SMS and MMS, technologies that have had their day
“Appearing in the 1990s, SMS revolutionized communication by allowing the sending of short messages between mobile phones. Its ease of use and speed have enabled SMS to become a global standard.“, explains France Num, the digital transformation portal for businesses.
Moreover, a little cultural moment: the first SMS sent from a computer to a colleague's phone contained the following basic phrase “Merry Christmas” (or “Joyeux Noël” in French), sent by a British IT developer, Richard Jarvis . And it was already in 1992!
Since then, SMS and MMS have evolved significantly. You can send avatars with a simple click, react to messages…
But, with the advent of virtual messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Messenger, we quickly realized that SMS had found its limits : basic texts without formatting, number of characters and limited content… in short, despite certain developments, the end of SMS and MMS is planned for 2025 and it will be replaced by another technology. His name? The RCS.
Soon the RCS will replace them
Rich Communication Services (RCS) is about to arrive in France and intends to revolutionize the way of sending messages.
-Designed by the GSMA (Special Mobile Association Group) which brings together mobile operators around the world, this new messaging system relies on data networks (4G, 5G and Wi-Fi) to transmit richer messages, there where SMS was confined to the traditional telephone network and could only contain “text” messages.
The RCS, it is the door open to all possibilitiesincluding:
- real-time dialogue
- transmission of multimedia streams
- transfer of files of any kind
- group chat
- location sharing…
Thanks to all these possibilities, RCS intends to compete head-on with all messaging applications such as WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram or Signal and it could well stand out thanks to the interoperability it offers. In other words, the RCS does not require the use of a specific application to read messages, unlike SMS/MMS.
Currently available in all Android devices, this technology is also now accessible on Apple and is already integrated into 87% of mobile phones. So you can probably already enjoy it on your phone, directly from the Messages application on your smartphone!
