Imagine you’re hiding in a closet during a break-in. You can’t speak. You need help. You pull out your phone and text 911.

Except you can’t — because your local 911 center doesn’t support text messaging. As of early 2024, only 53% of US Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) can receive texts at all. Nearly half the country has no text-to-911 capability. And the half that does? They’re stuck with SMS, a protocol designed in the 1990s that can’t send photos, confirm delivery, or share your precise location.

This is emergency communications in 2024. Embarrassing.

I spent nearly two years working on messaging infrastructure at Google, and the gap between what consumer messaging can do today versus what emergency services actually have access to has bothered me since I left. RCS — Rich Communication Services — sits right in the middle of that gap. And there are early signals that Google and its partners are finally moving to close it.

What’s broken with text-to-911 today #

The current text-to-911 system runs on SMS. That means:

• No delivery confirmation. You send a text to 911 and have no idea if it was received. No read receipts. No acknowledgment. You’re sending a message into the void and hoping someone’s there.
• No precise location. SMS doesn’t carry location data. The 911 center gets your message and has to ask where you are — assuming you can respond. Cell tower triangulation gives a rough area, but “rough” isn’t good enough when someone is having a stroke in a 40-story building.
• No media. You can’t send a photo of the intruder, the car accident, the license plate. MMS technically supports images but the quality is terrible and many PSAPs can’t process them.
• No typing indicators. The dispatcher has no idea if you’re still there, still typing, or if something happened to you.
• 160-character limit per segment. Try describing a medical emergency in 160 characters.

For voice calls, the system works reasonably well. Enhanced 911 (E911) provides location data, the connection is real-time, and dispatchers are trained for voice interaction. But there are scenarios where voice calls are dangerous, impossible, or both.

Domestic violence situations. Active shooter events. Deaf or hard-of-hearing callers. People with speech disabilities. Situations where noise makes voice communication impossible. The National Emergency Number Association has documented dozens of scenario categories where text-based 911 contact is the only viable option.

And we’re serving those scenarios with SMS.

What RCS brings to emergency communications #

RCS isn’t just “better SMS.” For emergency contexts, the feature gap between SMS and RCS is the difference between a walkie-talkie and a smartphone. Here’s what changes:

Delivery and read receipts. When you text 911 via RCS, you’ll know the message was delivered. You’ll know when the dispatcher reads it. In a crisis situation, that confirmation isn’t a convenience feature; it’s the difference between staying put and trying to find another way to get help.

Automatic precise location. Android’s Emergency Location Service (ELS) can share your GPS coordinates automatically when you contact emergency services. We’re talking accuracy within a few meters, not the block-level approximation from cell towers. For someone trapped in a building, lost in a rural area, or unable to describe their location, this is lifesaving.

Rich media sharing. High-resolution photos and video over RCS. A picture of a suspect. Video of a developing situation. A screenshot of a threatening message. The dispatcher gets visual context that SMS simply cannot provide.

Typing indicators. The dispatcher sees that you’re still composing a message. You see that they’re typing a response. This real-time awareness keeps both sides connected during a conversation where minutes matter.

Medical information and language preferences. RCS messages can carry metadata. Your phone’s language settings can indicate that you speak Mandarin or Spanish, letting the PSAP route your contact to an appropriate responder. Medical information — allergies, conditions, medications — could be shared automatically when the caller can’t communicate verbally.

Each of these features exists today in consumer RCS messaging. The gap is getting them into emergency infrastructure.

Google and RapidSOS: signs of movement #

Android Police reported earlier this month that Google Messages is inching closer to RCS support for 911 emergency services. The details are still emerging, but the direction is clear: Google is working with RapidSOS — the company that handles the data pipeline between smartphones and most US 911 centers — to bring RCS capabilities into the emergency communication stack.

RapidSOS already processes emergency data for the majority of US 911 calls. They’re the bridge between your phone and the dispatcher’s screen. If RCS 911 texting routes through RapidSOS (which seems likely given their existing infrastructure), the integration path is straightforward: RapidSOS handles the call-center side, Google Messages handles the device side, and the PSAP gets a dramatically richer data stream than SMS ever provided.

The most promising aspect? RapidSOS has stated their goal of making enhanced emergency features available at no cost to 911 agencies. The 47% of PSAPs that can’t receive text messages today aren’t failing because they don’t want to — they’re failing because the infrastructure upgrades are expensive and the funding mechanisms are complicated. If RCS 911 can reach those centers through RapidSOS’s existing platform rather than requiring each center to build new capability independently, adoption could move fast.

Why this matters beyond the tech #

I keep coming back to the domestic violence scenario because it illustrates the stakes most clearly.

A person is being threatened in their home. They can’t make a phone call without being heard. They need to contact 911 silently. Today, if they’re in one of the 47% of areas without text-to-911, they have no option. If they are in a supported area, they send an SMS with no location, no confirmation it was received, and no way to share a photo of the situation.

With RCS-enabled 911: they text, the dispatcher immediately sees their precise location, receives any photos they send, sees a typing indicator confirming the person is still responsive, and can respond with real-time status updates. The person hiding in that closet knows help is coming because they can see the dispatcher’s read receipt and response.

That’s not a feature comparison. That’s a safety gap measured in lives.

The challenges are real #

I don’t want to paint this as a solved problem. The technical pieces exist, but deployment challenges are significant.

PSAP infrastructure. Most 911 centers run on legacy systems. Upgrading to handle RCS data streams requires software updates, training, and testing. Some centers are still running equipment from the early 2000s.

Coverage parity. RCS 911 will initially work on Android devices with Google Messages. That’s a substantial user base but not universal. iPhone users would still fall back to SMS unless Apple implements RCS emergency features (which hasn’t been announced). The emergency system needs to work for everyone, not just Android users.

Reliability requirements. Consumer messaging can tolerate occasional delivery delays. Emergency messaging can’t. The RCS infrastructure needs to meet five-nines reliability standards that consumer messaging doesn’t typically guarantee.

Rural connectivity. The areas most likely to lack text-to-911 capability are also the areas with the weakest cellular data coverage. RCS requires a data connection; SMS can work on 2G. In remote areas, the fallback to SMS might still be necessary.

These aren’t reasons to delay — they’re engineering problems that need engineering solutions. And the cost of not solving them is measured in emergency response times, which are measured in lives.

What I want to see happen #

The emergency communication stack in the US is overdue for modernization. The FCC has been pushing Next Generation 911 (NG911) for years, but progress has been slow and funding inconsistent.

RCS-based 911 could leapfrog some of those challenges. The protocol is already deployed on hundreds of millions of Android devices. The infrastructure partnership between Google and RapidSOS means PSAPs don’t have to build everything from scratch. The features — location, media, receipts — are proven technology that just needs to be routed to the right endpoints.

I worked on the messaging stack that powers RCS at Google. I know how capable the protocol is. Seeing it applied to emergency communications isn’t just a technology story; it’s the kind of application that justifies all the engineering effort that went into building the platform.

The 47% of 911 centers that can’t receive a text message today shouldn’t still be in that position by the end of the decade. And honestly, “by the end of the decade” is too generous a timeline when the technology to fix it already exists.