We asked, you told us: Most of you have RCS messaging and use it

Google called out Apple earlier this week for taking advantage of “peer pressure” around iMessage. The company also called on Apple to switch from SMS as a fallback for Android users to the modern RCS messaging standard instead.

That got us thinking just how many people actually have the RCS standard enabled on their phone and whether it’s actually being used. We posed this question to readers and here’s what you told us.

Do you have RCS enabled on your phone?

Results

The poll garnered over 2,500 votes after we posted it on Tuesday, and it turns out that 48% of respondents say they have RCS and are using it. This made for the single-most popular option of the lot. This was a pretty interesting result and we’d be interested to see a geographical breakdown of voters. After all, the likes of WhatsApp are pervasive in Europe and other regions, whereas the US is a major stronghold for traditional texting.

Perhaps the most surprising result was that almost 30% of voters say they don’t know whether RCS is enabled on their phones. For what it’s worth, you can check whether you’ve got RCS enabled by visiting settings > Chat features in Google Messages and making sure that the enable chat features toggle is on and that the status is “connected.” But this suggests that Google and other players could probably do a better job of making this setting visible.

Meanwhile, 12.2% of polled readers say RCS isn’t enabled on their phone, while just over 10% say RCS is enabled but they don’t use SMS. Personally, I fall into the latter camp, as I’ve enabled RCS but stick to Telegram and WhatsApp.

Do you use RCS messaging? How do you think it can be improved? Let us know via the comments section below.