I guess it depends on how you define “worse”. With RCS, you have SMS fallback, so anyone with a phone number can get your message when you send it. There’s a lot of value in that. Even with dedicated IM services having more features, if everyone I know can’t agree on one of those, I dont want to have 5 messaging apps on my phone and have to check them all every day. Very few people that I know even use one of those, and those people are all using different ones.
It’s great for Europeans where WhatsApp is ubiquitous, but here in the US, I don’t know a single person who uses WhatsApp. I’d someone asked me to use it, I would just tell them to text me because I don’t want to use a product owned by Facebook.
The closest thing we have here that most people use is Discord, but the older people I know can’t figure it out.
SMS “failover”, just two comments above. https://lemmy.world/comment/6102361
I see this failover failure every single day when people talk about RCS.
This is unacceptable.
Also, since when do you have to “check” a messenger? That’s what notifications are for.
