Google has disabled businesses ability to use RCS for promotion in India, the company’s biggest market by users, following reports of rampant spam by some firms in a setback for the standard that the company is hoping to be the future of SMS messaging.
Rich Communication Services, or RCS, is the collective effort of a number of industry players to supercharge the traditional SMS with modern features such as richer texts and end-to-end encryption.
Google, Samsung and a number of other firms including telecom operators have rolled out support for RCS to hundreds of millions of users worldwide in recent years. Google said last month that RCS messaging in the Messages app for Android had amassed over 500 million monthly active users.
At its developer conference last month, the company also urged that “every mobile operating system” (in a subtle jab at Apple) to support RCS, which is also aimed at helping…
