RCS was doomed from the start by virtue of the carriers playing any kind of role beyond acting as dumb pipes. Any standard that the carriers have their fingers in will be doomed to the same fate.
It’s one of the main reasons why WhatsApp, iMessage, etc have such popularity. A cell connection is merely one of many means of access and carriers have no structural role whatsoever, meaning that if you’ve got cell data you’ve got messaging.
Yeah it's kind of wild how many Americans want to regress to the bad old days of SMS. WhatsApp is just so much better. At least it has been for the last decade. Maybe Meta will ruin it soon but if that happens we can all move to Signal (until they ruin it). Either way it's better than giving an ounce of power back to telcos.
I guess what I'm getting at is that there should've been standardization around a fully web-based protocol that does not involve the carriers in any way.
Like imagine if instead of investing in RCS, Google instead created a web-based "Advanced Messaging Protocol" or something to that effect, which specifies capabilities roughly in line with those of RCS. The big guys like Google, Apple, Meta, and MS would run their own servers, but there'd be no reason why smaller players like FastMail and Proton couldn't also run them. Most users would just roll with the major providers pre-configured on their platform of choice but more savvy users could choose their own.
That could've rolled out and been adopted and iterated upon far more quickly than RCS has.
Exactly. There's absolutely no reason why I should even need a phone number in 2025. All person-to-person communication (text, call, video, file transfer, etc) should just be an open standard running on TCP.
It’s one of the main reasons why WhatsApp, iMessage, etc have such popularity. A cell connection is merely one of many means of access and carriers have no structural role whatsoever, meaning that if you’ve got cell data you’ve got messaging.