Fourteen thousand times in six months, a business asked a mobile carrier for permission to message differently, and got a yes. That volume of carrier approvals, more than the traffic growth headline, is what Infobip is actually reporting in its July 28 update on Rich Communication Services for Business.

Global RCS traffic grew 169.3 percent between H1 2025 and H1 2026, Infobip says, with the United States posting 1,298.8 percent growth over the same stretch and more than 1.5 billion RCS messages delivered domestically this year. Spain grew 290 percent. The UK grew 282 percent. India and France grew 108 percent and 48 percent, a spread that tells a more specific story than the global average does.

US Carriers Spent a Decade Catching Up, Then Did It in a Year

RCS existed in the US for years as a demo, not a channel. Apple didn't support it until iOS 18.1 shipped in late 2024, and even after that release, carrier-side rollout lagged the announcement. Infobip's 1,298.8 percent US growth number reads as the compounding effect of that delay: a base so small in H1 2025 that any real adoption produces a triple-digit percentage. Compare that to France's 48 percent, a market where RCS had already been live longer and the growth curve is flattening toward maturity.

That distinction matters for anyone reading the headline number as evidence of US leadership. The US isn't leading RCS adoption. It's arriving late and moving fast because Apple removed the last device-side blocker.

Registration Volume Is Becoming the Product

Infobip helped more than 7.3 thousand unique brands process RCS registration requests and completed 14,000 successful agent launches in the period, according to the company. That is the number a CIO evaluating messaging vendors should weigh heaviest, because RCS carrier onboarding is not a solved API problem. Every sender identity has to clear carrier-specific review before a single branded message goes out, and the process varies by market and by network.

Twilio took a different route to the same channel, opening RCS to all 349,000-plus active accounts on its platform when it went generally available in August 2025, betting on self-serve scale rather than white-glove registration. TrueDialog picked a third lane entirely, shipping a no-code visual composer in February 2026 aimed at SMB marketing teams who will never touch an API. Three vendors, three answers to the same carrier bottleneck: buy scale through volume, buy scale through self-service, or skip the complexity and sell simplicity.

The Billing Model Changed Under the Traffic Growth

Buried in the announcement is a pricing shift with more procurement weight than the traffic figures. Infobip's Interactive Session billing is now live in the US, meaning two-way conversational pricing applies across every market where the company runs RCS. That moves the unit of billing from the message to the conversation, the same shift WhatsApp Business forced on enterprises years earlier. Anyone budgeting RCS spend off historical SMS per-message rates is budgeting against the wrong unit.

Brands are migrating existing SMS and MMS traffic into real deployment, said Dave Boddington, RCS Business Unit Head at Infobip (Infobip, 2026).

What the Regional Spread Doesn't Tell You

Infobip didn't publish absolute message volumes for Spain, the UK, India, or France, only growth percentages. A market growing 290 percent off a small base can still carry less enterprise traffic than one growing 48 percent off an established one. Without the denominator, the regional comparison functions as a marketing chart more than an adoption map. That gap is worth naming rather than filling in with an assumption.