At some point we should require people to tell us whether they have read the link or not so we can know if it's worth taking their opinions into account.
Your first paragraph is copied verbatim from Google's marketing material[0] without attribution. I just wanted to point out for anyone out there if you google that phrase you will find it verbatim repeated across the internet. I know this isn't an academic environment - who cares about plagiarism - but just to highlight it as part of media literacy. Your comment is part of a media/marketing campaign, it is not an actual back-and-forth dialogue that one would expect on HN.
Ah, yes, the “industry standard” which relies on proprietary extensions made by Google which are only implemented in one of Google’s applications, and whose carrier adoption figures are based on Google hosting the servers.
RCS is better, but don’t oversell this as more than Google’s attempt to pressure Apple into helping them recover from repeated self-inflicted damage. If they hadn’t screwed up their messaging strategy so many times since the 2000s nobody would care about iMessage. We could be using an open cross-platform system if they hadn’t killed that concept trying to force people to use Google+.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...
I said in another comment that Google continuing to call RCS a "standard" is disingenuous. What they're really pushing for is Apple implementing Google's proprietary fork of RCS, where most messages are routed through their own servers. That doesn't sound like a standard to me and I don't see why Apple would/should go for that.
Imagine an alternate universe where they backed a dump truck full of cash over to the Signal Foundation and said “hire all of the developers you need to make first-class desktop clients and add federation for people willing to meet CA-level requirements. We’ll ship integration in Messenger and Gmail this year.” Apple would have a lot more pressure from something which is open and better rather than a marketing play for a Google subsidiary.