I’m sorry you’re upset about Apple being what they are, but while most of the world doesn’t have an iPhone, Apple commands the dominant share of the phone market by dollars, and by software. And like it or not, every mobile carrier in the WORLD has to cater to Apple when it comes to device requirements. So after 15 years of working directly with these companies, I can confidently say Apple and their chosen feature set does matter, even if you don’t like it.

Apple’s developed a much more powerful ecosystem than any android device, and they used that power to control the mobile carriers (from China to France to India and even Brazil). This had nothing to do with teens in the US - they wanted power to demand the world wide carriers to do what they wanted and this was one of the ways they did it. It’s much more complicated than iMessage.

That’s why I’m skeptical that RCS will happen in the near future.

Sorry to burst your bubble friend, but a trillion dollar company is anything but “simple”

Former cellular industry worker here, for a team that is now owned by and works for Apple. My job was to direct the engineers toward what features cellular carriers were adopting and thus what features needed to be integrated into modems.

RCS was such a difficult topic. And Apple was the single source of contention.

Basically the entire world was like - RCS is good, we like it, but since Apple isn’t on board we’re going to develop our own version of RCS.

And then when my hardware / modem team would talk to Apple, they’d argue “well all the carriers don’t agree on what RCS is so we’re not doing it”

And round and round it would go. A giant stalemate.

In theory Apple could incorporate RCS and play nice with non-iPhones, and they always could have, but they didn’t care enough.

MAYBE it’s ubiquitous enough now that they can do it and trust their phones to work the same across all networks and with all non-iPhones. But that’s the benchmark, and I’m skeptical.

I’ll bet 2025 earliest.

But this has been a debate since 2011 AT LEAST.