Speak for yourself; I LOVE texting my fellow-Android-owners with RCS. My photos don't get squashed a la MMS, sending multimedia Just Works, and typing/receipt indicators are lovely. Maybe the mobile operators are getting far bigger wins, but as an average person texting my friends, it's great.

I'm just annoyed that it's opt-in, and still seems to have some issues. I think I converse with exactly three other people who use Android.

One of them works with RCS! Yay!

The second hasn't enabled RCS for some reason. (Or he has -- I haven't asked him -- but for some reason the machinery in between hasn't figured out that we're both RCS-capable.)

The third has enabled RCS, and the messages I send to him go over RCS, but when he replies, they go over SMS/MMS. No idea why.

Yeah I definitely feel that pain, especially with the swapping back and forth to and from RCS.

Honestly same. And the same thing for getting Wi-Fi calls with people on the same network and how they sound crystal clear but then you call someone who's not on your network and it sounds like a crappy phone call again. When my dad and I were both on Google fi our phone calls sounded great and texting through RCS was great. He switched to the same carrier that his new wife has and the service is just degraded.

Its definitely a compromise, but Google is ultimately at the mercy of the carriers. We can sit back behind our keyboards and criticize but it is a way to get something going. I don't think carriers have any incentive to improve this area, and probably nothing would happen

> Its definitely a compromise, but Google is ultimately at the mercy of the carriers.

Are they, though? Google absolutely could have implemented an iMessage competitor, directly in the stock Android Messages app, and then required third-party Android manufacturers to include it as the stock SMS/MMS/"gMessage" app as a part of Android conformance testing.

But no, instead they choose to play games with Allo, Duo, Hangouts, Chat, etc., all of which are an optional download and need not be included in the stock install. And even if/when they are required, it's still an extra app that a user has to find, and understand why they should use it.

Now, I don't want them to do this. I want them to promote and support a federated, open standard; I don't want another iMessage. RCS is not great for many reasons, but at least it's not a walled garden.

> Google is ultimately at the mercy of the carriers

Yet again I recall the deal with the devil Apple did with AT&T, giving them a year or two of exclusive rights to sell the iPhone in return for having exactly zero control over the device. That was an excellent trade. Before 2007, carriers were intrusively involved with all aspects of a mobile phone.

I understand that there are huge interoperability and legacy requirements on the phone network. But for the sake of solving the biggest problem of Android to iPhone communication I think we can and should demand something which is actually modern (ie platform and carrier agnostic).

The problem with RCS is that the solution has been stuck in GSM consortium hell for over a decade.

> Google is ultimately at the mercy of the carriers

I mean...are they?

If Google were serious about pushing a new standard, and were willing to actually push it on the carriers, they have plenty of money, reach, and clout to make their point heard loud and clear. That would be triply true if it weren't a "new standard" that was yet another transparent attempt to gather more data from users.

They don't even need to push it on the carriers. They can just implement their own siloed iMessage clone in the stock Android Messages app. They don't need to integrate with any carrier services to do so. Hell, simply moving Google Chat into the stock Android Messages app, and seamlessly switching between SMS/MMS and GChat (like Apple does between SMS/MMS and iMessage) would do the trick. (To be clear, I don't want them to do this, but they could.)

And even if Google pushed a new, better standard (than RCS) on the carriers, Apple could (and probably would) still refuse to implement it.

I dont imagine implementing their own imessage clone would work as hardware vendors such as samsung will remove the stock app and ship their own.