If your business sends text messages to customers in India, there’s a good chance a large share of them are no longer reading plain SMS. Their phones have quietly upgraded to something richer, and most people never noticed the switch. That upgrade is called RCS, or Rich Communication Services, and by mid-2026 it has become far too widespread for any business to ignore.
For years, messaging in India began and ended with SMS: reliable, universal, and visually unchanged since the early 2000s, capped at 160 characters and stripped of any personality. RCS changes that without asking customers to install anything new. It lives inside the default messaging app already sitting on their phone, and it quietly adds photos, buttons, read receipts, and a verified sender name in place of a random ten-digit number.
The Numbers Are Bigger Than Most Businesses Assume
What makes this a genuinely important shift, rather than a technical footnote, is scale. A detailed, carrier-by-carrier and brand-by-brand breakdown of exactly which phones support RCS in India is laid out in MetaReach Marketing’s guide to RCS supported devices in India for 2026, and the figures there are worth sitting with. Roughly 65 to 70 percent of Indian smartphone users are already RCS-capable, which works out to somewhere between 70 and 80 crore devices. That includes the majority of Android users on Jio, Airtel, and Vi through the Google Messages app, plus a growing slice of iPhone users running iOS 18 or later.
That last part surprises a lot of people. For years, RCS in India was treated as an Android-only story, with Apple sitting it out entirely. That changed when iOS 18 shipped in September 2024, and it changed faster than most marketers expected: Jio was reportedly the first Indian carrier to switch on RCS for iPhone users, ahead of both Airtel and Vi. Businesses that still assume an iPhone number automatically means “SMS only” are working from an outdated picture.
Why This Matters More Than It Looks Like It Should
Here’s the practical consequence. Every OTP, delivery update, appointment reminder, or promotional message a business sends today either lands as a plain SMS or as a rich, branded, interactive RCS message, depending entirely on the recipient’s device and carrier. Get that targeting wrong and you either waste the rich features you’re paying for by sending them as flat text, or you miss the fact that a large chunk of your list can already see something far more engaging than a wall of characters.
Sectors that depend heavily on trust and quick action are the ones seeing the clearest gains. Banks use RCS to attach an actual “Pay Now” button to an EMI reminder instead of a paragraph explaining how to pay. E-commerce brands use it to show the product itself inside an order update. Real estate businesses send swipeable property carousels straight to a phone that never had to download anything extra. None of it works if a business doesn’t know, in advance, which portion of its customer list can actually receive it.
Building a List-Aware Messaging Strategy
The sensible approach isn’t to treat RCS as an all-or-nothing switch. It’s a layer on top of SMS that quietly falls back to plain text whenever a device or carrier doesn’t support it, so reach is never at risk. The only real decision a business has to make is whether its messages are designed to take advantage of that layer when it’s available, or whether they’re leaving it on the table by default. Understanding exactly which carriers, brands, and iOS versions are covered is the first step, and that’s precisely what a resource like the one referenced above is built to answer clearly, without the guesswork.
For businesses looking to actually put this into practice, MetaReach Marketing runs RCS Business Messaging campaigns across Jio, Airtel, and Vi with automatic SMS fallback and full delivery tracking, so brands can see exactly who received the rich version of a message and who didn’t, rather than sending and hoping.
The Bottom Line
India’s messaging landscape has shifted quietly but decisively. Three carriers covering more than a billion subscribers have RCS fully live, most Android brands sold in the country support it out of the box, and Apple’s 2024 entry closed a gap that used to split the market cleanly in two. For most Indian businesses today, the honest answer to “can my customers receive rich messages?” is already yes for roughly two out of every three people on their list. The remaining question isn’t whether RCS has reached enough of India to matter — it clearly has — but whether a business’s messaging strategy has caught up with that reality yet.
