Hear me out Europeans, Latin Americans: WhatsApp is good, however, you’re at the mercy of Facebook, and Facebook already said that it’s bringing ads to it. RCS brings modern messaging features agnostic to apps of platforms. Apple, GSM, and Google will work together to improve the universal standard and add e2e encryption, and potentially more features. So it’s a win for mobile communications as a whole. Yeah, a bigger deal in the US, but significant abroad nonetheless.
99% of people want a messaging app that as many people as possible use. When the whole „WhatsApp user agreement“ scandal popped up I saw my opportunity to convince many of them to switch to Signal.
Quite a few did, but none of them really left WhatsApp. And since WhatsApp still had more people they know on it, over time most of them (me included) reverted back to just using WhatsApp.
RCS isn’t supported by every carrier, I wouldn’t even be able to reach all Android users I know. People with old Android smartphones don’t have RCS on their phones. And if I send media and they don’t have RCS it would get converted to MMS, which would cost me 0.40-0.90€ per MMS. MMS never took off in many European countries, thus it’s almost never included in the “free unlimited messages” carriers offer.
So it’s a complicated mess, a guessing game and a potential waste of money all rolled into one. Good luck getting people to use it.
As for ads, let’s not forget >Google had to actually turn off RCS for India< because spam messages became so rampant.
My group of friends switched to Signal and never looked back. iMessage is for peasants and sheep…at least that’s what the Silicon Valley elites think of iMessage. iMessage is for the general population.