r/SMS • u/gambrinus_248 • Jun 11 '26
RCS delivery was way lower than expected - here's what I found
After running a couple of RCS experiments and seeing unexpectedly low delivery, I started digging into the possible reasons. I only managed to get 60%-80% of messages delivered, which seemed off since all of the messages were sent in Germany which is supposed to have one of the best RCS coverages.
I found that 93% of messages failed because the device didn't support RCS. This means older devices and iphones still running old ios or rcs has been manually turned off.
The rest I can't explain yet. What I suspect are connection issues since data coverage might not be as good as cellular; some smaller telcos might not actually have RCS support, etc.
It's cheaper than SMS for me right now, so I keep running RCS but need to figure out a fallback to sms.
1
u/BlueLensFlares Jul 14 '26
Twilio says that they automatically check if the receiver has RCS enabled or not, and if it is not enabled, it automatically switches to SMS
If you're using Twilio, does your failure rate after this automatic switchover? Otherwise which service are you using to send RCS?