[AAAAaccountAAAA]

RCS has enough features for most people, and it will be pre-installed. After people will realize that mobile operating systems can do modern texting without any crutches from their respective app stores, they will increasingly not bother with them, and that will make Whatsapp to gradually be less and less important in an accelerating pace.

Those who actually care about e2ee don't use Whatsapp, because it is closed source and it nags users into enabling plaintext cloud backups.

Of course, if Apple's RCS implementation won't work without carrier-provided RCS, it will be dead in arrival outside North America and China.

[sunaookami]

RCS failed. It failed the last >10 years and it will fail the next >10 years. There are too many companies and too much bureaucracy. It isn't an open standard anymore - Google extended it and now wants Apple to use their implementation. The rest of the world moved on from SMS and so should the USA.

[asdaq1312512]

> if Apple's RCS implementation won't work without carrier-provided RCS

Could you explain? If RCS works without carrier support, why would Google rely on carrier support in the first place? (It seems for phone number verification, they rely on SMS. I'm confused.)

[AAAAaccountAAAA]

RCS in its standard form is to be offered by the carriers. However, because carriers in the most parts of the world refused to offer the service, Google took over that role.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/17/18681573/google-rcs-chat-...

Apple has so far been quiet about how, if at all, they are going to deal with carriers that have no native RCS support. Maybe they will run their own servers and federate with Google, maybe they will use Google's servers directly, or maybe it simply won't work at all without carrier support. We have no idea yet.

Edit: IMO the most worrying option would be that Apple and Google will make a some sort of exclusive bilateral deal that will make them, and only them, to be able to offer non-carrier-based RCS support, locking out any other operating system vendors from the platform. That would probably have antitrust implications, but enforcement is often slow.

[asdaq1312512]

Is RCS possible without phone number? Like, Google would just set up an RCS server that accepts GMail addresses, and only falls back to your contact's phone number if they can't route the message? I just find it odd to have carriers involved at all (through the phone number), but sure, it's probably compelling to use an established concept.

[AAAAaccountAAAA]

Not sure if I understood it correctly, but this specification seems to discuss about SIP URI based non-mobile identities: https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/wp-content/uploads/2019/...

[asdaq1312512]

Thanks!