Because then SMS would never progress, and we’d all be stuck with 140 characters under the hood along with optional subjects and zero security.
There was no push for RCS until iMessage came along.
There was no push for RCS until iMessage came along.
Also it's worth noting that RCS originally launched in 2008, a year after the iPhone and iMessage launched in 2011. Many features we expect from both iMessage and RCS today were not present at the time, but a next-generation messaging spec was there- Apple chose not to engage with it- which is too bad because at the time Apple could have helped to defragment the implementations and make it a better specification. The carriers fumbled pretty hard on compatibility, also probably because they saw it as a way to produce vendor lock in for their customer base.
What's kind of interesting about this to me is that Google was able to add encrypted messaging on top of RCS without the help of carriers (and it's not just because they develop/host Jibe, the most common RCS server side implementation-- E2EE messages can be sent over any RCS server/relay from what I understand). They just use a special mimetype and some base64 encoding and a custom identity server for exchanging keys. All things Apple could have done with RCS back in 2011.
Google's whitepaper on their E2EE: https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf
That doesn't change anything about what I said.
With RCS or iMessage they cannot justify charging for these.
I also worked at Apple in 2008, and recall the discussions then too.