

SMS/MMS was working but only with individual conversations. Any group messages would fail. RCS is supposed to fall back on MMS when some recipients can’t use RCS but something about the handshake was broken and it never would do that. I spent two months trying to sort it out and I never could.




I don’t know for sure but my guess is that a lot of US users thought you were wrong because they don’t know that SMS / MMS is essentially dead in the EU. It’s still the primary text based communication method in the US.
MMS supports all the things you mentioned (albeit in a shittier way) except encryption. RCS adds a new layer that is more like Signal in that it supports encryption and emojis and a few other things but it is controlled by Google and there are no open source alternatives currently.