Or as the rest of the world would describe it: That's why it's always a pain including Americans in a group chat – they usually don't have WhatsApp :)
I personally dislike getting full-resolution images in iMessage by default and wish there was an option to manually request the full-res one (the sender could just upload two versions, or maybe a progressively compressed one). It seems like the worst of both world (in that it still wipes metadata from the photos, last time I checked, making them annoying to save in my photo library).
I expect the metadata scrubbing on message-sent images is a security thing.
"The rest of the world" is also not the whole rest, there‚a China, Japan, Korea, with WeChat, KakaoTalk, ...
But what I wanted to highlight is that SMS/MMS and generally carrier-based messaging is just as much of a weird communication island at this point as all of these OTT messengers are, from a non-US point of view.
RCS would just be a continuation of that, so I'm not sure if it's worth cheering on Apple for taking this path, further cementing Google's hold on Android messaging in the US – they run almost all the infrastructure and get all the message content, after all!
So, won't help with Americans or any other part of "the rest of the world".
I can’t use WhatsApp because on iOS it asks for access to your contacts, which I refuse to give. (Facebook already burned me once, there.) So in WhatsApp, all my contacts show up as numeric phone numbers, and there’s no way to change that, so it’s basically useless to me.
A data protection consultant once told me in theory I can sue my friends for violating my data privacy by doing that...
At least on iOS 18 it will become possible to provide partial phonebook access, as far as I've heard.
I'm fortunately too old to ever have experienced this myself, but so I have to rely on others' observations for this.
That said, I wouldn't quite call it "discrimination" yet, but it's certainly uninformed, targeted at the wrong entity, and on top of that is at least a bit icky given the quite large difference in retail pricing of iPhone and Android smartphones.
The reality is just that people only install new apps if the preinstalled ones don't do the trick, or at least only if most of their friends already have too.
So in my view, the entire problem is that apparently no regulator has been considering it a problem for the better part of a decade that Apple is effectively running half of the country's communication infrastructure without being regulated anywhere close to the way landline or mobile carriers are from a competitive and interoperability point of view.
But this seems to already be changing; Apple definitely didn't implement RCS out of their strong desire for openness and interoperability. I just wish they'd picked a better protocol/system.
On the large scale, I agree. We have telecom regulations for good reasons.