Comment by hocuspocus

And it's not only on the client side, but also server side. There are carriers who implemented Universal Profile on their own and cannot connect to the ones running Jibe. So much for a federated protocol.

So today it's either Google or Samsung messages and Jibe, otherwise RCS is essentially useless. From what I know Facebook wanted to get on board at some point, I'm not sure why this didn't work out.

The fact Google publicly whining about the iMessage lock-in is pretty rich.