You know better than I - can I ask what RCS is doing that leads Google to disable it on devices with unlocked bootloaders? Are devices meant to only accept messages that have been signed by a vendor or something? I thought it was just a new messaging standard but I guess there's a lot that goes into the security of it. But why can Signal run e2ee messages on unsavory devices but googles won't let me send a text message unless they've signed the whole stack?

No idea.

There's a massive feature benefit: finally allowing multi-megabyte attachments. Hopefully pictures and videos won't be compressed to fit into 600KB.

This is entirely possible with MMS but for most carriers refusing to adopt 3GPP's current recommendations. This is also entirely possible with other messaging apps available on iOS but for American android users refusing to use other apps.

That's like suggesting it's entirely to run jumbo frames it's just ISPs don't support it.

Like, sure, yeah it's possible but all the stacks in between are too heavily ossified.

> but for American android users refusing to use other apps.

As if it's just those pesky Android users that won't just use another app. Lots of my contacts only want iMessage. Show me the APK signed by Apple, the Google store page managed by them, and I'll install it.

You realize iMessage and RCS are two different things, right?

> but for American android users

You realize it's not me, the Android user, being unwilling to use something other than iMessage/SMS? It is the iPhone users I wish to communicate with that don't want to use Whatsapp/Signal/LINE/Facebook Messenger/Element/Telegram/WeChat/Threema/Viber/GroupMe/Discourd/Teams/Allo/Discord.

Give me an app that actually directly supports iMessage on Android and I'll use it. Not something which is trying to proxy through some other device. Something either made or directly blessed by Apple.

Messages is the app. It currently supports SMS/MMS and iMessage protocols. It will soon also support RCS. So soon all those people who will only use Messages on their phones will be able to send and receive high quality videos and images with me. I'm quite excited for the change.

Suggesting RCS doesn't bring any new features other than advertising and spam is being extremely disingenuous. Larger attachments and other extensions, while not quite feature parity with iMessage, are leagues ahead of what was available by SMS and MMS. Effectively available, not just what was theoretically allowable by a spec but not actually possible due to limitations with service providers.