It’s just that US carriers have partnered with Google to provide their RCS support.
Not sure if I’d call this “partnered”. AFAIK every carrier can provide their own RCS infrastructure via some data on the SIM. However, as Google wanted to push RCS, they’ve added a fallback to their own servers into the Android Messaging app. And I guess this then became somewhat of a “standard”.
And carriers are busy enough counting all that money we pay them, so they were happy to not having to do anything.
As far as I know, carriers do explicitly have to point to some RCS endpoint to make it work on iOS though, because that doesn’t assume the Google fallback. Maybe that’s what they meant.
The US carriers announced in 2019 their CCMI (Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative) to bring RCS. But that went nowhere and they killed it. That’s when they started using Google’s Jibe instead.
Not sure if I’d call this “partnered”. AFAIK every carrier can provide their own RCS infrastructure via some data on the SIM. However, as Google wanted to push RCS, they’ve added a fallback to their own servers into the Android Messaging app. And I guess this then became somewhat of a “standard”.
And carriers are busy enough counting all that money we pay them, so they were happy to not having to do anything.
As far as I know, carriers do explicitly have to point to some RCS endpoint to make it work on iOS though, because that doesn’t assume the Google fallback. Maybe that’s what they meant.
The US carriers announced in 2019 their CCMI (Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative) to bring RCS. But that went nowhere and they killed it. That’s when they started using Google’s Jibe instead.
See: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/verizon-att-and-t-mobile-kill-their-cross-carrier-rcs-messaging-plans/. Interesting read in 2025. Since then a lot changed. Carriers switched to Jibe rather than rolling their own RCS, Apple started supporting RCS (China mandated they add support, but I’m surprised that they brought it to other countries too), and now RCS has an official end to end encryption protocol.
Can’t believe it’s been 6 years since that announcement.