Protocols are greater than apps

I recently installed WhatsApp again when I found myself in need of finding a place to live in a foreign country within a 30-day window. I tried using Telegram, iMessage, or SMS, but people just wouldn't answer me or would ask to move the chat to WhatsApp.

I got the place, but now the real estate agent and the landlord had chats with me, and it felt inconvenient to explain to them to contact me elsewhere. I met other new people, and you can guess the default app where we would start a chat. For every new person, it becomes harder to ignore it.

I now find myself using 3 messaging apps and having to keep mental notes on where to message each person. I've seen one solution that aims to solve this issue by grouping all services in one app, while everyone else can keep using whatever they prefer. It doesn't solve the root cause, and I'd prefer not to keep accounts on all chat apps—plus one.

I'm all for free enterprise, but I don't like the idea of one company having almost complete ownership over the main communication medium between the majority of people. That seems to be the case for WhatsApp and Meta, which is so prevalent almost everywhere.

We could dive deeper on all kinds of matters that revolve around this subject, but a solution I've been excited for is RCS, especially with the support introduced on iOS 18. The protocol exists for a while, but it hasn't been adopted by Apple until recently.

All nice RCS features aside, what I like the most is that each company or developer can build their apps on top of it while maintaining the ability to talk to apps from other parties that implement the same protocol—like email. So even if the majority of people would decide to use a certain app, the company who owns it would have less control, and the tech choice of the majority wouldn't submit individuals who are more opinionated with theirs.

iOS 18 finally arrived, but it came as a surprise that my current carrier in Italy didn't support RCS. Apple supposedly introduced RCS on iOS 18 due to pressure from the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA). However, none of the carriers in Europe seemed to support RCS by the time iOS 18 came out, and they are not even in the scope of the DMA, so they are not legally required to provide the necessary infrastructure to enable interoperability between messaging apps, as sought by the regulators.

Now, two months later, 16 carriers are listed as supporting RCS, but some countries are still left with no support at all. I want to make the jump as soon as I have a supportive carrier near me, but not all of my contacts might have it by then. Messaging apps can always fall back to SMS, but the overall success of such change will ultimately depend on the network effect.