RCS messaging: still a zombie, but now wearing a suit

This post originally appeared on October 4 on my LinkedIn feed, which is now my main platform for both short posts and longer-form articles. It can be found here, along with the comment stream. Please follow / connect to me on LinkedIn, to receive regular updates (about 1-3 / week)

Yesterday I followed the Mobile Ecosystem Forum stream of its #RCSWorld conference, on #RCS #messaging, especially business messages. I thought it was time to get an update.
 
As regular followers know, I’m a long-time critic of RCS. I saw it announced in 2008, wrote reports & advised telco clients about its many problems in 2010-2013, called it a zombie tech in 2015 (“28 quarters later”) and have been sniping at it ever since, including at Google’s acquisition of Jibe and its attempt to turn it into Android’s equivalent of Apple #iMessage.
 
Some flaws have been addressed (it finally uses E2E encryption), while Google’s tightening control of its features has maybe fixed its “design by committee” paralysis and historic fragmentation. Google is now hosting the whole application for many MNOs, rather than telcos relying on (and paying for) in-network IMS integration, but with an implicit threat of end-running them if they don’t support the services to customers.

There's about 1.2bn phones with RCS active - mostly Google #Android but also about 200m in China. This has been driven by its adoption as the default messaging client on new phones, rather than by consumer download.

I didn't hear any stats on genuine active use - ie beyond just using it as a pseudo-#SMS/MMS app because it's the default. Numbers always seem to be monthly MAUs rather than meaningful DAUs. No anecdotes of teenagers who swapped from FB / WA / iMessage / WeChat / TikTok / whatever because RCS is cooler with better emojis, birthday greeting fireworks or cat-ear image filters.
 
To be fair, the conference name was misleading. Almost the entire event was about RCS Business Messaging (RBM) rather than personal or group messaging. It was about targeted marketing campaigns (that’s spam to most of us), customer interaction with so-called “brands”, multichannel whatnot, and blather about engagement and “digital” marketing

Apparently A2P revenues for SMS are flattening, but the addition of "rich" interactive in-messaging customer experience functions will reignite growth. One operator in the audience asked why the same forecasts have been shown (and not come true) for the past 4-5 years. Apparently it's too complex for most developers.

So the big innovation is "basic RCS" with 160 characters. SMS with a brand logo, a verification tick and read receipts. It's aiming at the #cPaaS market to get more devs/marketers onto the first rung & hope to catalyse more fancy use-cases later.
 
IMO this is why Apple isn’t going to support it anytime soon, despite Google's cringey social media exhortations. The notion RCS is a standard for P2P messaging is a smokescreen. It’s an ad & CRM platform, not an SMS replacement or default way to chat with friends. It’s not going to be the messaging equivalent of USB-C chargers & forced on Apple by the European Commission
 
In a nutshell, it’s still a zombie. But now it’s a zombie in a suit spamming you with ads and "engagement" while it eats your brain

 

.

Telcos & OEMS: You should ignore the GSMA's "Advanced Messaging", RCS & "Universal Profile"

Summary: There are  10+ reasons why RCS messaging has failed, despite a decade of trying. Even with Google's involvement, the GSMA's "Universal Profile" and "Advanced Messaging" only fix, at most, two of these problems - and introduce new ones. Despite the hype, mobile operators should continue to deploy VoLTE only when it is really needed, and should avoid Advanced Messaging, RCS and ViLTE entirely. There are many other better ways for telcos to retain relevance in communications apps & services.



What's happening? 

In the next couple of weeks, we will likely be hearing a lot about the GSMA’s “Universal Profile” (UP), developed with Google as a standardised setup for new Android devices to support VoLTE, plus the latest version of the decade-old failed RCS messaging "zombie" service, now being rebranded as “Advanced Messaging”.

UP also incorporates a version of ViLTE, the video-calling application that can’t even be called a zombie, as it was never alive in the first place. Essentially, UP is a combination of VoLTE and RCS6.0. The first spec was published in Nov 16 (link). (Microsoft is also apparently supporting it, although seems less deeply involved than Google).

