When it comes to B2C “application-to-peer” messaging, there hasn’t been a dominant platform to win the US. Instead, conversational commerce exists mostly as Intercom chatbots on websites in a support function despite WhatsApp’s business penetration in LatAm and Europe. Since it acquired Jibe Mobile a decade ago, Google has been pushing a new messaging standard to replace SMS called RCS (Rich Communication Services) that has recently also been adopted by Apple with the rollout of iOS 18. Now that the protocol has finally begun to gain meaningful customer adoption, Google and its technology vendors have been promoting new business messaging use cases such as online restaurant ordering and order tracking that just might take off in the near future. This week, HNGRY studies the evolution of this new chat protocol and why it is primed to gain mainstream adoption between restaurant merchants and consumers.