Basically I can understand this yearning for a messaging service with the ease of SMS in the good old day - no need for an app and everybody was able to recieve

Basically I can understand this yearning for a messaging service with the ease of SMS in the good old day - no need for an app and everybody was able to recieve as this is just an infrastructure protocol. Indeed, RCS looks promising to let this principle live further. RCS has a long lasting history but is driven forward mainly by google during the last years. [1] One mayor flaw is that it comes basically without end-to-end encryption which - again - google announced to add an roll-out slowly. [2] Furthermore its unclear in how far Apple will implement RCS [3]. And last-but-not-least there is lack of some feature we are used to by messenger apps, like avatar picture, status message, live location etc. With 473 M users worldwide [4] it seems to be everywhere an nowhere. I'm checking from time to time with my contacts, but I've not seen the lock symbol in the Android Messages App on by up-to-date Pixel phone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#Hi... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/19/21574451/android-rcs-encryption-message-end-to-end-beta https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/19/21574451/android-rcs-enc... [3] https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/07/20/apple-holds-out-in-adopting-next-generation-rcs-texting-standard https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/07/20/apple-holds-out-i... [4] https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/rcs/ https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/rcs/