From The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/16/23964171/apple-iphone-rcs-support
Glad to see this. Hopefully extended family group chats are a more pleasant experience with this compared to MMS!
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I would have paid good money to have been a fly on the wall when Apple made that decision.
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Just saw it on my RSS. As Craig Frederighi said: We truly live in an age of wonders. USB-C, multiple timers and maybe even alternative app stores (in the EU). 
What does this actually mean? I’m not a power user. But it’s very annoying to talk to people with android phones that are in a group chat, or try and send them pictures or videos. I always have trouble. Will it fix that?
It’s supposed to.
According to Samsung’s website, RCS has a file size limit of 100MB compared to 2-5MB on MMS so photo and video sharing should be a much better experience. I’d think it would also fix the weirdness SMS/MMS causes, but that remains to be seen. I’m sure a lot of us have been in a group chat where someone’s phone sends individual messages when they reply instead of replying to the group chat.
If you are a company with enough marketing clout, standards have never meant much. If Apple implements “standard” RCS, whatever that is, will Google gracefully fall back to the standard?
It seems that a potential outcome of this is that much of Google’s spec, specifically the end-to-end encryption, will be integrated into the standard spec before Apple rolls it out.
IMO, yes. “iMessage amounts to serious lock-in” , was how one unnamed former Apple employee put it in an email in 2016"
So, the standard is whatever one of the market leaders with enough clout says it is? Yup. Standards will always be a see-saw battle between innovators, market leaders, and standards bodies (which are made up of manufacturers without enough clout on their own). The wild card is the government, but only when political winds favor regulation.
Finally
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