It's an international standard, supported by carriers and everyone not-Apple. Google pushed it forward, but did so in coordination with standards bodies. I'm not sure how you arrive at the above conclusion when the history is not in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#Hi...
Slow your roll there and define your terms: who actually is everyone not-Apple?
Do you just mean carriers and Google? That leaves out in your apparent definition of “Apple” a bunch of things I thought were “not-Apple”: LINE, WeChat, KakaoTalk, Kik, WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Skype, Telegram, Signal, Discord, Slack, Teams and basically every single app with some form of DMing.
RCS might have made sense in a different world, but in this one it’s just another protocol among many and without any compelling reason to support it other than it’s “not SMS”. There’s a lot of “not SMS” out there and iMessage and RCS are just two among many; you’re going to need something a lot more compelling than that.
The same people who standardized SMS. We're talking telephony, it's widely standardized, and it has nothing to so with WeChat or Discord et al. These are telecom standards issued by the same telecom standards bodies that run everything else in your phone. I've provided sources linking to this.
I'm surprised how controversial this seems to be with Apple users.
You're being very imprecise with your words and causing confusion. I understand what they are trying to say - "everyone not apple" is an ill defined phrase and functionally doesn't actually mean anything.
I was talking about telephony in a discussion about telephony standards but Apple users seemingly confuse notions like "SMS" with apps like WhatsApp. When I say everybody not-Apple, I mean literally that. All modern entrants in the mobile phone space with one single exception have some basic support for RCS.
My language was precise, it just doesn't agree with the notions of Apple users.
Nobody is “confusing” anything. My argument was that the distinction was irrelevant on a modern smartphone and the “telephonic” standard was simply irrelevant. You can choose not to engage that part of my argument, but don’t misrepresent it. Telephone networks do everything over IP as of LTE, and RCS isn’t especially relevant for the reasons it’s proponents claim that it is now when it’s just a protocol among many accessible via an app among many, so you would need to make a stronger case for it elsewhere.
It's a proprietary add-on by Google and since it's not part of the spec will simply be banned by many countries.
It would take the entire industry back to the 90s where governments, carriers and rogue actors had free reign to access any data they wanted.