-US- iPhone users very often don't want to have SMS/MMS users in their group chats.
The rest of the world is using WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, Snapchat, LINE, etc. for group chats (for better or worse), even on iPhone.
If what you say about “the rest of the world” using other messaging apps is true, then yeah, it probably is North America–centric. So what? Are you agreeing with the OP who didn’t see any point and advocated that GrapheneOS “totally ignore RCS”?
GrapheneOS already supports WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, Snapchat, and LINE. What’s wrong with improving OS support for another widely used alternative, that for all its faults is mostly better than still another widely used alternative (SMS/MMS)?
There’s a thread on the GrapheneOS forum titled “Using RCS with Google Messages on GrapheneOS” with 2,192 posts in it. Clearly there’s a lot of interest in using RCS on GrapheneOS!
Why are you strawmanning?
The comment I reacted to:
iPhone users very often don't want to have SMS/MMS users in their group chats.
I think it is useful to qualify that, because a lot of people from the US are under all kinds of false beliefs like: green bubble anxiety is universal, Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro do not support physical SIMs (Pixels support physical SIM in other regions), etc. (I could go on for a while.)
These misunderstandings repeatedly show up over and over again and discussions, so I think it is worth being specific. In this case most iPhone users worldwide do not even think about SMS/MMS users in their chat, because they do not even rely on iMessage as their primary messaging app.
In theory carriers could increase the max resolution for MMS now that 3G is essentially dead, but I doubt they will now the slow move to RCS has started.
MMS bring broken since day 1 in my experience is probably the reason I jumped on internet chat and email, since those actually work as advertised (sure, they has some practical limits, but they tell you about those!). I probably would have sent my mum that image over MMS if MMS actually every worked. Since it never did, using a difference service was a must.
Then again, this feels like an extension of the rest of the phone system. Anything beyond calls between two people, SMS and data that involves connecting to the phone system has always (in my experience) been either janky or broken. No wonder I try to use anything else given the opportunity.
I'm not sure which of the two is better tbh. Utterly dominated by a Facebook-owned system, or using something that's crappy enough that people spread out to a variety of systems?