Expect the MWC announcements to talk breathlessly about how this is going to enable “Messaging as a Platform” (MaaP), and there will likely be some dubious-seeming big numbers mentioned. Any claims of "XXXmillion active users" should be *very* carefully questioned and analysed - what actually counts as use? There will be a lot of spin, painting what is essentially legacy SMS usage with a new app, as RCS. Daily is much more relevant than monthly data here.

Most probably, you’ll hear lots of hype and PR noise about “mobile operators winning back against the OTTs”, or “people won’t need to download apps”, or “everyone is fed up of having 17 messaging apps”. You’ll hear that it can use network—based QoS, which is great for VoLTE primary-telephony calls, but irrelevant otherwise. Vendors will probably say “well you’ve got an IMS for VoLTE so you should sweat the assets and add extra applications”.

We might even get an announcement about “advanced calling”, which is a way to improve phone calls with pre/mid/post-call capabilities (not actually a bad idea if done well) but force-fitted to use RCS rather than a more pragmatic and flexible approach (which is a very bad idea, and likely executed very poorly).

So ignore it. There are no customers, no use-cases, and no revenues associated with “advanced messaging”. It’s the same pointless RCS zombie-tech I’ve been accurately predicting would fail for the last decade. It’s still dead, still shambling around and still trying to eat your brain. It’s managed to bite Google and Samsung, and they’ll probably try to infect you as well.

What's the background?

If you're new here: I've been following and talking negatively about RCS for 9 years now. The project started in 2007, and emerged as a lukewarm 2008 IM concept for featurephones (link) in the days when both iOS and Facebook where just emerging onto the stage. I described it as a "coalition of the losers" in a report in 2010 (link) It evolved to a dead-on-arrival branded app called "joyn" as smartphones gained traction (link), and it has tried climbing out of its grave so many times since that I describe it as a zombie (link). Various operators have deployed it, then given up - even in markets like Spain and South Korea where multiple operators offered it at first.

I'm currently writing a report on VoLTE trends and implications for my STL/Telco 2.0 Future of the Network research stream (link). It should be out in the next month or so. As part of my research, I've been updating myself about the GSMA's plans to blend VoLTE with RCS - hence becoming aware of the Universal Profile and Advanced Messaging developments. 

Most people I speak to in the mobile industry privately admit that it's been a huge white elephant. I've met people who've been given the "poison chalice" of RCS inside operators and eventually quit their jobs in desperation. Huge slugs of time and money have been spent on a no-hope service, that could have been better deployed elsewhere, on things that could make a real difference. 

It's been pushed by:

• A few operators misunderstanding the nature of user behaviour, requirements and preferences for communications services, thinking that there had to be a standardised and interoperable "magic bullet" to compete with WhatsApp, Facebook, iMessage and WeChat (and 100's of others).
• The desperation of network vendors trying to make IMS seem relevant for something other than plain-old phone-call VoIP, either for fixed broadband voice, or VoLTE.
• The GSMA's stubborn belief that it needs to predefine interoperability and lengthy specifications, rather than iterate on something basic that people actually like. Also, the belief that it has to tie in the phone number / any-to-any model.
• Google, wanting to find a way to compete in the messaging space it has repeatedly failed with, especially creating an Android version of iMessage based on the Jibe acquisition. Samsung has recently joined in with its own acquisition of Newnet.

So my "coalition of the losers" joke (er... jibe?) in fact has a reasonable basis in history. And history doesn't record many such coalitions having great success at anything, except maybe keeping a few people occupied.

A couple of operators have launched recently - Rogers and Sprint in North America - but the other operators are still delaying, and have big iPhone populations anyway.
 
In the meantime, while the telecom industry has procrastinated over RCS, various other adjacent players such as Twilio and Nexmo (now Vonage) have pushed the supposedly "dead" SMS market to become the standard mechanism for A2P messaging, and signed up thousands of developers for that, plus voice/video/notification cPaaS capabilities. In the time it has taken RCS to get to its 10th anniversary, we have seen Apple, Facebook, Whatsapp, WeChat and others create huge value and loyalty.


But, but... Google!
 

