This is indeed a US thing (culturally). Most countries seem to have chat culture revolve around Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, WeChat or LINE.
On top of that, most people don't really care and read whatever comes in regardless of the format.
MMS was a failed concept, and so is RCS. Not because the technology is fundamentally bad, it's the implementation that is fundamentally flawed by keeping telcos in the loop. The only reason SMS didn't die is purely by accident: it was included as some sort of auxiliary technical channel, not really intended as a means of chatting with other people. Heck, it was almost not even included in the GSM standard and mostly thought of as a useless waste of protocol specification. This made it unattractive to market or monetise at first, and later on with the whole ringtone/bitmap mess around the 00's it only enjoyed a short bubble of commercial exploitation.
The cost, and the limited format then caused the likes of BBM and even MSN for mobile to be used as true chat replacements, except in the USA. That was around the same time as the flop that was MMS. Then WhatsApp (and others) came along and by then the whole telco legacy mindset finally caught up and it was way too late. Then Apple came around and a decade later finally RCS was invented at some sad endeavour to get back in the loop as a telco.
Similar things were tried to 'replace' email etc. in the AOL days, which also turned into a big flop.
MMS wasn't a failed concept. It was successful at what it was designed for at the time - to share a photo or short video on 2G/3G phones. Not bidirectional conversational messaging.
MMS was never designed to be used for group chats. It was a clever implementation by Apple which made it become the standard for cellular group chats once every other platform copied it.
On top of that, most people don't really care and read whatever comes in regardless of the format.
MMS was a failed concept, and so is RCS. Not because the technology is fundamentally bad, it's the implementation that is fundamentally flawed by keeping telcos in the loop. The only reason SMS didn't die is purely by accident: it was included as some sort of auxiliary technical channel, not really intended as a means of chatting with other people. Heck, it was almost not even included in the GSM standard and mostly thought of as a useless waste of protocol specification. This made it unattractive to market or monetise at first, and later on with the whole ringtone/bitmap mess around the 00's it only enjoyed a short bubble of commercial exploitation.
The cost, and the limited format then caused the likes of BBM and even MSN for mobile to be used as true chat replacements, except in the USA. That was around the same time as the flop that was MMS. Then WhatsApp (and others) came along and by then the whole telco legacy mindset finally caught up and it was way too late. Then Apple came around and a decade later finally RCS was invented at some sad endeavour to get back in the loop as a telco.
Similar things were tried to 'replace' email etc. in the AOL days, which also turned into a big flop.