Why? What's Europe's fascination with WhatsApp? I don't get it. RCS is now fully rolled out and multiplatform. People who know better should start new conversations in their default messages app so their family and friends start to realize that WhatsApp isn't necessary. Why would people want to run all their personal and business communications through META of all companies?
I don't really like WhatsApp myself and I would rather use the native iOS message App, but I’d say there are 2 main reasons why RCS isn’t really used outside the US currently (it isn’t Europe which is an exception for not using RCS, it is the US which is an RCS island in a world not using RCS):
1) RCS isn’t actually fully rolled-out globally by any means. In a majority of countries in the world (including many European countries) there is either no support or partial support only from some mobile networks. Meaning RCS isn’t currently fit for purpose to message contacts within the country and actually has worse reach to message international contacts than WhatsApp currently offers. See here a list off RCS-supported carriers/countries on iOS and you will see it really is a small minority and really not universal (plus as I understand not all RCS implementations are interoperable and for example an RCS user in Japan can't chat with an RCS user in the US):
https://foxt.dev/ios-rcs/
2) Apple decided to sacrifice SMS and iMessage in Europe (and most of the world) to WhatsApp in the name of the “blue bubble” marketing in the US. I.e. while the blue bubble discussions and deliberate lack of RCS support on iOS for a long time (to push for iMessage and messaging fragmentation between iOS and Android in North America) was getting them more iPhone sales due to peer pressure in the US, this strategy didn’t really work in most of the world but instead helped WhatsApp become the de-facto messaging App in many countries. This is because while in the US people were OK to use SMS/MMS as a fallback option to contact Android users, most of the rest of the world didn’t want to settle for the rather limited feature set of this option and turned to Meta and WhatsApp instead (which was offering communication features Apple didn’t with iMessage and SMS/MMS: free international messaging, reliable group messaging, easy media sharing, and free international group calls, all
across iOS and Android devices which is very important in most of the world). This has effectively made WhatsApp the default messenging App in a majority of countries in the world, and it is very hard to kill this network effect (even if I don’t like WhatsApp, I have no choice but to use it because this is what everyone uses where I live and the first criteria for how good a messaging App is is whether the people you want to chat with are reachable via this App).
So in short: for US users, migrating to RCS is a seamless transition which feels like an improvement in terms of features vs what they had before (SMS/MMS), while for most of the world it means moving to another App, losing your chat history, not being sure all your contacts will be available, and without any obvious gain in terms of features (actually losing the free international group video calls WhatsApp is offering). Again I don’t really like Meta’s privacy practices and the clunky WhatsApp UI, but all the things I mentioned mean RCS isn’t an easy sell in WhatsApp dominated countries.