It’s a little difficult to tell if Google actually believes in RCS, or whether it’s just cynically using the GSMA and gullible MNOs to push Android harder – and especially, help reduce the horrendous fragmentation of its platform in terms of both OEM-specific skews and non-updated older OS variants.

As I wrote previously (link), it also seems likely that Google is using the surprisingly-pliant cellular industry to help it create its own version of Apple’s iMessage. The optional hosted RCS Hub could also be an early foray by Google into the NFV and cloud communications space – perhaps with an eye to ultimately competing not just with the Huawei/Ericsson/Nokia axis, but also maybe Amazon and Twilio over time. That’s quite an extrapolation on my part, though - not based on anything public from Mountain View.

What’s definitely clear is that Google doesn’t see RCS as “the one messaging platform to rule them all”, nor the Universal Profile as a way to replace all other forms of voice and video communications. It has a broad range of other services, including Duo, Allo, Voice, HangOuts (now being reoriented towards enterprise), WebRTC support in Chrome and perhaps natively in Android at some point. It also has a stake in Symphony (messaging/UC for finance and other verticals), and works with most of the larger UCaaS and hosted PBX/UC players.

It also wouldn’t be a surprise if Google acquires other cool youth-oriented messaging apps to compete with Facebook’s Instagram, although a post-IPO Snap might be too pricey. And of course, it has its own push-notification platform which is probably (quietly) the world’s biggest messaging service that nobody talks about.

In other words, Google seems OK about creating a lowest-common denominator function that's no worse than what it has already, but which brings extra cooperation brownie-points from the mobile industry, and a bit more leverage with its wayward licensees. Its downside is limited - and if miraculously it somehow it can create a MaaP platform, its upside significant. There's probably also some interesting data-analytics and machine-learning gains in here somewhere too - even if it's just a better understanding of what Android users don't like.

In other words, from Google's point of view, it's a worthwhile and almost risk-free punt. Whether the mobile industry wants to over-rely on a company with a reputation for ruthlessly shutting down failed ventures is another matter.

 

What's wrong with UP/Advanced Messaging? 

Where do I start?! Well, perhaps by pointing out what actually has changed for the positive. It's true that Google is offering a hosted RCS platform for operators that don't yet have an IMS. ("Effectively sponsoring this piece" - link). That's helpful as it reduces friction and cost of operators getting RCS to market. So to does having a pre-certified set of devices that should work with that platform, or in-house deployments. 

But while perhaps those are necessary, they are very far from being sufficient. Many other problems and concerns abound.

The biggest lie about RCS and the “universal profile” is that it will become universal or ubiquitous. Not only is Apple not likely to support it, but it is far from clear that Android OEMs will implement it on all their devices, especially those sold in the open market. It is unlikely to have good PC support (although to be fair, neither does Whatsapp). It is unlikely to be downloaded onto older Android phones. It is unlikely to work smoothly on dual/multi-SIM handsets, of which there are hundreds of millions. It’s unlikely to work well on many MVNOs’ devices (neither does VoLTE). It’s also unlikely to work nicely on the vast plethora of smart IoT devices that support SMS – even those with decent web-browsers and app downloads. 

I've seen some of the projections for RCS-capable handset penetration, and I think they're significantly over-enthusiastic, especially if considered on a country-by-country basis.

There is no relevance of RCS for the enterprise UCaaS and vertical markets that telcos urgently need to focus on. That has to integrate with all manner of other communications services that seem unlikely to have more than a loose coupling with RCS, if at all. It won't be replacing email, Office365, Cisco Spark, Slack, HipChat and numerous other collaboration tools, not to mention the universe of video-conferencing. It's also going to be a long time before it becomes another channel in contact centres' multi-channel platforms - there's a long list of bigger fish, especially if WhatsApp and Facebook offer APIs to billions of users.

The MaaP approach seems doomed to failure – there are no examples of successful technology platforms that have not been based on successful technology products first. Trying to pre-guess the requirements for a platform – let alone creating voluminous standards for it - ignores a wealth of experience: customers use products in unexpected ways, with spikes in viral adoption, unpredictable demographic biases, emergent behaviour and geographical patchiness.

