They're also adding a lot more incompatible text formatting and shit to keep Android incomplete with their real chat protocol. Gotta keep those teens bullying Android users. Also E2E encryption would be nice, but the EU didn't force them to do that.
Still great because MMS is garbage and ruins photo and video quality.
They won't do E2EE until it's part of the standard. That is being worked on.
Google only has it because they have an extremely proprietary, non-standard RCS implementation. Tbh, Google should've open sourced this and had it as part of the RCS standard, but they didn't.
And yeah the EU isn't going to force anything on iMessage because it's literally irrelevant outside of the US. I don't know anybody who seriously uses iMessage tbh, despite like 40% of people here using iPhones.
Funny how many people wanted RCS on iOS in order to be compatible with Android, while large parts of Google's implementation of RCS in Android is proprietary as well.
While Google should open source it, it's important to note that Google never actually wanted to run or implement RCS. It was supposed to be the carriers, but they never did and even Google spent years pushing them to get off their ass and they still didn't. It was years before Google finally went "Fine, I'll just fucking do it myself"
WhatsApp (EU/LatAm), WeChat (China), Kakao Talk (Korea), Line (Japan/Taiwan) are the main ones I’ve encountered. I think Telegram is used more in Russosphere and Signal has a footing in some niche circles as well.
There is no E2EE in RCS, so no amount of EU push would’ve enabled that. Also RCS was not a EU play, it’s a China play. RCS features are dependent on carrier implementation against GSM consortium’s spec.
So no, everything there is basically wrong… but hey, it goes well with the echo chamber vibes so upvotes to you!