When Apple added RCS support, a lot of coverage treated it as the end of the blue-versus-green distinction. It was not. It was the end of the *technical* distinction, which was never the part that mattered commercially.
What RCS fixed
Genuinely a lot. RCS brought SMS into the modern era on features that had been missing for twenty years.
| Feature | SMS | RCS | iMessage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Delivery receipts | Partial | Yes | Yes |
| Read receipts | No | Yes | Yes |
| Typing indicators | No | Yes | Yes |
| Full-quality media | No | Yes | Yes |
| Reactions | No | Yes | Yes |
| Long messages | Billed per segment | Yes | Yes |
| Works on Android | Yes | Yes | No |
| Bubble color on iPhone | Green | Green | Blue |
On a feature-by-feature reading, RCS is the better product: it does nearly everything iMessage does *and* it reaches Android. If the decision were purely technical, RCS would win outright.
What it did not fix
The last row. On an iPhone, RCS is still green.
That sounds petty until you remember what the color actually encodes for the recipient. It is not an aesthetic preference — it is a decade of learned association between that color, unknown numbers, and messages worth ignoring. The trust signal is the product, and RCS inherited the visual identity of the channel it replaced along with the reflex that goes with it.
The distinction that survives
RCS solved a capability problem. Blue bubbles solve a credibility problem. A business choosing between them is not choosing between feature sets — it is choosing which problem it actually has.
The registration difference
There is a second, less discussed gap. RCS business messaging runs through carriers and aggregators, which means it inherits the carrier compliance apparatus: A2P 10DLC registration, brand vetting, campaign approval, and the associated monthly fees.
iMessage does not touch carrier rails, so none of that applies — which is why providers advertise launching in an afternoon rather than in three weeks. That is a genuine operational advantage, particularly for a seasonal business or one testing the channel. It is emphatically not a compliance exemption: consent law binds you regardless of the transport.
So which should a small business use?
The answer depends almost entirely on one number you can look up today.
- iPhone share above ~60%: iMessage, with SMS or RCS fallback for the rest. The credibility gain applies to most of your list.
- iPhone share below ~40%: RCS. You would be buying a channel that reaches a minority.
- In between: whichever your provider handles automatically. Sendblue falls back to RCS and SMS without you branching on handset — see the provider comparison.
The mistake is running both manually as separate systems. Two vendors, two sets of copy, two reporting surfaces and one person to maintain it all is how a messaging programme dies of overhead. Pick a provider that handles the fallback, or pick one channel and accept the coverage gap.
What would actually change this
One thing: Apple shipping a public iMessage API. That would collapse the scarcity that makes the channel valuable, and within a couple of years blue bubbles would carry roughly the weight green ones do now.
There is no indication that is coming, and there are good structural reasons it may never come. In the meantime, the four ways to actually send an iMessage automatically range from a script on your own Mac to a managed line. Until it does, the bubble color remains the one durable difference between these channels on the device that matters.