Well, it still is end-to-end encrypted. Just from your end to Apple’s end. 😂

Funny enough I had activated the Advanced Protection (which deletes the iCloud encryption key from Apple’s servers) like a week before that UK thing went into effect. And since Apple isn’t allowed to talk about this, there’s no pressure to deactivate it again so far.

I’ve been there in the early days, when it was still called “Joyn” in Europe. That was around 2008/2009.

It’s just that US carriers have partnered with Google to provide their RCS support.

Not sure if I’d call this “partnered”. AFAIK every carrier can provide their own RCS infrastructure via some data on the SIM. However, as Google wanted to push RCS, they’ve added a fallback to their own servers into the Android Messaging app. And I guess this then became somewhat of a “standard”.

And carriers are busy enough counting all that money we pay them, so they were happy to not having to do anything.