Are there any apps that support RCS that aren’t made by Google or a crappy cellular provider (ie: bloatware Verizon apps)?
I appreciate the features RCS has, but I’d love to get that without sending it all to Google with a “trust us” approach to backdoor keys. The documentation I looked at indicated that anyone could setup an app to support RCS and communicate with Google’s RCS users, but I can’t find any apps that actually do that.
Also would love to be able to message from multiple devices using RCS, which Google has working in their web app.
SMS is also super low level, it’s like the equivalent of ping. The GSM protocol already had a way to send small packets of data to phones for diagnostic/control purposes and someone figured you could also cram small text messages in there and thus SMS was born. It was really created as a way to monitize functionality that already needed to exist on the network for technical reasons. Back in the early days of GSM text messaging plans were a big money maker for the carriers because it cost them almost nothing to send SMS across the network but they charged customers by the message.