[paulmd]

the best part is that I, as a google voice user, still don't have RCS support even though it's a google product.

google implemented the exact minimum they'd need to give them a foot to cry on in the courts, and no further. and now that there is a mandate to implement RCS, they almost certainly will choose to kill google voice rather than implement it. I am already planning my exit strategy, because otherwise they'll take my phone number with it. and this is not trivial, we are talking about buying another phone (hopefully it will make it until the next-gen iphone with N3E) and paying for two lines for a couple of months. This is a pain in the ass for me.

and google has already embrace-extend-extinguished the standard - their encryption implementation is proprietary and they've refused to let anyone interop, so essentially they have put themselves as imessage 2.0 but with google as the man in the middle this time.