RCS message adoption in the US has crossed a major milestone, with Google announcing that one billion messages are now sent every day.

RCS is the successor to SMS, offering advanced features like group administration, file sharing, high-quality media, typing indicators, read receipts, encryption, and more. Google has been pushing RCS adoption for years, and Apple recently adopted RCS as its iMessage fallback. In the past, when communicating with Android devices, iPhones would fall back to SMS, giving users an inferior and insecure experience. Apple adopting RCS as the fallback has been a boon to cross-platform texting, as well as RCS in general.

According to Google, a billion RCS messages are now sent daily in the US alone.

Over the last few years, we’ve been focused on improving how people connect, no matter what phone they have. That’s why we helped make RCS the messaging standard for Android and iOS. Now, in the U.S. alone, there are more than a billion RCS messages sent every day (based on an average of the last 28 days). This means more people have been able to send high-quality photos and videos, and add someone to the group chat, without it breaking.* Learn more about RCS on our website.

The milestone is a significant one, and good news for users who want to preserve security and privacy when communicating between iPhone and Android devices.