Listen, I'm happy for everything that makes communicating easier but to paint Google and Android as some champions of messaging is just straight up crazy.
I was an android user since the beginning of modern smart phones (and before that I used Windows Mobile 6.5 😵💫) and messaging has been an absolute shit-show on android for almost the entire time. Google finally had a good solution with Hangouts (circa 2014) but they killed it and spawned so many messaging clones that I lost count.
The reason why we have such fragmentation and so many different apps we have to juggle to communicate on android is because of the clear lack of vision and leadership in that area in Google.
Even RCS is freaking fragmented as well. Take for example E2E encryption, that doesn't work unless you go through google's servers which you can't really guarantee so you're getting a different "RCS" UX depending on who you're texting and what servers are being used on the backend.
After I switched to iPhone from Android it was like a slap in the face on how much better just communicating to people was on iPhone. Google isn't the fucking hero here.
