It's also noteworthy that the RCS platform adopted by companies worldwide is run by Jibe, a company owned by Google. Doubtless, Apple doesn't want to use Google's servers any more than it needs to.

"open protocol" my ass. Google just wants control over everything.

It seems like all efforts to "bridge" imessage to anything outside apple software work this way - there's a Matrix bridge and a dedicated open source app and they both rely on the imessage client on a mac. Is there a legitimate reason for it not being reverse-engineered yet?

No playlist? Wdym? There's a fork called PipePipe which has comment replies.