Who in their right mind would make this assumption? I'd hate to have to explain that one to grandma.
The iPhone was unique in that it refused to let carriers customize its operating system. That's part of why Apple had to partner with a relatively obscure carrier on launch, while Motorola/Samsung/Nokia/Sony Ericsson/Android phones launched on random carriers all the time.
Many people still buy phones from their carriers which comes with all kinds of apps pre-installed, including carrier-branded SMS apps in many cases.
Everyone in their right mind would have made that assumption when the system was designed. Only some weirdoes at Apple and a few hard-core open source enthusiasts cared.
Of course, that doesn't mean that operating system vendors such as Apple and Google can't simply implement RCS and all the weird carrier quirks they need to deal with in their own apps anyway, and to make messaging available using an API. They already do that kind of stuff with SMS, MMS, location information, internet connectivity, and practically anything else the phone does. They just decided that they're not really gonna bother with an API for this specific trick your phone can do.
The past truly is a foreign country.
> Many people still buy phones from their carriers which comes with all kinds of apps pre-installed, including carrier-branded SMS apps in many cases.
You're joking, right? I've never seen this in Europe since the flip phone days. I thought we had left that in the past. Most people here buy their phones outright, but even when on a plan, they don't fill your phone with malware.
Apple has basically had the balls to tell carriers to go fuck themselves and do it their way, and it's been a huge boon. Google still hasn't done this enough, IMO.
So unfortunately SMS will still be around for quite some time
now RCS compared to SMS is a bit more secure (in theory at least), so would rather over plain SMS but never over signal
The reason iMessage is popular in the US is the fact that it's functionally just SMS, being used by the default message app. The reason that didn't happen in Europe is that SMS used to cost money to send, so nobody was already deeply invested in that system, but instead rushed to Whatsapp et al., since those were free and SMS was not. SMSes are free nowadays, but by now we're all already invested, and all the apps provide a better experience than SMS and RCS (the former due to lack of features, the latter because its often broken) and even Grandma has Whatsapp to keep in touch with family, if only because little Timmy installed it.
Google had to pretend to be everyone's carrier to make RCS work because the GSMA spec assumed everyone would download/install their carriers' messenger apps to use RCS, like you would back in the day with SMS/MMS. This expectation was broken the day Google allowed app developers to write third-party SMS apps, but that hasn't bothered the spec people so far.