Product changelog and announcements

To enhance account security and prevent unauthorized hosting of phone numbers, Twilio now requires phone number ownership verification.

Between November 1, 2024, and January 5, 2025, Twilio will enter a Heightened Awareness Period (HAP) to help ensure reliable message delivery during peak traffic times, such as the U.S. presidential election, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Click Tracking Refinement for Link Shortening is a feature designed to help you gain a full understanding of your users’ engagement from the moment that you send a message all the way down to the individual click. For background, Apple’s and Google’s messaging applications support both automatic link previews (aka bot previews) as well as ‘Tap to load’ link preview functionality, which may lead to confusion around what is considered a real ‘click’, thereby blurring engagement analytics as a result. Twilio’s Link Shortening feature now supports bot preview distinction from human-generated clicks in its click events. This provides you with a highly accurate representation of click through rate (CTR) metrics as well as 100% confidence in the validity of click tracking data.    

Read our documentation to learn more about the feature. 

The Certificate Manager for Link Shortening is a feature designed to streamline certificate management tasks for users by delegating them to Twilio. By opting in, you can entrust Twilio with tasks such as requesting SSL certificates and handling subsequent certificate renewals to prevent any interruptions to HTTP traffic. Certificates are issued by LetsEncrypt, a widely used and trusted certificate authority. 

To further simplify onboarding and certificate management, you can also validate your DNS status independently, confirming successful domain and certificate setup.

Read our documentation to learn more about the feature. 

Twilio now supports Sole Proprietor registration for U.S. 10DLC messaging on campaigns registered directly with The Campaign Registry (TCR). If you are a customer who has registered directly with TCR as a CSP and wish to use those registrations for your message traffic with Twilio, you can request an exception to link your TCR-registered campaigns.

Externally registered Sole Proprietor use cases were previously unsupported.

For more information, check out our Help Article on Direct TCR Registration and the API documentation for guidance on the registration process.

Starting October 17, 2024, Twilio will introduce Authentication+, a new identity verification process for public brand registrations within A2P 10DLC. This step applies to new and existing public brands and is designed to prevent brand impersonation and protect against fraud, such as smishing and spoofing.

• New public brands will need to provide a brand representative email address during A2P 10DLC registration; this email must be from a domain associated with the public brand. Twilio’s registration facilitator, The Campaign Registry (TCR), will then send a Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) email to the brand representative. The representative will have 7 days to verify their identity by clicking the link in the email. Once verified, the brand will move to a VERIFIED state, and you can start registering new campaigns under the brand.
  
  

• Existing public brands in the VERIFIED or VETTED_VERIFIED state must also follow the Authentication+ step to register new campaigns. Active campaigns are not immediately impacted, but no new campaigns can be added until the brand representative email is provided and 2FA is completed.

If you don’t provide the required brand contact email and complete the 2FA process, you won’t be able to register new public brands or new campaigns for existing brands.

For more information, visit our updated documentation: Authentication+ Process for A2P 10DLC.

We are excited to announce the release of RCS in Twilio Programmable Messaging as a public beta. Twilio is offering RCS text in the Programmable Messaging API as a branded, verified messaging experience. When sending SMS messages with Messaging Services, Twilio will automatically send RCS messages to capable devices. Devices that cannot receive RCS will continue to receive SMS messages. If you’d like to learn more about RCS and request access you can do so here.

The ReferralCtwaClid parameter that is already available through Twilio webhooks (Changelog) can now also be delivered through Event Streams (docs). Update to version 4 of the schema for Inbound Message events (schema definition) to start receiving this parameter through Event Streams.

This new support will guarantee at-least-once delivery of this business critical event, as well as improve integration flexibility for customers using multiple Twilio products or a product that is built on top of multiple products, such as Flex and Studio by making this data easier to consume.

Sending Content Templates with a messaging service sid in the from or a MessagingServiceSid field is now optional!

Previously using a messaging service and specifying its sid was a requirement to use Content Templates. Now customers can send a content template by using the standard to and from fields containing a phone number with the sender prefix if relevant. 

Previous methods of sending a content template using messaging service sid will still be supported.