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Comment by inferiorhuman | Hacker News Reader

  if apple didn't do it's shenanigans, RCS or something similar with a
  different name would've have replaced MMS by now.

The only reason there's any RCS interoperability right now is because most carriers have bought into the Google RCS stack. Before that you absolutely had to be aware of which carrier the recipient was using. If memory serves T-Mobile is running both a Google and non-Google RCS stack. RCS is and was a mess.

Hell, if you've a rooted Android you can't access Google RCS and any RCS messages sent your way will disappear into the ether.

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There are no third party RCS apps outside of hardware manufacturer skins on Google Messages as Google has shut them all out.

If you want to interact with the RCS world as a non-wireless carrier, expect to pay upwards of 10 cents a message and have a minimum revenue commit of thousands of dollars a month. Carriers also don't get paid for inbound texts on RCS, creating a huge new cost center instead of symmetrical texting volume resulting in minimal costs like the current SMS/MMS ecosystem.

This is untrue, the US carriers had a "cross-carrier" consortium that had built most of its own RCS stack, complete with animating dots when the other party was typing, and good image and video support. But Samsung refused to use it (not sure if Google was bribing them in the background) so it got killed in favor of supporting Google's flavor of RCS.

Any source for that? Afaict, every Telco now use Google's RCS stack.

I also can't remember what it was called, but every Telxo uses Google's because of its failure.

> In October 2019, the four major U.S. carriers announced an agreement to form the Cross-Carrier Messaging Initiative to jointly implement RCS using a newly developed app. This service was to be compatible with the Universal Profile.[34] However, this carrier-made app never came to fruition. And later, both T-Mobile and AT&T signed deals with Google to adopt Google's Messages app.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

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