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Apple announced RCS with a whimper when it should have been a bang
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
A bunch of carriers implemented it originally, but their implementations were all horribly broken, with messages between carriers usually not working, the carrier-installed messaging apps sucking, etc. Eventually they all dropped it and Google picked up the ashes and "fixed it" by making their server the only one instead of having per-carrier servers like SMS/MMS.
Yeah, this really all feels like the carriers have dropped the ball.