@Bulb said in In other news today...:
Well, yes, it gets turned on by default in the Android messaging app.
I checked my phone. It's disabled. I don't think I ever messed with it, so that should be the default setting.
Wikipedia has a list of providers with RCS support. The three last providers I've been on aren't listed. It could be out of date, but it lists one provider that discontinued RCS end of 2023; following through to their page mentions that almost nobody used it.
Reading a bit more about it ... seems there's some sort of Goolge-supported franken-version of it?
Not here. In Europe you get to keep your number when changing carriers.
If you move inside of a country. You don't get to keep your number moving to a different country.
It is better for people with whom you have established connection. For people who have your phone number just in case, to send you a notification once something is done and similar, using something that is a standard part of the telecom network is much easier than dealing with dozens of äpps.
As much as I dislike Whatsapp, it seems to have taken that role.
Also: Just send me an email.
RCS is a standard by the GSM Alliance. That is, it should be interoperable across all carriers (now, there were some early versions that were not), like SMS are.
RCS via Google servers doesn't seem like it would be part of the telecom network.I checked a handful of different (European) countries, and they had one (or no) carriers with native RCS support. Definitively a minority.
Email-based accounts may be telco-agnostic, but they are not email-provider-agnostic, and unlike phone numbers, which can be made transferable, email address can't be. Making email-based accounts strictly worse in this regard.
On the other hand, email addresses are not bound to a single country. And, while not a general solution, you can always get your own domain. Or pay someone with a domain to forward them to where ever your "account" ends up.
Edit:
There's MMS. As far as I can tell, they do work by uploading the image or whatever to some server and sending a link via SMS. And they are also interoperable across all carriers.
Yeah, but nobody uses MMS (thank the Omnissiah!).