Hear me out Europeans, Latin Americans: WhatsApp is good, however, you’re at the mercy of Facebook, and Facebook already said that it’s bringing ads to it. RCS brings modern messaging features agnostic to apps of platforms. Apple, GSM, and Google will work together to improve the universal standard and add e2e encryption, and potentially more features. So it’s a win for mobile communications as a whole. Yeah, a bigger deal in the US, but significant abroad nonetheless.
My plan has unlimited everything and while texting/calls aren’t expensive or just come with the data, people still use WhatsApp because it’s convenient and so much easier. I doubt RCS will ever pickup because nobody here has any reason to push it when everyone’s already on WhatsApp. Kind of one of those “If it’s not broken, then why fix it” situations.