They finally compromised and Apple agreed to jump over if the parts of RCS that Google was gatekeeping were opened up.
Phase 1 of RCS on iOS will be sans E2EE sometime this year. Likely iOS 18 this fall. Phase 2 will roll in the security once the new open encryption protocol is good to go.
All in all, RCS looks like a lock as the next thing. All the major players are in.
smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
XMPP has more features than RCS even when RCS was being created and was actively developed for all those years unlike RCS. It also much simpler to implement and you don’t have to be cellular provider to have a server.