[daneel_w]

We initially tried getting on-board the RCS train about 3 or 4 years ago, to be able to do "rich content delivery" to customers. Specifications and feature-sets were hazy and seemed to be poorly agreed upon, and service providers offering RCS termination to the mobile grid were few. Besides only Android having support for it, it turned out that in all of Europe we found just 4 cellular operators that supported it. Consequently the reach of RCS was extremely limited, so we abandoned the idea.

In the beginning of this year we had another look at the situation, and somewhat surprisingly there has been very little progress in terms of operator support. As we would say in Sweden: it appears to be moving slower than a snail on vacation.

[rickdeckard]

It might be that you looked in the wrong place. I didn't check the RCS-situation in a while, but last time I checked (~1.5y ago) the Europe operators who haven't deployed RCS already (3-4 operators) dropped investment plans and decided to support RCS via Google's RCS cloud-service instead, mandating the use of Google Messaging as device-client.

(Google acquired jibe, a major company developing RCS clients/servers, and started rolling their own RCS-server and moving almost all vendors to the same client)

My expectation would be that by 2022 the majority of Europe carriers support RCS, not as an in-house service but by using either Google's cloud-based RCS or Samsung's RCS and their respective device-clients (with Samsung on steady decline).

The situation is a bit opaque, but if you look deeper on the device-side, RCS is no longer a carrier-controlled service. Google and Samsung combined control >90% of the client/server development and operations. They surely both align via the GSMA, but I doubt that the GSMA has actual control over the roadmap of RCS any more today than it had control over it ~2 years ago (which was close to zero)