I could understand consolidation when you're as big as google and lot of these one-off apps (Duo, Allo, Podcasts, Measure, Hangouts, etc.) are all clearly just testing grounds for either specific features eventually destined for their mainline apps, or just neat ideas that never caught on and couldn't be monetized enough to warrant keeping the service alive.
The real issue is: they almost NEVER actually make the "consolidated" app reach feature parity with the one it gets folded into.
Only recently did smartphone cameras get better at detecting darker skinned faces in software, and that was something they were probably working towards for a decent while. Not all that surprising that other camera tech would have to play catch up in that regard as well.
I believe they've (Google) been somewhat successful in convincing carriers / 3rd party OS devs like Samsung to start implementing RCS in their own messaging apps. There's even a 3rd party app on iOS that can use it now.
Check out the XDA Forums section for your carrier's version of whatever model of phone you have.
Not all carriers make it trivial (or even possible) to unlock the bootloader and flash custom recovery images, but if it's possible then someone there has certainly done it.
This is the leat surprising information anyone could have told me about working for LTT/LMG.
Time and time again, tech jobs and game dev jobs in workplaces run by "old internet edgelords" always (always) results in shit like this.
Do we really need a new post about this, with the same screenshot, every time it happens to someone for the first time?