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Why not use regular text or email? Is it just about green vs blue bubbles? I've never understood why anyone thinks this is important.
I guess you aren't living in the US either.
The iPhone is extremely popular over there, especially amongst teens the market share is over 80%. Also, because of cheap SMS and MMS people actually continued to use SMS while e.g. most of the EU quickly switched to internet messengers.
At the same internet messengers started to appear, Apple released iMessage which is a internet messenger with an SMS/MMS fallback for chatting with non-iMessage devices. This experience is worse for many reasons, notably the terrible 500KB media size limit makes videos unwatchable.
Additionally, MMS group chats are a thing in the US. This means a single non-iMessage device in a group makes the experience worse for everyone.
This lead to most people using their pre-installed messaging app, which is a worse experience on Android (SMS) than on Apple (actually modern messenger). It's not an issue in other countries because people are accustomed to instantly installing WhatsApp on their new device.
Edit: As a teen, I didn't even know MMS could do groups because ten years ago it would've been prohibitively expensive anyway.
This hasn't been true for years. Android has had full RCS support built into the default Messages app (and all major Android manufacturer third party apps also support it). RCS includes every major feature iMessage feature that differentiated it from SMS, but Apple refuses to implement it on iOS because that removes their iMessage monopoly.
You're right, except the missing e2e encryption and lack of proper carrier implementations RCS seems pretty great. Hopefully with Apple adopting RCS they'll push for a proper e2e spec, but I won't hold my breath to have e2e with anything except Google Messages.
A bit off-topic: My other complaint about RCS is missing open source implementations. The only client available on all devices is Google's Messages and even that doesn't work without Google Services.
Also many carriers don't implement RCS themselves, and instead use Google's server [1]. This is bad since Google has access to all messages (and probably governments too, similar to recent news about push messages).
~~Why use RCS with Google Messages through Google servers over WhatsApp? I'm just frustrated about the state of messaging.~~ Broad support across all countries is a big advantage.
[1] https://9to5google.com/2023/03/27/vodafone-rcs-messages-android/