RCS is a GSMA standard, like VoLTE and SMS messages. Of course it's going to use telecoms features as unique identifiers, that's what it was designed to do. Wh

RCS is a GSMA standard, like VoLTE and SMS messages. Of course it's going to use telecoms features as unique identifiers, that's what it was designed to do. While I agree that tying everying to a phone number is far from optimal, it's the status quo in messenger land. Only tech nerds use services like XMPP and Matrix, the rest all use either chat apps that tie you to a phone number or just text directly. RCS is there for the people who still use SMS/MMS. In my country, that's basically nobody. In Canada and the US, that's the majority of non-iPhone people, and the iPhone people have been complaining about the shitty integration between iMessage and MMS since the day iMessage took off (because MMS is terrible for modern messengers). RCS runs on your carrier's infrastructure. Google hosts RCS services for people whose carrier doesn't support RCS, but Apple won't be using those. RCS on iOS requires carrier support, which many carriers still have yet to turn back on. I think you're confusing the status quo with the goal behind RCS. The unfortunate truth is, the people who are using RCS would've used SMS/MMS before. RCS just appeared in their messengers some day and made texting a lot better. I'd still advocate for signal over RCS any time of the week (though I don't need to, because nobody uses SMS/RCS here anyway thanks to WhatsApp), but RCS is an abject improvement over the terrible messenger protocols it replaced.