AFT. I'd rather have some semblance of standards so I don't have to deal with fragmentation, than worry about the handful of people who care about whether the client employs encryption, colored bubbles, animated emojis, avatars or any other proprietary feature. It's a goddamn phone, it should allow me to communicate, not create barriers against it. Hand the standard back to the standards bodies and sit on said bodies, or open up imessage if they are so concerned about what google is doing with it/ how google is handling it.
Now I can't wait to see how gimped their implementation is, just so we can say 'rcs sucks'.
Their implementation won’t be gimped. Apple’s lock-in does not depend on RCS sucking. Instead, it depends on Apple adding new features to iMessage -- real features like group messaging, or gimmicks like “Genmoji”. RCS is a moribund carrier-controlled standard and has no hope of keeping up feature parity with iMessage. It will always be outdated, no matter how good or complete the implementation is (or isn’t).