Agreed. My only point was the business incentives here are very different. Operating and supporting the CDMA network is very expensive both from a dollars perspective AND from the ability to refarm the bandwith to LTE and 5G. SMS, not so much. And still, they can't seem to get the CDMA network shut down in the timeframe they hoped.

It will be years and years before every device out there (not just in the US, but in Europe, Africa and Asia) supports RCS. Unless Verizon wants to say something like "No matter the international plan you have, you can't send messages to people in xxx country, because we don't support SMS/MMS" or unless they want to build a gateway where messages get moved from RCS to SMS in transmitting to other networks and then back again, there's very little incentive to shut down SMS/MMS. The technology to do SMS over data with a gateway has been in place for years (and for instance is 100% the way SMS works with a company like Bandwidth or Twilio) and simply shutting down the traditional 2G/3G SMS paths doesn't necessitate the termination of SMS. Estimates show that in 2018, in the US alone, about 18 billion SMS/MMS messages are sent EACH DAY. Yes, eventually a lot of that will move to RCS, but the older members of my family that still have flip phones won't be moving to RCS any time soon even on their fancy new LTE based flip phones from Verizon. Not to mention all the IoT devices that will take years and years. It isn't practical to think that carriers will force Apple to support RCS any time in the foreseeable future because they won't be able to "shut down" SMS/MMS. Apple choosing to support RCS because of customer pressure, desire to adhere to standards (although that's not really a force at Apple from what I can tell), etc may happen, but I stand by my initial assertion, Apple won't be forced by the carriers to support RCS in order to have their phones work on the carrier networks.