Hear me out Europeans, Latin Americans: WhatsApp is good, however, you’re at the mercy of Facebook, and Facebook already said that it’s bringing ads to it. RCS brings modern messaging features agnostic to apps of platforms. Apple, GSM, and Google will work together to improve the universal standard and add e2e encryption, and potentially more features. So it’s a win for mobile communications as a whole. Yeah, a bigger deal in the US, but significant abroad nonetheless.
Nah in asia sms is non existent other than to get OTPs they are limited and huge cost while data is so cheap. And localisation plays a huge part which is why people use apps like WhatsApp, wechat, line chat. Wechat, linechat even have payments integrated so you can easily send money to your friends .