Apple spent years ignoring RCS, allowing iPhones to offer a degraded messaging experience with Android users. This made Android folks unwelcome in many a group chat, but Apple finally started rectifying this issue last year with the addition of RCS support in iOS. It has been a slow rollout, though, with Google’s mobile service only now getting support.
While Apple supports RCS messaging on iPhones now, it has not exactly been enthusiastic about it. Anyone using Google Fi on an iPhone was left in the lurch even after Apple changed course. The first RCS update rolled out in iOS 18 last fall, but it only supported postpaid plans on the big three carriers. Most other wireless subscribers had to wait, including those on Google Fi, as confirmed to Ars last year. It was a suitably amusing outcome, considering Google is largely responsible for reviving the RCS standard and runs the Jibe back-end servers through which many iPhone RCS messages flow.
Källa: Apple enables RCS messaging for Google Fi subscribers at last