Yes, but also why should they? It’s not really in their interest to do so. The only reason they’re doing anything is because of regulatory pressure.
I agree it has some monopolistic tendencies in the US and Canada and signals “iPhone is better!” when someone is what they call “a green bubble.” However, in the end, every group chat just gets created in an OS-agnostic app if one of the users has an Android. So, from my perspective, it’s a wasteful allocation of resources if you’re trying to “make it a good experience for the customers to communicate with non-customers” since it doesn’t really get “much better” than what we have now.
I promise you people who have Android friends/family will enjoy this update.
My point isn’t that this upgrade isn’t useful. I meant, why would a private company allocate resources to fix a problem that barely affects their users?
It doesn’t barely affect users. That’s the point. In the US 50% of people use android. In the rest of the world that numbers a lot higher. Anything that goes over MMS sucks. Having a single android person in a group chat means falling back to SMS/MMS and everything sucks.
RCS is a huge quality of life improvement when texting non-iPhones for people who do that on a regular basis.
People are not going to switch to using SMS just because iPhone added RCS either.
You're right that people move to third party clients, but the issue with Apple/Google screwing messaging is the third party services become de-facto while being sub-par.
In particular rival services don't get privileged access, which impacts either service quality (in particular conditions to receive a message) or user QOL (battery drain, core featuees implementation lag etc.). Line is a prime example of that, with a crazy wide audience in specific countries yet it became a pile of turd software wise, being optimal on neither platform.
The default messaging app being somewhat interoperable is IMHO a huge deal.
This is probably true for you and me (actually everyone I know regardless of platform uses Signal) but not for many people it seems.
Because allowing communication with open standards allows more freedom for your customers?
I know people who have wondered why texting to/from Android phones “doesn’t work” since pictures/video look terrible. This is a problem for their customers.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they would’ve done this without regulatory pressure, just perhaps not as soon.