My novice read of it is that Google made the mistake of trying to hand off the management burden to carriers, since they felt that the way to make something universal like SMS/MMS is to include carrier support.
But that obviously didn’t work because there are hundreds (thousands?) of cellular carriers around the world and they are the wrong people to manage such a thing.
So they basically are steering it back to “Google’s shitty iMessage.”
The universal thing isn’t the carrier anymore, the universal thing is the Internet that runs on top of it, which is perhaps why just about everyone outside the US tends to use messaging apps like WhatsApp/Signal/WeChat/etc.
It turns out that the only thing worse than the platform monopolist was the old phone carries monopolies.
> just about everyone outside the US tends to use messaging apps like WhatsApp/Signal/WeChat/etc.
This is The Way. Well, several ways, since you inevitably end up a bit fragmented, but usually a country will settle on one, usually WhatsApp. Further east Telegram is also popular.
...and then WhatsApp starts to send ads in push-notifications that you can't turn off. And you either have to live with it, or be a massive black hole in your friends communities.
I don't know if RCS is the way, but monopolistic messaging apps definitely aren't.
> and then WhatsApp starts to send ads in push-notifications that you can't turn off
*that you can't filter.
Every time an app begs me to enable notifications, I give it the side-eye because I immediately assume it's going to include notifications that I don't want to see, which are essentially ads for some app feature / some part of their walled garden.
I want to be able to filter notifications at the OS level. That could be by a substring search on the content of the notification, or by a unique-per-call-site (in the code) identifier included in the API the app uses to surface a notification (though I suspect most apps would just re-use the same identifier everywhere because the developers don't want me to be able to filter their ads).
> My novice read of it is that Google made the mistake of trying to hand off the management burden to carriers, since they felt that the way to make something universal like SMS/MMS is to include carrier support.
I'm not sure who you are calling "carriers", but it sounds like the people who own a mobile network. They buy gear off a supplier like Nokia / Huawei, contract them to install and maintain it, then make their money back over time by selling the bandwidth to consumers and hopefully a "free" phone as well.
They aren't the engineering power houses the telco's of old were, like AT&T. Rather they are reverse - a marketing powerhouse, duking it out with other marketing power houses. Their technical know how is close to 0. In fact on the retail support side, it might even be negative. When I deal with them, I come away with the impression would have trouble fixing a propelling pencil. If Google thought they could manage a massively parallel e2e messaging stack, they were deluding themselves.
This is the real reason Huawei was banned by the West. It wasn't just that it meant they were using Chinese make the gear, with opaque Chinese firmware, although I guess that was bad enough. It was that if the telco's bought Huawei, Huawei ran it for them. "Ran" means hands on, 24 hours a day, with in Huawei engineers deployed around the country keeping it ticking. Having a Chinese company running your countries mobile phone infrastructure was an impossible swallow.
Every time I have gotten a SIM card in a country south of the US-Mexico border, the carrier spams the text messaging. But nobody else uses it.
In the US we don't reliably use WhatsApp, iMessage is locked down, and Signal, etc., are just for tech bros or political hacks. Yet, everyone wants to text instead of call, so we are in this world where we need to make RCS work, and they are just not putting in the effort.
What I mean is that in Mexico, Brazil, and many other countries, WhatsApp is the de facto messaging standard. Businesses expect you to have it, restaurant ordering is integrated with it, etc.
But that obviously didn’t work because there are hundreds (thousands?) of cellular carriers around the world and they are the wrong people to manage such a thing.
So they basically are steering it back to “Google’s shitty iMessage.”
The universal thing isn’t the carrier anymore, the universal thing is the Internet that runs on top of it, which is perhaps why just about everyone outside the US tends to use messaging apps like WhatsApp/Signal/WeChat/etc.