Standard SMS/MMS are the de facto standard in the US, outside of iMessage. Hundreds of millions of people use it. It’s not “never really used anywhere”.

And you’re right, people have moved on from caveman technology; the youth is switching to iOS and iMessage en masse. That’s why people need to deal with shit like this, iOS users don’t know that the only reason they can text like normal people is because of Apple’s weird version of WhatsApp.

If iMessage hadn’t been sneaked into the iOS texting app, Americans may have moved over to something better as well, but they didn’t. They never felt the pressure to switch to texting apps because their carriers charged differently/less for texts than the ones in other countries.

And it did go somewhere. RCS is SMS/MMS for data networks. Carriers didn’t run RCS servers and phones didn’t come with RCS clients so it went nowhere. Until Google started hosting Jibe and including it in the messages client, that is.

Even RCS took some massaging by Google to make it actually usable as a texting standard, with Google making use of the freeform HTTP nature of the protocol to add some proprietary standards to make it actually usable. The first released versions of RCS were kind of terrible, basically MMS but over IP rather than weird telecom protocols.

I pity the fool trying to use RCS without Jibe. Luckily, carriers are shutting down their bespoke RCS servers and renting RCS services from Google instead. Unfortunately, that makes RCS a standard practically governed by Google, carriers from whatever countries Google isn’t permitted to operate in, and spying agencies.