I have sympathy with the technical and debugging plight but genuinely why are people still dealing with this, SMS/RCS is to the US what fax machines are to Japan. You can only put so much lipstick on a pig. Any bog standard IP based messenger has had none of these issues and all of the features that RCS is supposed to fix for a decade.

You're right, but between my carrier and Meta, I'd prefer to trust my carrier, even if it's just to know which window to throw a brick through. Maybe I'm being too European on this, but I'm not willing to hand over basic communications to private industry, especially companies whose entire business strategy is building profiles on people.

I still hope for a protocol to win out that's not tied to one party.

RCS is basically email over HTTP, wrapped in a layer of carrier stuff. The same way Visual Voicemail is IMAP but wrapped in a layer of carrier stuff.

The spec also handles video calls, conference calls, sending/receiving money, and just about anything else a modern messenger does.

It just lacked E2EE for the longest time, which makes sense when you consider that the police and secret service have their tendrils in the standards body that publishes the spec.

That’s the best part: RCS is an IP based messenger

"hey bro, just download this crappy totally trustworthy app and add me just to talk to me and only me!" is a patently ridiculous thing to try and sell people on.