TL;DR
- Users who have rooted their phone, have their bootloader unlocked or are using some custom ROMs report that their RCS messages are not being sent, even though RCS shows them as connected.
- The Google Messages app does not show any error messages when blocking RCS messages of these users and does not send the messages out as SMS or MMS either.
- Google famously campaigned for Apple to include RCS messaging in iMessage but is now blocking it for certain Android users.
Sadly, you make a good point. They will probably develop their own RCS servers and let others connect to that.
I would be surprised if that happened. As we learned in the Apple v. Epic case (we all suspected before hand but was confirmed) Apple has kept I message closed so that parents wouldn’t “buy cheaper android phones for their kids”.