LOL
Unreasonable position for end users. It’s also not “agnostic”; it’s specifically capitalistic.
As well as messages not being chopped up erratically into SMS-compatible chunks, wrongly-sequenced, double-delivered, truncated, broken images, entirely missing messages…
Unfortunately, this is a kind of thing that carriers aren’t apt to adopt as a standard unless it’s merely formalizing something the rest of the world has already essentially adopted.
Those are siloed domains whose very existence is to make money on data collection and advertising. Your anecdotal evidence does not a norm make.
My reasons to reject those message “services”:
Or, do you mean let’s ignore the fact that the carriers which had a stake in creating RCS has given up on RCS and, as a result, Apple’s following their lead? Sure.
Let’s be clear, though, it’s not only Apple that refuses RCS. Every carrier also refuses RCS. There’s not a single carrier that supports RCS in the same way that they support SMS.
Russia and China are carriers? I thought those were countries. Beeline, MegaFon, Mobile TeleSystems and Tele2 are carriers in Russia, and China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom are carriers in China. And, just like all carriers around the world, none of them support RCS in the same way that they support SMS, at the carrier.
The folks most concerned with the ‘care and feeding’ of RCS, the carriers, have dropped it. There’s no one… maybe other than Google, that’s going to have any plan on ‘improving’ it.
Cross-platform alternatives exist at all due to the fairly onerous fees that were in place when WhatsApp came onto the scene. It offered people all around the world the “free texting” that folks in the US have enjoyed for years. Some of that has come to some countries, but WhatsApp has been integrated into so many areas of so many countries, it’s embedded and not going anywhere.
Well, Verizon, T-mobile, AT&T and carriers AROUND THE GLOBE are all anti-RCS, so I think that puts those folks in good company.
Is it? It’s not time for the carriers, who created RCS AND MMS, to go back to the drawing board and create the next thing at the carrier level that all carriers can adopt worldwide? And all phones would support, worldwide? Because that’s the only way anyone’s going to see a replacement for SMS. And, if the carriers want the government to FORCE them to create a new solution? Sure, maybe that’s just what the carriers need!
Every iPhone already has the potential for “Google RCS” compatibility (there is no RCS compatibility as RCS is not supported at the carrier). All they have to do… is the exact same thing Android users would need to do, just download Google Messages. BOOM! I have Google RCS compatibility on my iPhone right now!
No, it WAS the popularity of the iPhone. The other carriers saw this upstart Cingular coming out of nowhere not only gaining marketshare, but gaining marketshare of people with pockets deep enough to pay for the iPhone and as a result a group of people that would actually make building out the data part of their network worth it. Within a few years, the same carriers that had told Apple to take a hike were more than willing to adopt the same kind of data plans that Cingular had pioneered, ANYTHING to get some of these upgrading users and, more importantly, the expanding number of users newly interested in smartphones.
Actually, this is a good point. This is proof that RCS is nowhere near as widely supported/adopted as HTTP/HTTPS. No matter how much Google would want folks to believe that.
Apple will end up selling 150 million or more iPhones this year. And, will just as likely end up selling 150+ million phones next year. That is, quite literally, how the world works. If, out of the 6+ billion people in the world, 5 billion are customers that are driven away from the iPhone, that STILL leaves plenty enough people for Apple to still sell another 150+ million phones in a year.
You DO recognize, though that SMS being a standard that’s understood and accepted on ALL phones is 100% due to the fact that ALL CARRIERS support SMS, right? If all carriers didn’t support it, SMS wouldn’t be understood and accepted. This is the core of why RCS, even though it’s an evolution of SMS, is going nowhere. Because no carriers support it.
No, you’re not in the minority. Far from it, you’re in the HUGE swath of the majority that sees a nail and picks up a hammer. Sees a screw and picks up a screwdriver. And, never EVER bemoans “Why can’t I use the screwdriver on the nail? They look pretty much the same! The government needs to mandate that all screwdrivers should also be naildrivers so we can force hammers out of business.”