I'm just sitting here frustrated because I'm wanting my family to move away from messaging me over SMS (they mainly use iOS), but they refuse to download any extra apps. But Google's RCS really doesn't look like a solution either since it mainly just seems to be a way of enforcing Android as an ecosystem, and they don't even make RCS available for 3rd party apps to use either.
The primary form of text communication in Australia is sms. I do a bit of regional travel in Australia and after adopting "chat features" (RCS) in the Google sms app I started having critical messages failing to go through (without notifying me) because of poor (data) reception and it wasn't falling back to sms.
I love the features RCS brings to messaging and would love to use it, but it's just not reliable without an uninterrupted data connection.