In other words, it’s the worst of all possible worlds? It’s kinda OOT but only if you’re talking to other Google Messenger users? Meanwhile SMS/MMS group chat works well enough for me that I don’t generally notice stuff breaking, and RCS wouldn’t give me the features of an OOT system I actually want unless I use a Google app? I’d rather just use Facebook Messenger for the groups I use it for, I’m not sure which company I trust less. (But I generally do trust Facebook to keep even bad ideas around, I don’t necessarily trust Google not to launch yet another incompatible messaging app!)
Correct - to put it into exclusively RCS terms -- we've had RCS since shortly after LTE launched. Each carrier had their own flavor of it; it's an open standard for use by anyone presented by the GSM Association after all. None of these carrier systems talked to the others, they were all these carrier-enabled fiefdoms. Then you have a Samsung come along and launch their own RCS platform in the form of Samsung Messages. Samsung's was the most successful, as Samsung is the whale of Android OEMs. Google won them over, and that was a huge deal -- but even Samsung didn't get API access to Google's RCS and has to ship with Google Messages now. Any form of this, today, requires Google Messages to be installed. And it appears Google's stance on this is they want access to the SMS stack in iOS, and possibly even iMessage's stack. Otherwise, they could've released the app themselves at any point, yesterday... today... tomorrow... nothing is stopping them. RCS works without SMS access, and soon, without even a phone number.