RCS also beautifully demostrates the problem with these open protocols - carriers simply refused to support it and federate between themselves, so you couldn't even send a message to a non-carrier branded phone, even if your exact carrier supported it. They (with push from governments) even demanded it's unencrypted.
This is Google basically stopping to wait for carriers to stop screwing their users and allowing some users to get this messaging protocol without waiting for their carrier to stop being incompetent. Unfortunately they're also going about it in the typical Google way with insane rollout rules.
No need to wait for carriers just try making something people want to use.
I'm caught up on rcs, I suppose it's an improvement over sms, but what isn't? It's not an improvement over email, or what's app or signal.
According to any kind of statistics - 100s of millions of people on the world. Yes, still. Please do look outside the bubble.
It's the same reason that I'll never switch from email to slack.
Right now I have iMessage, Snapchat, SMS, Messenger, GroupMe, Email, Discord and Slack along with a bunch of apps with chat as a feature. I have been caused no harm whatsoever by this setup except that my SO has a way to fill my notification screen when they’re feeling obnoxious.
How is that possibly not "harm"??
The irony is thick here. "Who uses the open, standard protocol for anything but authenticating proprietary, locked-in services competing on network effects?"
The whole point is to make it so the standard thing that everyone has by default doesn't suck as much, so we don't need to make messaging service decisions based on network effects and lock-in.
SMS has a strong network effect thanks to carriers wanting to charge you per message but basically nothing else going for it.
I do.