Outside of small bubbles, it’s hard to believe that anyone really cares, since it’s a resolved problem in most of the world. Without exaggeration, every person I’ve met from Europe, LATAM, East/West/South Asia, Africa, and Australia has by default asked me, “Do you use WhatsApp (or its local equivalent)?” when we decided to keep in touch.

I agree it has some monopolistic tendencies in the US and Canada and signals “iPhone is better!” when someone is what they call “a green bubble.” However, in the end, every group chat just gets created in an OS-agnostic app if one of the users has an Android. So, from my perspective, it’s a wasteful allocation of resources if you’re trying to “make it a good experience for the customers to communicate with non-customers” since it doesn’t really get “much better” than what we have now.

Have you seen the quality of video that comes through MMS?

I promise you people who have Android friends/family will enjoy this update.

As a person who has friends with Androids, I have no idea about the video quality through MMS. We just use WhatsApp, and although it affects the quality, it’s generally good enough.

My point isn’t that this upgrade isn’t useful. I meant, why would a private company allocate resources to fix a problem that barely affects their users?

> why would a private company allocate resources to fix a problem that barely affects their users

It doesn’t barely affect users. That’s the point. In the US 50% of people use android. In the rest of the world that numbers a lot higher. Anything that goes over MMS sucks. Having a single android person in a group chat means falling back to SMS/MMS and everything sucks.

RCS is a huge quality of life improvement when texting non-iPhones for people who do that on a regular basis.

Again, this argument ignores the existence of OS-agnostic apps like WhatsApp. Who uses MMS? I might be extremely wrong, as I couldn’t find numbers online. But just from personal experience as well, outside of US, WhatsApp and its alternatives are defacto standard over SMS/MMS. Significant chunk of countries offer free data for WhatsApp/Messenger usage, and SMS/MMS is still paid per text.

People are not going to switch to using SMS just because iPhone added RCS either.

There is something to say about the platform setting the bar too low.

You're right that people move to third party clients, but the issue with Apple/Google screwing messaging is the third party services become de-facto while being sub-par.

In particular rival services don't get privileged access, which impacts either service quality (in particular conditions to receive a message) or user QOL (battery drain, core featuees implementation lag etc.). Line is a prime example of that, with a crazy wide audience in specific countries yet it became a pile of turd software wise, being optimal on neither platform.

The default messaging app being somewhat interoperable is IMHO a huge deal.

"every group chat just gets created in an OS-agnostic app if one of the users has an Android"

This is probably true for you and me (actually everyone I know regardless of platform uses Signal) but not for many people it seems.

I’m very curious about the numbers that Apple/Alphabet see internally, as I couldn’t find anything from quick searches. It’s just very hard to imagine that it’s an actual widespread issue. I can think of two demographics who experience this problem. First is older people (70+) who have never been exposed to apps, have an Android and text people on iOS. And the small groups of people that avoid “X, Y, Z” apps for ideological reasons, are on Android, but keep in touch with iOS users.