Comment by rezonant
2 years ago
Google Messages, which is fast becoming the default Android messaging app across Android OEMs uses RCS when both participants support it and falls back to SMS when that is not the case.
RCS is an open standard that any carrier/OS/messaging app can support, unlike iMessage, which is exclusive to iPhones.
That's exactly RCSs biggest problem: It requires active carrier support. (As far as I understand, Google runs the infrastructure for many international carriers at this point, but they still need to opt into that.)
Using my phone number as an identifier and authentication factor for so many things these days is bad enough; I really don't want the messaging layer itself to touch my phone provider at all.
RCS-the-open-standard is not end to end encrypted.