I’m not a fan of the “war” between Android and Apple when it comes to SMS/texting. The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS/RCS/iMessage as much as WhatsApp and the like, so the US is pretty much lagging behind everyone else on this anyway.
That being said, I have to admit Android did a good job with this!
If you’re using Google Messages anyway, it’s true that RCS is a half-notch better than SMS. Unfortunately, it doesn’t compete with any decent chat service on any front—Not signal, not Whatsapp, not Matrix, not even Telegram, and Telegram sucks ass. It’s fully centralized, Google gets all of your metadata (which is not worse than Facebook getting all of your metadata, but it is something that Apple obviously won’t agree to), there’s only one app that does it…
have they even figured out how to encrypt group chats yet?