Platforms are created in response to a product’s growth, not pre-ordained. Nobody predicted that Snapchat had the potential to become a media channel and camera/AR platform – those angles represent reactions to actual real-world usage, as well as improvements in “adjacent” technology in the interim. More importantly, developers are unlikely to become interested until there is evidence of real-world usage among a decent slice of their target audiences. You'd have to be a brave airline to ditch your native apps, ignore Facebook and WeChat and iMessage, and port your main loyalty "experience" to a mini-app inside the RCS client.

There are assorted other problems lurking as well - interconnect and roaming should be interesting. Will it really be free to do video-sharing and file-transfer to your friend in Singapore? Trying to work out the pricing aspects will be challenging too - unless everything is free, for everyone, and to everyone. While that might be feasible for post-paid customers with big data quotas, it's unlikely to translate to the worlds billions of prepay users. 

It's slow to evolve, as it's designed by committee. It's not set up to do A/B testing on live audiences - maybe 100 million on a redesign first, to see how it goes and then make a call on full rollout. Standardisation and interoperability doesn't work with the agile, devops approach to apps that is de-rigeur here.

And another of the herd of elephants - what's it for? Who is going to use it, and why? I can't foresee any case-studies of teenagers saying "I used to SnapChat my friends all the time, but now we only use HyperMessage+ from NetworkXYZ!". Is it just generic SMS-style "Hi, I'm running 5mins late" stuff? But with "rich" elements, at least insofar as the person you're connecting with is another RCS user who can see them? Why else are people going to use it, except maybe as some sort of lower-than-lowest common denominator? And moreover, whats going to keep them using it, given how dynamic the communications app market is. Unless it can capture the "cool" factor, it's toast.

This is the problem - pretty much everyone can get WhatsApp or WeChat or Facebook. There's a 90%+ chance your friends are on your platform of choice and have no reason to switch. iMessage is the obvious anomaly, but it's more of a hygiene factor between Apple users - who often also have multiple devices like tablets and Macs as well, and who expect to "fall back" to FB or WA for friends (or groups of friends) who aren't Apple users. I guess in low-Apple penetration countries there could be tighter communities of Android buddies, but they may well include people with a lot of prepay accounts, older open-market handsets (some multi-SIM) and little likelihood to upgrade to a new UP-powered one soon. (One possible exception is India, given Reliance Jio's influence). 

So what should you do? (Or not do?)

If you’re the head of advanced communications at an operator, or looking into future voice and video services, don’t bother wasting your time in Barcelona on RCS or "advanced messaging". 

Sure, speak to vendors and look at cheap ways to implement VoLTE. The industry painted itself into a corner with a horrendously complex and expensive approach, so finding quick/simple/reliable ways to launch or scale it make sense. (Think open-source, cloud-based, pseudo-NFV for IMS without the hugely complex MANOs etc). VoLTE is becoming increasingly mainstream, although its adoption in many operators' networks is quite gradual. Insofar as the Universal Profile helps with handset/network interop for voice calls, it has a role to play.

But beyond VoLTE, operators and handset OEMs need to ignore the exhortations of the GSMA to implement so-called “Advanced Messaging” (I wrote that before I realised the acronym spells SCAM). It will soak up money, technical and marketing resources, customer attention and credibility. Even if the Google-hosted RCS platform reduces the cost of operators deploying their own servers, it will still need testing, integration with in-house IMS platforms and new NFV systems and other actions.

Be very very skeptical of all the announcements. Any user statistics should be scrutinised carefully - while some operators technically have RCS servers live, the key statistic that won’t be mentioned is how many active users are doing anything beyond basic SMS-type messaging. How many are actually using RCS properly - and like it? The reality is that essentially zero people have switched from using Facebook Messenger, WeChat or Snapchat to using RCS for any meaningful purposes – and a reasonable forecast for 2019 would be roughly zero as well.

Go and see genuine innovators in messaging and communications platforms for inspiration. Have a look at the various business UCaaS providers. Seek out anything based on WebRTC. Speak to the cPaaS providers & talk about partnerships. Look for open-source platforms for infrastructure and IMS (eg from Metaswitch & Canonical). Track down in-app messaging, or ways to hook IoT devices' signalling traffic into the mix (MQTT and so on). Look for companies doing interesting things with SMS - it's not dead, especially for A2P uses. Look at what some vendors are operators are doing with 2nd/3rd-generation API platforms for developers.

