The rollout of RCS on iMessage has been confusing to me. I know some carriers like Mint don’t yet support iMessage RCS; the company’s founder has said that it’s something on their end that will be fixed around December. But I’ve also seen some people on Apple’s forums pointing fingers at Apple.

I want to get a better understanding of what the holdup is. How does the iMessage RCS bridge work? What are the technical challenges? Why was every carrier not working on this for months and prepared for the iOS 18 rollout? And if I’m using Google Messages on an MVNO that doesn’t yet support iMessage RCS, does that imply I can’t RCS message an iPhone user on a carrier that does support it?