Most of my friends here in Sweden use Signal. But on the rare occasions that we had to switch back to messages lately, for example when Signal was down, I noticed RCS has been working flawlessly.
It's quite the nice surprise because it's a technology you heard about years ago and now suddenly it crops up in daily life. We all gave up on it years ago too and used other IM apps like Signal, Briar or SimpleX.
You where all on android I presume?
Since RCS does not work on iPhone in sweden.
NONE of the carriers have support for it, they support it for android but not ios.
It was originally started in 2007 and first deployments started rolling out around 2012. The US carriers were just spectacularly bad at implementing it, so Google swooped in and did it themselves. Then they extended it in non-standard ways and added E2EE. Good, but not standard so also not as helpful as it sounds because if your conversation partners aren't (or weren't, maybe it's better now?) using Google's implementation then your conversations were sent in the clear, just like MMS and SMS before it.
It's quite the nice surprise because it's a technology you heard about years ago and now suddenly it crops up in daily life. We all gave up on it years ago too and used other IM apps like Signal, Briar or SimpleX.