I just want working RCS messaging | Hacker News Reader

I just want working RCS messaging

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318 pointsjoecool1029313 comments

Yeah... I just started getting back into building sms/mms/rcs apps on Android and oh boy. It's much more of a mess than I expected, and much more "oh so it's basically just Google now, and they seem to be trying to lock it down further" than I expected (or hoped).

And you can't even implement it yourself because it requires special permissions on Android, which you can only get if you're a carrier/oem-blessed app. And the early "you'll be able to build other apps, there will be an API like this: https://github.com/android-rcs/rcsjta" promises (which would put it on par with sms/mms) never materialized, despite a reference implementation that did exactly that over a decade ago.

At this point I'm just totally against RCS and I'm intentionally turning it off. Why hand all of your messaging communications over to Google, when they've got such a consistent history of being hostile? We're much better off going back to telling people not to use sms (or mms or rcs) at all because it's insecure.

Then in practice it’s just Whatsapp owned by Meta

Signal exists.

Whoever knows how to download WhatsApp, knows how to download Signal.

Our IT department has found a way. Want to get some credentials sent to you (usually just for new accounts)? They send it only via Signal as a out of band method.

This turned Signal into the defacto default in our org.

Signal does some things well, but lacks far behind other apps in UX. It doesn't do cloud backups either, which keeps me from recommending it to less technical folks.

> It doesn't do cloud backups either,

Yes it does.

Signal recently introduced cloud backups. https://signal.org/blog/introducing-secure-backups/

Looks like the needle has moved, but reading the blog it's a recent development and only available in the beta version of the Android app.

They've probably expanded support since the initial announcement

Only in the Beta Android app for now... Signal is around for what, a decade now? And they still can't (or rather, refuse to) do the basic "copy the SQLite DB file to a folder". Edit: and even this beta feature is some bullshit proprietary thing with their own cloud and subscription rather than simply "let me export the DB file and stick it in a cloud provider of my choice".

Last time I had to reinstall my phone I ended up finding an implementation of their phone-to-phone transfer protocol to emulate a "new" device I'm transferring to just to get a dump of the data (I'd share, but don't want them to close this option, since clearly the lack of export option is very much intentional).

Then I deleted Signal and begrudgingly moved to WhatsApp (in addition to iMessage which I've already been using).

Signal has had a backup to a file you can do any you want to for years.

Never on iOS or any other Apple platform. Signal is designed not to be able to backup to iCloud either. The only option iOS users have had over the last few years is to do a device to device transfer where both phones are expected to be in physical proximity and it takes hours to transfer the data. Lost phone has meant losing all chats.

WhatsApp, which is infamous by association with Meta, backs up to Google Drive or wherever.

My biggest problem with Signal is their desktop app is awful. Telegram, for all its faults, has an excellent desktop app.

I hate writing on a phone - anything longer than a few words I use my computer for.

> Telegram, for all its faults, has an excellent desktop app.

Their developers are also very responsive to PR's, I have a couple GCC build fixes in it.

I really soured on Signal early with when running BB10, they would not let us fork and use/distribute websocket builds to get around not having google play services on available on that platform: https://github.com/libresignal/libresignal/issues/37#issueco...

I'm still a little sour on it now because there's still no way to transfer the identity since they refuse itunes/icloud backup, refuse any way to export a key, and I have to look at hideous corporate memphis icons every time I set up Signal new again on iOS (at least Android doesn't have the last thing).

I mentioned before, but I use mautrix-signal to be able to have a unified (except for telegram) messenger on desktop with nheko or element via matrix. It works really well.

In some countries, Whatsapp is pretty much the de facto town square. Friend groups, family groups, event planning, customer support for businesses (though now it's just talking to shitty AI bots), all on WhatsApp. You can't beat the network effects any more. One understands why Meta paid 19b for it.

> And you can't even implement it yourself because it requires special permissions on Android

That depends on your carrier, which is even worse. There are several ways to activate RCS for a phone number, as this standard is meant for carriers rather than app developers, and the carrier gets to choose which one they want.

