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