Never bothered checking since you can block MMS at the device level and SMS is free for me (international texts cost). Loads of carriers are already killing off MMS by default, only SMS remains due to OTP etc. usage.
“Need”, in quotes? I agree 100%. If I need food, and you offer me a cold bare hot dog, I’m eating it! If I “need” food and I say, “Thanks for the offer, but I’m looking for something better” then I didn’t really NEED food.
(Substitute “hot dog” with the “basic food product” that best fits your constitution!)
The other OTT “OTT” apps before WhatsApp are why they started working on RCS. And, “working on it” is what they were still doing when WhatsApp came out. It’s not like they didn’t have an opportunity to make RCS the next thing, they just figured they had the time to futz around, not understanding that folks were moving into that area, and way faster than the GSMA could ever move. As WhatsApp grew, the features for RCS grew. These days, folks say how much RCS is like WhatsApp, not the other way around.
And I will reiterate again, WhatsApp is banned for 1/6 of the world's population. If you're regularly communicating with this population, then WhatsApp is a non-starter.
It’s good that it finally came around due to the Chinese carriers making it a viable thing, but we’ve all seen what Google does with messaging platforms. I’d hope that the US carriers negotiated a specific level of service, but we’ll see what happens if Alphabet has a few bad quarters and needs to cut back on some of their less profitable ventures again.
I don’t understand the purpose of “this means nothing to me” posts.
You can turn off MMS in settings. Other than that, you have to keep an eye out for SMS downgrades (e.g. spotty data connection). Apple so far refuses to add a setting to stop automatic conversation downgrades to SMS, with RCS looking identical to SMS (bar the small RCS placeholder in the text input box), you‘re at risk of accidentally sending SMS cross borders.
MMS does not use data in the sense that it‘s billed via data consumption in a lot of countries / for a lot of carriers. Here MMS are billed per text (I think it was 0,79€ / MMS?), it‘s the same way for most of my European friends.
Why are you telling us this utterly useless information?
These days here in Canada, I guess because SMS is commonly used, most of the post-paid plans include unlimited international SMS and MMS, so there isn't as much incentive to download a third party messaging app. Mind you, it may be the other way around. Perhaps because people were disinclined to use third party apps, they gravitated towards plans that included unlimited international SMS/MMS. MMS isn't actually that commonly used, but it goes along for the ride in these plans.
To clarify going against the RCS standard. Sticking to the RCS standard for compatibility is the right move.
Liz & Co. tend to do this for many things, to be fair.
“Need”, in quotes? I agree 100%. If I need food, and you offer me a cold bare hot dog, I’m eating it! If I “need” food and I say, “Thanks for the offer, but I’m looking for something better” then I didn’t really NEED food.
In this case, solutions existed equally for everyone in the world with a smartphone able to download and run messaging apps (for every new app that existed starting with WhatsApp). Folks outside the US needed to avoid SMS charges, so they flocked to applications that offered that. A quick free download in exchange for not paying .10 to .50 of local currency per message (depending on where it was going/coming from)? No hesitancy, reluctance or confusion.
If SMS costs in the US at the time were like the rest of the world, your hundreds of contacts would have settled on one of those other apps a long time ago, most likely WhatsApp. That wasn’t part of thought process around messaging apps in the US. While some of the first iPhone plans had something offered 200 text messages a month as a limit, unlimited texting very quickly became commonplace right along with unlimited data (where the rest of the world was only given unlimited data).
And the “American Company” remark is, as you say, some people didn’t want to use a viable solution primarily because they’re turned off by “American Tech Company A”, but then being ok with another one that kinda/sorta is in the same boat. And, for those folks in the US that don’t want to deal with this via Meta or Google, then, there’s still a “need” for them.
Some carriers in many countries can indeed do this, but at least around here it is not recommended to block SMS completely since it's still used for 2-factor authentication and various other things.