There are dozens of clever options for messaging innovation available for operators (or MVNOs, cPaaS providers, UCaaS players and other types of SPs). RCS is not one of them.
It's notable that in all of the GSMA's literature & commentary I've been able to find, I've seen almost zero mentions of these words: Viral, Fun, Snapchat, Slack, Instagram, Emoji, Twilio. But there's lots of "interoperable" and "rich" and scare-stories about telephony ARPU.

Although, ironically, GSMA's own Twitter avatar is a SnapChat ghost at the moment. And it has its own Snap channel (link). Maybe if it announces at MWC that SnapChat is transitioning to/interconnecting with RCS it'd be a gamechanger. But otherwise, it speaks volumes that it's promoting one of the Internet success stories in 2017 messaging.

As I've said before: Ubiquity is earned, not imposed. RCS stilll needs to prove that users actually want it before it can have pretensions to being a platform. For now, remember So-Called Advanced Messaging is still a failure - it's an unfortunate acronym, but amusingly appropriate. If the Universal Profile had just been about implementing - and improving - VoLTE to improve the telephony experience, it would make sense. Instead, it's been weighed down with a lot of harmful baggage.


 
If you're thinking "So what else should I do instead?" or "How do I stop my management team making an expensive mistake?" then you're in the right place. Contact me about possible workshops or other advice. information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com

RCS is still a zombie technology, "28 Quarters Later"

In February 2008, a number of major telcos and technology vendors announced the "Rich Communications Suite Initiative" (see here).  I first saw the details a couple of months later, at the April 2008 IMS World Forum conference in Paris. 

****NOTE: NEW FEB 2017 POST ON RCS & GOOGLE - CLICK HERE ***

It is now 7 years, 2 billion smartphones, and 800m WhatsApp users later.

Or to put it another way, 28 Quarters Later*.

However, unlike Danny Boyle's scary, fast-moving monsters in the 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later movies, RCS is not infected with the "Rage Virus", but is more of a traditional zombie: dead, but still shambling slowly about and trying to eat your brains. It's infected with bureaucracy, complexity and irrelevance.

To remind you: April 2008 was also a few months after the launch of the first iPhone, and a few months before the launch of the AppStore. It was also when Facebook Chat, now Messenger, was switched on in my browser for the first time - while I was waiting on the podium, to start chairing the IMS event. The world of mobile devices, apps and - above all - communications has moved on incredibly far since then.

But not for RCS.

The last 7 years have seen multiple iterations of RCS versions 1.0-5.2, RCSe as a short-lived spin-off, Joyn as the GSMA-sponsored brand, and more recently an attempt to piggy-back onto the deployment of VoLTE, as well as an attempt to reposition RCS as either "SMS 2.0" or some sort of API platform for developers.

Yet the active RCS user base is never quoted - I suspect it has fewer than 20m monthly users worldwide, and probably fewer than 5m active daily users. And by "active" usage, we should really focus on the "rich" aspect (see also below) with video or file-sharing, not just SMS-in-zombie's-clothing text. 

(Some vendors/operators are trying to replace native SMS apps on phones with RCS, to force people to "adopt" it. Most will just assume it's still SMS for text-messaging and avoid the other so-called "capabilities". Be wary of puffed-up future stats). 

The issue is that RCS has a large number of unfixable structural problems that guarantee its perpetual failure:

• It is "engineered" not "designed". Nobody sat down to ask what human problems RCS is intended to fix. It's a random grab-bag of technical features designed to be "interoperable" rather than "be useful for a purpose". There were no psychologists, designers or behavioural specialists involved in its creation.
• It has a bunch of expensive and complex "moving parts", using obscure and inaccessible protocols. Alan Quayle has a good run-down on its failings here. 
• Nobody needs expensively-engineered network cellular "QoS" for messaging, especially when 50-90% of use will be over 3rd-party WiFi anyway.
• It comes from an era where standardised app-level interop and federation was seen as a major benefit ("SMS only took off when networks interoperated") without recognising that 10-sec app downloads or 1-sec browser interactions now make this irrelevant. Popularity, design and purpose are keys to success - you can always interoperate later if needed, via the web.
• It's very slow-moving, as it's standardised by a committee process and hundreds of pages of labyrinthine documentation. It can't rapidly respond to new developments - messaging as a platform, stickers, "last seen online", likes, filters, disappearing messages etc. While it is a bit more extensible today, with operators' own features, it is still hamstrung by the lowest-common denominator interop specs and unnecessary QoS and per-message charging machinery
• RCS is often pitched as "competing against OTTs", but no reason is ever given why users should switch away from WhatsApp, LINE or WeChat, and for which use-cases. I have never seen a case-study interview of a teenager saying "I used to use SnapChat, but now all my friends have switched to Telco Messenger X"
• There is no obvious business model, except giving it away for free and hoping it adds value to a service bundle. Given that VoLTE is already an expensive investment in a declining market, it seems unlikely that many telco CFOs are keen on throwing yet more money down the drain for zero/negative ROI.
• Blending RCS with VoLTE overlooks the fact that VoLTE will not become "ubiquitous" for at least 10 years, and maybe never. I'm forecasting just 27% of LTE users to have VoLTE by end-2019  or in other words, less than 10% of overall mobile users. Limiting RCS to the niche of VoLTE users guarantees its irrelevance, given they're exactly the people most likely to use other apps on high-end devices.
• There is (AFAIK) no free international interconnect model for RCS - yet an important use-case for Skype, WhatsApp, WeChat and others is chatting to friends abroad.
• It is "any-to-any" rather than driven by buddy lists or whitelists, and so prone to spam and unsolicited marketing messages. Conversely, WhatsApp remains almost totally spam-free (helped by lack of an external spammable API, as well)
• RCS needs an IMS, which no mobile operator really wants to deploy, unless/until they're forced into it by VoLTE. While some RCS-aaS cloud solutions exist and help manage the costs, they still require client solutions on devices
• It's not supported by Apple and only half-heartedly by Google/Android and Microsoft, as they all have their own (better) communications products that tie into their own ecoystems (and their better understanding of user behaviour and design)
• It's not widely supported in retail-market "unlocked" handsets, used by most of the world's majority of prepay mobile users.
• It doesn't work very well with dual-SIM phones, or for people who have multiple SIMs and accounts.  
• It's unclear how it will work for people who don't have data plans. It might be zero-rated, but that has its own complexities and risks. For example, are file-transfers zero'd as well? It would be ironic if RCS got pressed into service as a free way to download other messaging apps from appstores.
• It is being pitched as a "platform" before it is a successful "product". That's not the way the technology industry works. Developers and enterprises will only sit up and listen when it has already got widespread adoption among the audience.
• Ubiquity is earned. Whatsapp, WeChat, Facebook and others have achieved viral adoption by giving people what they want, being differentiated in some way and having them recommend it. RCS has attempted to force itself on people, with telcos assuming a sense of "network privilege and entitlement".
• Users like fragmented communications experiences for many reasons - we see people happy with 5, 10 or more "messaging" or social apps, plus an increasing tendency to embed messaging capabilities as a feature into other apps. (Voice & video will follow suit, courtesy of WebRTC)
• There is no relevance of RCS to the enterprise. It doesn't fit with the way businesses or their employees use mobile devices and corporate applications. (Yes, I'm baffled by the Mitel/Mavenir acquisition, too)

Perhaps the most obvious indicator of failure is the name. Nobody actually wants "richness". Users want the right tool for the job, not an overloaded Swiss Army knife made "rich" with useless gizmos. The name - much like the term "multimedia" in IMS and MMS - epitomises the muddle-headed thinking that went into its conception.  It's rooted in engineers wanting to throw in as much as possible, not designers actually considering how people might behave, and what purposes/contexts they might pursue.

It is notable that WhatsApp added voice (& features like photo-sharing) only after it was already popular for text messages, and its owners could examine user-behaviour, how they used it (and for what), and only then determined what secondary features they might want. Almost all the most successful Internet applications have started out with something simple, and then added on top of it. They are also able to roll back changes, and do large-scale A/B testing on a live audience.