I think the reference implementation died around the time carriers shut down their RCS servers because nobody was using them. https://github.com/Hirohumi/rust-rcs-client seems to be the most reason open RCS client at the moment (with an Android demo app).

The real need and opportunity for an RCS messenger is on the LineageOS/custom ROM scene, where these permissions are available (you can sign the ROM yourself, after all).

As for the Google stuff, RCS being routed through Google is an anomaly that will hopefully be fixed as carriers add support to it so native Android <-> iOS messaging isn't completely terrible. Progress has been slow outside of countries that still use SMS (like the USA) but eventually we'll be back to normal carrier-based carrier message exchange once things calm down a bit.

On the Android side of things, I don't expect things to change soon, as most of the restricted fields were at one point available to developers and were mostly used to stalk users across installs without their knowledge for tracking and "telemetry" purposes. A country where people actually use SMS/RCS will have to crack down on Google's lack of an RCS API.

The problem with all these problems is that it makes RCS noticeably worse in both normal use and for your privacy than a regular web chat via some other system. And I do not see a path for it that escapes that.

I'm very happy that they're essentially using MLS, that's a real benefit[1]. But other chat apps can (and some do) do that too, without actively driving every single carrier globally to give Google all of your messaging activity. We're better off having diversity.

This all could reverse course and become acceptable, but I don't see how it would happen in practice. It seems much more likely that everyone will just give up and say "yeah that didn't work".

1: Though without alternate impls they can just silently MITM it and how would you know? RCS users: have you ever verified your messaging keys out of band? Do you know how? I can't find it in Messages. The "Universal Profile https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/technologies/netwo..." for RCS that describes a ton of things compliant apps have to do (many of which Google Messages does not seem to do, as far as I can tell) has no instructions at all to show users their keys or provide a common way to verify them (as far as I can tell). Client diversity provides a way to detect some attacks here, but there is currently almost no client diversity, and instead it seems to be shrinking towards just Google Messages, using Google's servers.

As a follow-up, since I can't edit any more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45980788

^ They are correct, the MLS / E2EE part of RCS is quite new and not yet implemented ~anywhere. So it gets no points until widespread, and this is now a decade after RCS's introduction. I think we can expect it to take a long time yet, if at all.

> eventually we'll be back to normal carrier-based carrier message

Why would you want to go into this closed model, where you’ll likely be charged per-account? How is this any better than XMPP, email, or any other IM protocol out there?

Because it's a universal lowest-common-denominator and generally included in the plan you pay anyway for data access.

Should you use it for day-to-day messaging? No. But having it for emergencies is nice - if anything, just to bootstrap an alternative, secure channel.

Then why not use SMS?

Because SMS is horribly limited. 140 chars per message* (less if chars are not plain vanilla ASCII), no support for attachments, group messages, reliable delivery receipts, emoji reactions, etc etc.

* There's a terrible hack called concatenated SMS that strings together multiple messages to build one longer message under the hood, but if any of those parts go missing along the way, the whole thing gets dropped on the floor.

For the proposed use case, you don't need those things, except maybe the 140 character thing, but I've never found that limiting, since phones stitch them together nowadays (and have for the past 15 years?).

Sure, RCS has those functions, but half of them are broken 60% of the time, and you don't need those anyway for bootstraping into wherever you actually want to talk, and for short messaging.

RCS brings nothing to the table if all you need is to tell mum she needs to come pick you up. On the contrary, it might fail you because it tried and failed to send that message over a 4G connection you barely have, rather than sending it as an SMS and then actually arriving. And you're never going to use it for group messages, attachments or with emojis unless its an actual service you intend to use for serious purposes, which is exactly what the comment I was responding to said you weren't going to use RCS for anyway.

