RCS agents

RCS is messaging that arrives in the phone's default messaging app with your verified brand up front — name, logo and colour — instead of a bare sender name. On RCS the sender is an agent: the brand identity you register, and that the operators approve, before anything is sent.

Register your agent now

Approving an RCS agent takes time — operators and the network review it country by country — so you don't have to wait for the endpoint to start. You can already create your agent and register it in your A2P Messaging API project, and have it approved by the time sending through the API is available.

In the dashboard, the A2P Messaging API project has the RCS channel under Channels > RCS, and the agents are in its Senders tab. The RCS channel has no Settings tab: everything about the agent is done from the agent itself.

The registration is the same process as on the platform: create the sender, register it for each country, complete the organization and compliance data, and follow each register's status until it is active. The one difference: an A2P Messaging API project has no default RCS sender, because each API call names its sender. The process is documented once:

Coverage

As on SMS, coverage is where Instasent can deliver and on what conditions, and the countries and what each one asks for are documented once, in the countries catalog:

The same catalog is published as JSON: country-requirements.json, where each country states whether RCS is available there. The countries you can register your agent in are the ones the dashboard offers when you register it.

What each country asks of your agent differs from SMS in one way: on RCS there is always a registration. The agent is registered per country, each registration is approved separately, and a country where your agent has no approved registration is a country you can't send RCS to — not registering is what blocks it. There is no best-effort delivery for an unregistered agent, and no list of destination countries to set: the agent's registrations are where it can send.

The agent's registrations, and the status of each, are followed from the agent in the RCS channel's Senders tab — see RCS senders & verification.

No wildcard route on RCS

RCS has no equivalent of the SMS wildcard route, and there won't be one. An RCS agent is always tied to one provider, so there is no sender without an identity for traffic to travel under: the agent has to be registered for each country before anything is sent there.