our word for it. Tap through it.
The interactive guides walk you through a branded messaging experience exactly as your customer would see it, on the platform they are holding:
Want your actual number? Book a demo and we will run a capability check against a sample of your list so you know what share of your sends would upgrade before you commit to anything.