General availability covers iOS and Android in the United States, with automatic SMS fallback through a single API.
Tells today announced the general availability of Tells RCS Messaging, a rich messaging product that lets verified brands send branded, interactive messages to recipients on both iOS and Android devices in the United States. The release follows the company’s regulatory approval as one of the first U.S. platforms cleared for RCS Business Messaging earlier this year.
SMS gets you a phone number. RCS gets you a brand, a logo, a checkmark, and a conversation that doesn’t end at 160 characters.”
— David Schlaegel, Co-Founder, Tells
RCS, or Rich Communication Services, is the carrier-grade successor to SMS. The format has been available on Android for several years, but reached genuine cross-platform reach in the United States after Apple added RCS support to iPhone in iOS 18. With both ecosystems now on the RCS Universal Profile, brands can use a single rich messaging channel for outbound to U.S. consumers instead of treating iOS and Android as separate delivery paths.
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Tells RCS Messaging is delivered through the company’s verified sender registrations across Google’s RCS Business Messaging on Android and the Apple RCS Universal Profile path on iOS. Messages from a verified Tells customer appear in the recipient’s thread with the brand’s logo, registered brand name, and a verified checkmark, rather than as an unidentified phone number.
The product supports the full set of interactive RCS features available to verified senders. Brands can send rich cards with images and call to action buttons, carousels of multiple cards in a single message, and suggested replies that let recipients respond with a tap. Action buttons can place a call, open a URL, add an event to the recipient’s calendar, or request a one time location share. Read receipts and typing indicators are surfaced when the recipient’s device and carrier support them.
A single Tells API call handles delivery across both RCS and SMS. When a recipient’s device or carrier does not support RCS, the message is automatically delivered as SMS with no change to the integration. Customers do not have to detect RCS capability per recipient, branch their code, or maintain separate templates for the two formats. Throughput for verified brands on Tells RCS Messaging is comparable to short code SMS.
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Brand verification is a core part of the product rather than an optional add on. Spam labeling and filtering have eroded trust in unverified outbound across SMS for years, and the same pressure is already shaping how mobile operating systems present unverified RCS traffic. A verified sender on Tells RCS Messaging gives recipients a visible brand identity in the thread, which the company expects to become a baseline trust signal for outbound messaging across the industry over the next several years.
“SMS gets you a phone number. RCS gets you a brand, a logo, a checkmark, and a conversation that doesn’t end at 160 characters,” said David Schlaegel, Co-Founder of Tells. “Our customers have been asking for a way to put their actual brand in front of recipients on both iOS and Android without running two integrations. That is what we are shipping.”
Tells RCS Messaging is available to all Tells customers starting today. Existing customers can enable RCS on any sender that has completed Tells brand verification, with no separate contract or new endpoint. New customers can begin by registering their brand and a sending identity through the Tells brand verification workflow, after which the same Tells messaging API delivers RCS where supported and SMS everywhere else.
Documentation, sample payloads for rich cards, carousels, and action buttons, and migration notes for customers moving from SMS only flows are available in the Tells developer portal.
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