Kind of a mixed bag.

Hopefully they can dodge RCS too, because it's a poor solution. Worse, Apple's implementation of RCS doesn't include E2E encryption.

Edit: RCS limits attaments to 100mb! What the hell, why? I can, today, send 100mb over SMS/MMS, on Verizon, to other Verizon phones. RCS would be a step backward.

I don't really care about iMessage, Android is my primary device, and SMS sucks, and most people use SMS because Android, and I prefer to use other apps (especially on my iOS devices).

IMessage has its own insecurities, despite what people think. There's a recent publication about it while it uses AES to encrypt the message, the encrypted message and the AES key are packaged together with the RSA key...which never changes. So if you get someone's RSA key, you can decrypt all their messages, old ones, new ones, ALL of them.

So if they can dodge it, this keeps the pressure toward third-party apps with proper encryption, that isn't tied to your IMEI, Google or Apple accounts.

And this is what governments fear the most - they peoe will use apps like Signal, where not even the metadata is easily accessible or useful even if you could access it.

Here's just one well written example of what's wrong with RCS: https://www.reddit.com/r/UniversalProfile/comments/11b6fyd/ugh_rcs_really_does_stink/

The text of that post:

After 3 months of using RCS with Jibe, I have decided to turn RCS off due to it's instability, unreliability, and lack of standardization. Sometimes, I'd send an RCS message and it wouldn't go through, and sometimes someone would send me a message via RCS, and I wouldn't get it.

In some RCS group chats, I would only see half the conversation because some people would send messages in the group chat, and I wouldn't get them. You know what, I could list off RCS problems for 48 hours without stopping, but that would be a waist of time. The point is RCS is buggy, and doesn't work. The Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative already failed, so there is absolutely no way RCS will ever be able to replace SMS. This, along with RCS's bugs, is the reason why RCS will only be good enough to be a broken and unreliable iMessage for Android. Without the carriers, there is no way RCS will ever become a standard, and I don't think Apple will ever adopt RCS because of the stupid decisions of carriers, Google, and smartphone manufacturers.

The whole reason I started using RCS was because I wanted to support it, not because I actually liked it. Now, there is no reason to support RCS because it is a broken messaging system, and will never become a standard. Android is extremely fragmented, and it will continue to be fragmented for a very, very long time