I disabled RCS (and iMessage back when I had an iPhone) for exactly these reasons, but still use SMS as a fallback with people I don't actually know and never intend to talk to again, and see no reason to upgrade to RCS even if it wasn't broken, since for my use cases, the extra feature set isn't needed. If I need more fancy features, its for use with people I actually know, and thus people I can get in touch with on not-SMS.

It doesn't change your point, but SMS is limited to 160 chars per message. Twitter was originally limited to 140.

If we're being pedantic, it's 140 bytes, which can be 160 7-bit chars (ASCII), 140 8-bit chars (ISO 8859-x) or 70 2-byte chars (UTF-16).

Mostly because my understanding is that RCS is meant to be a drop-in replacement for SMS and if you’re on a device that supports it (or your carrier-specific configuration of RCS) you don’t actually have a choice and your “SMS” is actually RCS and you must use it and hope it works.

Given that there's a 'Disable RCS' toggle (and a 'Resend as SMS' toggle for that matter) that seems to re-enable SMS and eliminate the RCS weirdness, this doesn't really seem to be true. I guess it could be in the future when carriers disable whatever path SMSes are currently going through, leaving you only with RCS that might still be borked.

I'm not entirely sure what you're claiming here, but broadly speaking no, this is not correct.

RCS is, by spec and in practice, intended to fall back to sms/mms if it doesn't work for some reason (e.g. you're roaming and not connected to your carrier. or have opted out. or they're having an outage. or...).

And there's an opt-out (partly because it kinda requires syncing your contacts to the RCS servers... technically only for "online presence" and for any individual you contact to check their RCS status (which is completely reasonable) but do you know where that presence toggle is in Google Messages? I don't).

The fallback is not really automatic or anything, RCS's feature-set is gigantic and allows senders to have far more control over the message's presentation (https://developers.google.com/business-communications/rcs-bu... currently has visual examples of this). It's rather clearly a "built for businesses" system, at least in part. But "RCS might not be available" is very much a core expectation for the stacks as a whole - the world is a big place, and there are many old phones and out of date apps, even if every carrier gets on board. (this is very likely one of the reasons why everyone's just piling into Google's stuff)

If they ever get things working, they might try to force it everywhere, but that's probably like a decade or three away at a minimum. Accurately predicting industry and legal trends on that kind of horizon is basically impossible. They might be planning on it (I have no evidence either way), but achieving is an entirely different matter.

> generally included in the plan you pay anyway for data access.

Er, what? The main reason why most of the world moved from SMS to internet-based messaging is because SMS was far more expensive.

> having it for emergencies is nice

In what kind of emergency could SMS be useful?

> just to bootstrap an alternative, secure channel.

But you need to exchange SMS numbers to do that. You might just as well exchange emails, XMPP, or whatever other protocol your going to use later and skip SMS entirely.

My novice read of it is that Google made the mistake of trying to hand off the management burden to carriers, since they felt that the way to make something universal like SMS/MMS is to include carrier support.

But that obviously didn’t work because there are hundreds (thousands?) of cellular carriers around the world and they are the wrong people to manage such a thing.

So they basically are steering it back to “Google’s shitty iMessage.”

The universal thing isn’t the carrier anymore, the universal thing is the Internet that runs on top of it, which is perhaps why just about everyone outside the US tends to use messaging apps like WhatsApp/Signal/WeChat/etc.

Every time I have gotten a SIM card in a country south of the US-Mexico border, the carrier spams the text messaging. But nobody else uses it.

In the US we don't reliably use WhatsApp, iMessage is locked down, and Signal, etc., are just for tech bros or political hacks. Yet, everyone wants to text instead of call, so we are in this world where we need to make RCS work, and they are just not putting in the effort.

You might be surprised at how many “normies” are getting on board with Signal.

The user base pales in comparison to WhatsApp but it did double in the last couple of years.

If you’re not a nerd, signal is like a batlight for people doing stupid shit.

https://xkcd.com/1102/

What I mean is that in Mexico, Brazil, and many other countries, WhatsApp is the de facto messaging standard. Businesses expect you to have it, restaurant ordering is integrated with it, etc.

