Another way to read this: Apple has a superior product because they perform anti-competitive practices and don't allow other companies to out-product them. And when they do, they buy them/shut them down before anyone is the wiser.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406303/imessage-android...
In short, Eddy Cue proposed in 2013 that Apple owning the best-in-class messaging app would be a win, and even mentioned the cost being low. Phil Schiller shut him down, arguing it would remove a barrier preventing iPhone parents from buying their kids Android phones.
That reads like anti-competitive motivation to me. In particular, it looks like tying, where two unrelated products are connected artificially. The wikipedia article on anticompetitive behaviors has a section on tying, and mentions another case involving Apple that bears some resemblance involving iPods being artificially restricted to only playing tracks either from iTunes or direct CD rips.
So I think the anti-competitive angle has some real merit.
The innovation claim, though, I have a harder time with. I don't see how releasing Messages for Android implies design-by-committee. They could just release it, like Beeper Mini just did, but without the reverse engineering part.
As much as I think Beeper's work on iMessage is important, apps like that do not and have never solved this problem. Because then you have different contact identifiers to contend with, the inability to make groups amongst those users, differing features, and the list goes on.
If you look closely at what I'm saying here, it's easy to compare it to what iMessage users say about why Android users create problems for them, and that's true. That's why messaging interoperability is important.
I cannot remember the last time I've received a non-spam SMS. The whole iMessage thing feels so alien to me. My girlfriend is an Apple fan-girl and has never used iMessage in her life. I kinda wanted to see what was special about it and when I asked her about it, she had no idea what I was talking about.
You can definitely make the argument about innovation in the messaging space, but RCS is very extensible. RCS Encryption definitely needs to be standardized, but I recommend you check out how Google layered it on top of RCS [1] including handling fallbacks for corner cases like switching your RCS client away from Google Messages before the system realizes it.
This is to say that RCS is pretty flexible, the key is handling the fallback paths in the extension design and working with other vendors to standardize promptly, so we don't end up with the same kind of broken mess that the carriers made.
[1] https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf