The reality is Google's peak messaging days were 2016-2019. When you could send/receive text messages from your Gmail inbox alongside Google's native chat platform. Also, all of your chats were backed up and searchable by Gmail (which was actually good at the time).

Having RCS is nice, but I always said the deep integration of SMS into gmails platform was a big competitive advantage and was something that kept me firmly in the ecosystem for years.

Sent from my iPhone