I asked if people chose iPhone for the blue bubbles elsewhere a couple days ago, and while there was some good discourse on that post, the blue bubbles definitely also came up as a reason.
In my experience, when people find out my texts are green, they oftentimes would rather switch to a different platform altogether like Instagram or just not text at all.
Is this actually a deal-breaker in friendships out there?
The biggest feature that WhatsApp and Signal provide over RCS, is the fact that you can use them on iOS.
Right now RCS in practise is just another walled garden, that not every phone with every carrier can join.
Apple will likely never implement RCS, especially not right now where the best RCS experience is reliant on Google servers and propietary Google extensions.
Only government intervention could force Apple’s hand. But I don’t believe the EU will implement such a law in the next 10 years. America, where this issue actually matters, probably not even in 20 years.
I doubt that even Google will stick to RCS to the bitter end. They had significantly more power over XMPP, but they abandoned it anyway for some in-house propietary protocol. Who says history will not repeat itself?