| The author lost me on the assumption that RCS is a carrier-controlled service.
I doubt that carriers have much control over the roadmap of RCS, they haven't had real control over it for years now.
It's basically a service of Google (and to a decreasing extend Samsung). Until 2015 the direction of RCS was for every carrier to setup infrastructure to operate a own RCS server. A few companies offered such RCS infra, but a key player in the center of the whole standardization and interoperability matter was a company called jibe.
Jibe was selling RCS servers (and clients) to network operators, and got a few of the key-carriers as customers from the start. As each device-manufacturer was expected to develop/source his own client, and network carriers needed servers to interoperate as well, alot of interoperability discussions, testing and refinement was needed. As a key server-vendor, jibe was at the heart of all those topics and a strong participant in GSMA RCS. In 2015 Google made a move to enter the RCS space and acquired jibe. It started the trajectory which transformed RCS into the mostly Google-operated service that it is today.
Google integrated RCS-client capabilities into their Android Messages application and offer RCS as a unified cloud-based service to operators. Within just a few years: - All network operators who planned to invest into RCS infrastructure scrapped those plans, entered an agreement with Google to use their cloud-based RCS-service instead and mandated towards device-vendors to adopt Android Messages. - Network operators who had no concrete plans for RCS made the same agreement with Google as it promised revenue-share but required zero investment from them. What remains is a handful of network carriers who #1: already have RCS-infra and #2: Didn't shut it down yet. I'd say that 99% of all Android Smartphones today either use a Google Messages client or a Samsung Message client, with the majority of them connecting either to a Google RCS-server or a Samsung RCS-server. The companies surely still align via GSMA, and the carriers / network operators are still involved in discussions about the specification, but given the direction of the past 5 years I don't see that they have actual control over the roadmap of RCS. --- All that said, RCS is the best candidate we have to replace SMS, with a majority of carriers chipping in, so it would be reasonable for Apple to adopt RCS as a replacement for SMS and align with the industry on how this standard should be shaped. |