When you’re choosing a texting app for your phone or device, you might think that all texting is the same. However, depending on how you’ll want to use your texts, you might need to get a specific type set up on your phone.
Here are the basics.
SMS – Short Message Service – this is where it all began. Text messages. Short 160 characters. A key reason people came up with all those cool abbreviations. Over time, phones would chain together multiple SMS messages so that you could type longer sentences. Those would just be recombined at the other end. This is VERY simple and doesn’t handle images, videos, or anything else complicated. This is sent over the cellular phone network just like a basic phone call. You don’t need any internet access.
MMS – Multimedia Messaging Service – this was in essence an upgrade to SMS. It added in the ability to send pictures and videos. There’s a size limit – a few mb. Because this works with SMS, it still goes over the normal phone system.
RCS – this is where it gets interesting. Once most phones had wifi and internet abilities, the RCS system took advantages of that. RCS does NOT use the standard phone connections. Instead, it uses the internet / mobile data connection or wifi. So you need an internet connection for an RCS message to go out. The person on the other end has to have a phone which also handles RCS. So you couldn’t use a modern phone with RCS to message to a very old SMS-only phone.
RCS is where you get all the fun features like ‘i am typing’ dots, the return receipt, and so on. RCS is now cross-platform so you can send RCS messages from Android to Apple and vice versa.
Note that if you’re trying to send RCS and run into internet problems the system will try to get the message out through SMS/MMS if it can.
Different plans have different limitations. If you pay for mobile data but get free unlimited SMS texting maybe you’ll want to primarily send SMS texts. If you have unlimited mobile data or are mostly on free wifi, maybe RCS is best for you. It’s good to look at your plan, look at how you tend to be connected, and then choose a texting app to match that.
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