> Monopoly is the wrong term here, the root-cause of this situation is that Google is now maintaining the largest OS-implementation of RCS by far, only followed

> Monopoly is the wrong term here, the root-cause of this situation is that Google is now maintaining the largest OS-implementation of RCS by far, only followed by Samsung, and then some carriers who also use RCS for other platforms (web-apps, STB,...). Clarification - many of the carriers are using Google-hosted RCS servers as well. I don't think Apple especially likes the idea of iPhone user metadata (and message contents) going through Google-hosted chat servers every time they message an Android user. > If there would be support from Apple, an RCS-server of Apple could handle the communication to Apple-Devices. The issue there is you need something that authoritatively resolves a phone number as being routable via a particular server, and (ideally) to a public key for encryption. This is the hard problem for chat services - knowing how to route and how to protect data. If there is a problem, then you have some other party monitoring your communications or even manipulating them. If the same phone number could be authoritative to either Google or Apple RCS servers, then some other component has to make that call.