Opinion post by

Calvin Wankhede

As I scrolled through my social media feed earlier last week, I came across several reports claiming that businesses in India were abusing the RCS messaging standard to broadcast unsolicited advertisements. I’d personally never used RCS for an extended period of time — most third-party SMS apps don’t support it, and almost everyone around me uses WhatsApp anyway. Nevertheless, I decided to set Google Messages as my phone’s default text messaging app to see if there was any truth to those claims.

I was greeted by my first RCS advertisement (pictured at the top of the post) within the first hour of switching back to Google Messages. It didn’t offer a way to opt out of receiving future communication, something you’d expect from a traditional SMS message or email.