The death of traditional SMS has been predicted in France for several years now. Its successor, the RCS, will however take a while to arrive for some.
How far gone are the days when SMS was a fashionable novelty! While these little texts sent from our smartphones have become widespread in our society, their disappearance may well be closer than we think. RCS (Rich Communication Services), its replacement, is a tool that can already be found on certain Android phones which have their own instant messaging applications.
This technology has everything to bury SMS since it allows several advances compared to the latter. In particular, it allows you to not have character limits (compared to 160 for SMS), to exchange files of varying sizes, to make video calls, to share audio or a location, and much more.
In short, it is in your best interest to switch to RCS rather than SMS. It may even be likely that you are already using it without realizing it if your operator is compatible and you check the “RCS Chats” option in the “Messages settings” on your application.
But some will continue to use SMS for a while, especially iPhone owners! The Apple ecosystem does not yet allow everyone to benefit from RCS in France. If SFR launched hostilities by offering this service to its subscribers from July 2024, other operators are taking a little time to join the movement.
While Free and Bouygues Telecom offer the RCS service within the 18.2 update of iOS released last December, it is Orange which is taking a bit of a wait. The operator is still not present among the list of those who offer RCS on iPhone. Orange subscribers are therefore among the rare people in France who are still unable to take advantage of this service at the time of writing these lines.
Questioned on the subject, Orange however declared its interest in the deployment of RCS on iPhone. Late on the subject, the firm declared that RCS would be available to its subscribers on iPhone during the year 2025. Without further details on the subject, we suspect that the operator is doing everything to catch up and offer the RCS as quickly as possible to its subscribers.
Orange is not the only operator not to offer RCS to its customers on iPhone. The other latecomers, however, are much smaller in the telecommunications landscape since they are operators such as La Poste Mobile, Lyca Mobile and Prixtel. Operators who are entirely virtual and who do not seem particularly eager to look into the subject, like Orange.