Google recently bolstered its RCS Business Messaging toolkit by enabling PDF support via rich card attachments in Google Messages, starting with businesses in India. That means no more jumping from RCS to email or another app just to grab your flight ticket, pass, or brochure. Right in your messaging window, the PDF arrives neatly packaged as a rich card (Source: Android Authority).
Information-rich cards for document-rich communication
But not for everybody or everywhere (yet)
If you’ve seen a doc arrive inside a chat bubble that looks like a little card—sometimes with the first page preview, sometimes a thumbnail or even a default PDF icon — this is it. Tap the image and it opens in your PDF viewer.
There are practical limits: all media and PDF attachments in a single RBM message cap out at 100 MiB, ensuring businesses don’t swamp your data plan or your phone. No sneaky multi-file overload here.
A PDF preview and PDF icon, respectively, in a Google Messages RCS chat.
Technically, developers and enterprises leveraging RCS Business Messaging must integrate PDFs via rich cards with media placeholders, titles, description text, and suggested actions or replies, just like with any other rich card. In India, in particular, businesses need to use registered RCS templates for promotions or A2P traffic, and can attach PDFs using a “Text with PDF” template.
From a usability lens, this makes sense. RCS already supports richer content than SMS and MMS. Now it does documents too. Flight itineraries, event tickets, policy documents, manuals, brochures — they all just drop into your chat flow. No more hunting through email or link chains.
With that said, the move is not without its caveats. India’s RCS Business Messaging ecosystem has its share of spam concerns, and PDF attachments could become a new vector, especially if malicious or misleading documents get pushed via rich cards.
Also, developers targeting global markets shouldn’t hold their breath just yet. The PDF‑in‑rich‑cards feature is currently limited to Indian users on Google Messages. We haven’t seen rollout plans for Europe, the US, or elsewhere.
Ultimately, this is just the latest step in Google’s RCS chat implementation getting smarter and more useful. Adding PDFs to rich cards in Google Messages can drastically reduce friction in document-based messaging (at least in India, for the time being). It’s a quiet enhancement that stands to make user-business interaction smoother. We’ll be watching to see if and when PDF support expands to broader international markets, and how the ecosystem handles the potential for abuse.