By contrast, RCS has been developed as a rigid, all-singing, all-dancing application with minutely-specified details.

What the industry should have done was take SMS, and make continuous minor tweaks to the application. A better (& cheaper) SMS could have battled its rivals. Context-specific versions of SMS would have made sense, too. Trying to just swap out SMS for RCS will likely make the experience worse, and accelerate the move of users (and developers) to alternative products.

There are dozens of ways to improve the utility and value of SMS. Adding video-sharing isn't one of them. RCS is emphatically NOT the new SMS2.0, despite desperate marketeers trying to suggest it.

A couple of operators' own messaging apps allegedly have RCS as an external interface for others to connect to - but I suspect that's mostly just to tick a box and keep the GSMA's enforcers quiet. I'm not aware that Orange Libon has any active "federation" use, for example. I also think Genband's "fring alliance" attempt to white-label messaging apps to multiple telcos and then allow them to "federate" is an exercise in futility. 

RCS-based app federation is just a way to create a "coalition of the losers".

The way that RCS has been positioned and marketed has been woeful as well.

RCS has had slogans such as "It's just there, it's just works" which have been laughably false, while early deployments - including by multiple operators in some countries (eg South Korea & Spain) have faded rapidly from sight. I wrote a research report in September 2010 about its continued failure.

About 3 years ago, I heard a Metro PCS radio ad while driving in the US saying "try Joyn, the messaging service taking Europe by storm!". I assume that someone subsequently rescued the teacup suffering from bad weather.

I meet virtually nobody in the industry who thinks that RCS anything other than a joke, apart from a couple of tired-looking vendor representatives. Yet most won't say so in public, scared of pointing out the GSMA Emperor's nudity. A few bloggers occasionally put up half-baked "Will RCS finally allow telcos to beat the OTTs?" articles, but that's just as click-bait, and probably half of them hope I'll jump in personally, and start a fight in the comments. 

I see a few vendors still trying to pitch RCS as an API for developers, or adding WebRTC to it in the hope to "extend" it to the browser or other devices. Both are attempts to put lipstick on the pig zombie. The use of RCS for A2P messaging will not happen until there are sufficient users adopting it for P2P. It's doubtful anyone will want to "engage" via a medium their customers are unfamiliar with, or that they think is uncool or clunky.

In my view, the industry needs to stop messing around with RCS, and kill it loudly and clearly. It needs to die with a bang, not a whimper. Someone needs to drive a wooden stake through its heart, then we can "go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over"

The "reset" can only come with 5G. Rather than wasting yet more time and money with the GSMA's "2020" vision and perpetuating legacy IMS, VoLTE & RCS, the industry needs to start again with a clean sheet. It needs to move towards contextualised communications, where voice/messaging/video is a feature of apps, websites and devices, not just a standalone service. It needs to decouple basic useful protocols from signalling, as in WebRTC. It needs to stop trying to define application behaviour, but leave that to the market.

Operators should pull the plug on all RCS investments now. Stop throwing good money after bad. Put the teams to work on thinking about what future communications could be - not trying to protect the obsolete "interop" models of the past, with clunky, expensive and unwanted new services. Operators needs to work individually - with vendors as and where appropriate, or with Internet/app providers if that makes more sense. They need to understand how and why their customers communicate, and predict how that will change.

The future of communications is about:

• Context and purpose - help people achieve what they really want
• Fragmentation & multiplicity
• Flexibility & agility
• Design & behaviour
• Interop & federation only where it makes sense, not by default
• QoS only where it makes sense, not by default
• Differentiation
• Multiple identity domains
• Security, privacy & control

RCS was already dead in 2008. It's still dead now. Ignore the occasional twitches of its corpse. Instead, focus on the growing seeds of new sources of value in communications.

***For a Feb 2017 update on RCS, GSMA & Google, click here ***

And if you want to know what is genuinely innovative & an opportunity in voice/messaging for carriers, contact me at information at disruptive-analysis dot com

* OK yes, it's 29 quarters since the original announcement, but 28 since I discovered the details. Who's counting.