This post seems say that they'd rather avoid the difficult programming challenges of working with the varied devices and protocols people use for communication generally, and just compete with other walled garden apps instead. I wish them luck, but it's a different trajectory than they were on a year or two ago.
It's not a "difficult programming challenge" if you don't even get access to the APIs for the new protocol, I don't think...
But there's also certainly something to be said for deciding where to spend your time. Sure, getting regular SMS right on many different devices might be a difficult programming challenge, but if that means you can't spend time on making sure your service scales, or that people are able to hide their phone number, or... Then that's not laziness, that's making a hard choice.
There is (sometimes?) a way for Signal users to deregister from RCS which should presumably cause other devices to send messages via SMS instead of RCS.
People's Android devices can be opt in to receive messages via RCS based on phone number with either Google or their carrier. If the number is registered via Google, the number can be deregistered using a form. [1] For Verizon, it seems you can call Customer Support at 800-922-0204 to disable RCS. [2] Presumably other carriers have similar options.
Once RCS is disabled at Google/carrier level at the phone number level, other RCS compatible phones will fall back to SMS/MMS for delivering messages, which will cause the Signal app to be able to read messages via Android SMS APIs.
Disabling RCS, which apparently is encrypted with the Signal protocol for G messaging, so that people can continue to comfortably use unencrypted comms (sms) in Signal messenger itself would be a really wild course of action.
Great context, though from an end user's perspective it was clear why and just left hanging with "find a new SMS messaging". The integration made adoption/integrating new users easier by allowing some to have one messaging app with progressive security for contacts on Signal.
Yeah absolutely, messaging wasn't great, although that's a hard thing to get right, especially considering how they have both very technical and pretty non-technical audiences.