Does the use of emojis affect the character limits of RCS messages?

No. One of the advantages of RCS is that...

No. One of the advantages of RCS is that messages can contain far more characters than a traditional SMS – without special symbols or emojis reducing the length.

In an SMS, adding just one emoji will force the message to use UCS-2 encoding, which drastically reduces the character limit (from 160 characters to 70 characters per SMS). RCS, on the other hand, uses Unicode as standard and does not reduce the number of characters when emojis are used. In other words, you can freely decorate your RCS messages with any emoji without your message limit suddenly being halved in length.

In practice, an emoji counts as a single character (or a few characters, depending on the emoji) within RCS’s generous character limit.

How does fallback to SMS work if I have used emojis in my RCS message?

If an RCS message falls back to SMS (e.g...

If an RCS message falls back to SMS (e.g., because the recipient’s phone does not support RCS), the normal SMS limits apply—and emojis will again trigger the 70-character limit on the SMS. But as long as the message is sent as RCS, you don’t have to worry about this.