📡 The Big Story
WhatsApp Now Carries More OTPs Than SMS, and SMS Did It to Itself
Verdict: 🔥 Actually huge
A new Mobile Ecosystem Forum analysis published September 30 cites the number I've been dreading. Only 41% of verification traffic is still on SMS. WhatsApp has 54%. Everything else splits the remaining 5%. Verification is the backbone of A2P SMS, the one use case everybody assumed was locked in forever, and most of it now runs through an app owned by Meta.
Here's the thing: this was self-inflicted. MEF's read is that escalating SMS rates are squeezing A2P revenue, and I agree. For years, operators treated OTPs like a toll road with no exits. Termination fees went up, firewalls went up, and the bet was that brands would keep paying because a login code has to arrive. Turns out a login code just has to arrive somewhere. WhatsApp doesn't need to be free to win. It needs to be cheaper and good enough, and judging by that 54%, plenty of brands decided it is.
Not sending OTPs? You should still care. Verification volume is a big part of what makes A2P economics work. When that volume walks, operators have fewer messages to spread their costs across, and the easy move is to raise rates again on whoever's left. That's a doom loop, and your marketing and notification traffic is standing right in it.
🔥 What's Moving
India's TRAI Makes AI Spam Detection Mandatory
Verdict: 🔥 Actually huge
Under the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference (Third Amendment) Regulations, 2026, notified September 1, Indian operators must use AI to proactively detect and block spam. Businesses also have to pre-declare their numbers, or risk legitimate service calls getting filtered by third-party apps. The first part goes after spammers. The second is meant to stop your bank's real call from showing up as "Likely Spam." Both are overdue.
India already runs one of the strictest A2P regimes anywhere, with SMS headers and templates registered on DLT platforms thanks to TRAI's 2018 rules. Now there's an AI layer on top, and that's where I get nervous. AI filters are great right up until they eat a legitimate message, and "the model flagged it" is not an answer your customer will accept. Directionally right, operationally scary. And since this is one of the world's biggest A2P markets, I'd bet other regulators are taking notes.
Nordis Technologies Brings RCS to Expresso
Verdict: 👀 Interesting...
Nordis, which sells customer communications and payments tech, launched RCS inside its Expresso platform on September 29, with verified branding, rich media and one-tap actions. One vendor adding a channel isn't news. The pattern is.
RCS doesn't win through CPaaS keynotes. It wins when vendors who already own boring, high-value workflows like bills and payments quietly flip it on. A payment reminder from a verified sender with a one-tap action is about the cleanest RCS use case there is. The catch? RCS still leans on SMS fallback for phones that can't receive it, and per the Big Story, fallback isn't getting any cheaper.
Google Messages Inches Toward Native RCS Video Calls
Verdict: 😴 Who cares
The RCS standard has added native in-chat video calls, and Google is getting the pieces in place in Messages, per Android Authority on September 28. It's still not live, though Messages first hinted at it earlier this year.
For consumers, sure, every gap RCS closes with WhatsApp is one less reason to switch apps. For business messaging? Your customers don't want to video call your brand, and I promise your compliance team doesn't either. The funny part is the timing.
Google Confirms RCS Media Bug, Fix Could Take Weeks to Land
Verdict: 🤡 Sure, buddy
Same week, Google confirmed a delivery bug behind media attachments failing to send over RCS in Messages. A fix is rolling out, but Google says it could take a couple of weeks to reach devices. So to recap: video calls are coming, photos are pending.
Look, bugs happen to everyone. But brands are betting real money on RCS, and Android's default client is the delivery path. The reports are about users' media failing to send, so your biggest exposure is two-way flows. If your support journey asks a customer to snap a photo of a damaged package and it fails, they won't blame Google. They'll blame you. Keep an upload link in your back pocket.
🏆 Winner of the Week: WhatsApp, which now carries 54% of verification traffic and owes a thank-you card to every SMS rate hike.
📉 Loser of the Week: Every operator that hiked A2P rates betting OTP traffic had nowhere else to go, because 59% of it now lives somewhere else.
📊 By the Numbers
- 59% of verification traffic now skips SMS entirely (54% WhatsApp plus 5% other channels), per MEF. That's not erosion. That's a majority.
- 41% is what SMS has left, and that's with bypass included. Translation: grey-route traffic counts toward that number, so the share actually paying proper A2P rates is smaller still. Price hikes don't just push traffic to WhatsApp. They push it underground.
- ~2 weeks is how long Google says its RCS media fix could take to reach devices. That's a long time to keep telling customers "try sending it again."
🔮 What We're Watching
Whether Google's fix actually lands. A couple of weeks from October 2 puts us around mid-October. If people are still fighting stuck RCS photos by Halloween, this stops being a bug story and becomes a trust story, right when brands are setting 2027 budgets and deciding how much goes to RCS.
TRAI's false positive rate. As Indian operators roll out mandatory AI spam detection, I'm watching for the first legitimate senders caught in the net, and how fast they get pulled back out. That will tell us whether this is a smart filter or a blunt instrument.
💡 The Hot Take
SMS didn't lose the OTP market to WhatsApp. It lost it to its own rate card.
I run a company that moves a lot of SMS, so this isn't me dunking on the channel. SMS still reaches basically every phone on earth with no app and no account. That's an incredible asset. Operators spent years pricing it like a monopoly anyway. Fifteen-plus years in this business have taught me one thing: traffic always finds the cheapest route that works. So it did, with WhatsApp on one side and grey routes that skip the A2P rate entirely on the other.
Prediction, in writing: before the end of 2027, at least one major operator group cuts verification rates to win traffic back. They'll launch it as a shiny new "premium authentication" product. It'll be the same SMS at a price the market actually accepts. And if RCS business messaging gets priced off the same playbook, it'll lose the same fight, only faster, because RCS doesn't even have SMS's reach to hide behind.
Price is a feature. Somebody tell the rate card.
