📡 The Big Story
RCS Finally Gets Encryption, and Apple Is the One Flipping the Switch
Okay, let's talk about the thing that actually matters this week. Apple is updating the RCS protocol itself to support end-to-end encryption across iPhone and Android. Not a bolt-on. Not a hack between iMessage and Google Messages. The actual protocol. After 15 years of SMS being a plaintext postcard that your carrier, your government, and a motivated teenager with Wireshark could read, we're finally getting grown-up messaging between the two ecosystems that 99% of humans use. 🔥
Here's why this is huge for anyone who touches A2P messaging: the moment consumers believe RCS is "the secure one," every brand still blasting SMS coupons is going to look like they're mailing you a Polaroid. Expect RCS Business Messaging adoption to spike hard in the back half of 2026, especially in banking, healthcare, and any vertical where "is this message encrypted?" is a compliance question, not a nice-to-have. Carriers and CPaaS providers that bet early on RCS infrastructure are about to look very smart. Everyone else is about to have a rough roadmap conversation.
The wrinkle, and there's always a wrinkle: encryption at the protocol level means operators lose some of the visibility they've historically used for spam filtering and SHAKEN-style trust signals. Which, conveniently, leads us to the FCC.
🔥 What's Moving
FCC Wants to Choke the Number Supply to Robocallers 👀
At its March Open Meeting, the FCC adopted an NPRM tightening numbering resource access, building on the Third VoIP Direct Access Report and Order. Translation: if you're a provider handing out DIDs, you're about to inherit a lot more paperwork, resale restrictions, and certification obligations. If you're a bad actor running a robocall farm, you're about to have a bad quarter.
Look, nobody loves another compliance regime. But the numbering layer has been the soft underbelly of this industry forever. You can build all the STIR/SHAKEN you want, but if someone can spin up 10,000 numbers on a Tuesday with a fake LOA, who cares? This is the right fight.
TCPA Class Actions Hit 507 in a Single Quarter 💀
New data shows 507 TCPA filings in Q1 2025, with roughly 80% filed as class actions. That's not a trend, that's a cottage industry. If your consent stack is a checkbox and a prayer, 2026 is going to be unkind. This is also why the "just text everyone" growth hack you saw on LinkedIn is going to bankrupt somebody's startup this year.
AWS Enters the RCS Chat 👀
AWS quietly launched RCS Business Messaging on End User Messaging. So now Twilio, Sinch, Infobip, and AWS are all fighting for the same enterprise RCS budget. AWS doesn't need to win on product, they just need to be "good enough" and already in your procurement portal. Twilio's moat here is developer love and actual messaging expertise. Both matter. Neither is infinite.
Samsung Kills Samsung Messages 😴
Samsung is defaulting to Google Messages and sunsetting its own app. Good. One Android messaging experience means one RCS implementation to test against, which is a real gift to anyone building RBM campaigns. The fragmentation tax on Android messaging has been brutal for years.
🏆 Winner of the Week: Google Messages, which just became the undisputed default on Android and the encrypted bridge to iPhone, all in one week.
📉 Loser of the Week: Anyone running an SMS-only A2P stack with sloppy consent records. Your lawyer is about to get busy.
📊 By the Numbers
- 87% of consumers read texts within 15 minutes, per EZ Texting's 2026 Consumer Texting Behavior Report. Email marketers are weeping into their 22% open rates.
- 89% of consumers say every text needs to "earn its place." Which is a polite way of saying they will unsubscribe, block, and report you if you send one more "Hey 👋 checking in!" blast.
- 507 TCPA class actions in Q1 2025 alone. That's more than 5 per business day. Your compliance team is not a cost center, it's a firewall.
🔮 What We're Watching
The FCC NPRM comment window. The numbering proposals will reshape who gets to hand out DIDs and under what conditions. Every VoIP provider, CPaaS, and messaging aggregator should be drafting comments right now. Whatever comes out of this rulemaking is going to define the operational floor for the next five years.
Apple's RCS encryption rollout timeline. Protocol-level E2EE sounds great on a slide. Shipping it across a billion devices without breaking RBM, carrier delivery receipts, and enterprise audit trails is going to be... interesting. Watch for the first major RBM campaign to run into an encryption-related deliverability issue. It's coming.
💡 The Hot Take
Here's my bold prediction: by this time next year, "SMS-only" will be a dirty phrase in enterprise procurement, the same way "on-prem only" sounded in 2018. Not because SMS is dying, it isn't, it's still the universal fallback and the workhorse of 2FA. But once RCS is encrypted, universally available, and has a real developer ecosystem behind it (hi, AWS), the justification for plaintext 160-character messaging as your primary customer channel just evaporates for any brand that cares about trust.
The flip side nobody wants to say out loud: encrypted RCS is going to make life harder for the carriers and filtering vendors who've built businesses on inspecting message content for spam and fraud. When you can't see inside the envelope, you have to trust the sender. Which means sender reputation, number provenance, and the FCC's numbering rules suddenly become the entire game. The next 18 months of messaging are going to be decided at the identity layer, not the content layer.
SMS won. Now RCS is going to win differently. And the operators who understand that the product isn't the message, it's the trust, are the ones who'll still be here in 2030.
See you next week. Don't blast your list. 📡
