It's an industry standard, but if Apple doesn't implement it in iOS then it's only useable from one Android device to another.
That effectively makes it into crappy iMessage for Android. Only works within one OS ecosystem, but it's unencrypted, managed by your carrier, and limited to the one cellular device itself instead of also working directly on your wifi-connected tablet and computer.
It would be nice of Apple to support this if it's an improvement over SMS/MMS, but Apple drags their feet on supporting any sort of standards that they didn't create. And even some that they did (pour one out for OpenCL).
I don’t see Apple supporting this if end-to-end encryption isn’t in place, they’ve been more and more positioning privacy as a competitive advantage for their services.
Apple already supports SMS to their Messages app. Those communication threads fall back to SMS rather than their proprietary protocol, I imagine. RCS equipped message apps will probably fall back to regular SMS when sending to Apple Messages equipped phones, maybe?
> It would be nice of Apple to support this if it's an improvement over SMS/MMS
I think another issue is that Apple just doesn't care about the user experience of anyone who isn't using an iPhone, to the point that I feel like they pretend non-Apple products don't even exist. I bet many iPhone users would like to be able to send encrypted messages and non-horribly-pixelated video to their friends who use Android (for example), but Apple acts like they don't even consider that as a use case.
It definitely is a standard, defined by 3GPP. Apple alone doesn't get to decide what is a standard.
Google's Messaging app is just one implementation of the protocol. There are other implementations, that are actually used. Samsung have their own, some carriers have their own. It really is an ecosystem.