In the US, we don't have anything except SMS/RCS.

It turns out that the only thing worse than the platform monopolist was the old phone carries monopolies.

> just about everyone outside the US tends to use messaging apps like WhatsApp/Signal/WeChat/etc.

This is The Way. Well, several ways, since you inevitably end up a bit fragmented, but usually a country will settle on one, usually WhatsApp. Further east Telegram is also popular.

...and then WhatsApp starts to send ads in push-notifications that you can't turn off. And you either have to live with it, or be a massive black hole in your friends communities.

I don't know if RCS is the way, but monopolistic messaging apps definitely aren't.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/474179/how-do-i-di...

> and then WhatsApp starts to send ads in push-notifications that you can't turn off

*that you can't filter.

Every time an app begs me to enable notifications, I give it the side-eye because I immediately assume it's going to include notifications that I don't want to see, which are essentially ads for some app feature / some part of their walled garden.

I want to be able to filter notifications at the OS level. That could be by a substring search on the content of the notification, or by a unique-per-call-site (in the code) identifier included in the API the app uses to surface a notification (though I suspect most apps would just re-use the same identifier everywhere because the developers don't want me to be able to filter their ads).

My point was that such services will always enshittify.

With RCS, you have at least multiple providers and the ability to switch without being socially exiled.

> but usually a country will settle on one

Isn't it fair to say the US has settled on iMessage and, to a lesser extent, RCS/SMS?

> My novice read of it is that Google made the mistake of trying to hand off the management burden to carriers, since they felt that the way to make something universal like SMS/MMS is to include carrier support.

I'm not sure who you are calling "carriers", but it sounds like the people who own a mobile network. They buy gear off a supplier like Nokia / Huawei, contract them to install and maintain it, then make their money back over time by selling the bandwidth to consumers and hopefully a "free" phone as well.

They aren't the engineering power houses the telco's of old were, like AT&T. Rather they are reverse - a marketing powerhouse, duking it out with other marketing power houses. Their technical know how is close to 0. In fact on the retail support side, it might even be negative. When I deal with them, I come away with the impression would have trouble fixing a propelling pencil. If Google thought they could manage a massively parallel e2e messaging stack, they were deluding themselves.

This is the real reason Huawei was banned by the West. It wasn't just that it meant they were using Chinese make the gear, with opaque Chinese firmware, although I guess that was bad enough. It was that if the telco's bought Huawei, Huawei ran it for them. "Ran" means hands on, 24 hours a day, with in Huawei engineers deployed around the country keeping it ticking. Having a Chinese company running your countries mobile phone infrastructure was an impossible swallow.

Yeah. I'm as frustrated as you are. I had an app in the app store even with all the restrictions around SMS, but there's simply no way to integrate with RCS, so this is basically Google's iMessage.

+1. I was a strong proponent of RCS earlier. Don't care about Green/Blue bubble nonsense. But Google (an Ad company) started abusing RCS to send garbage ads my way. And there is no way to block that as well except for disabling RCS. I feel this is a loophole Google can abuse where local regulations ban vendors for sending promotional messages.

Whatever it is, Google of all org should not be at the Helm of this.

And the amount of moral policing they did to apple. Disgusting assholes. I hate Apple for a lot of reasons. iMessage is definitely not one of them.

The only Google product that people will not ultimately regret adopting is golang, and even that is debatable.

I know this is a niche complaint but I hate packaging golang things. On Gentoo contributors are stuck hosting giant dependency tarballs since you need the modules to build a package and we sandbox networking while building.

I definitely think people will regret adopting Golang in time. It's this generation's Java, except without an smooth off-ramp in Kotlin/Scala and even less of the benefits.

> Why hand all of your messaging communications over to Google, when they've got such a consistent history of being hostile?

The alternative is to hand all your communications to carriers, who have a consistent history of being incompetent, extortionate and bending over to authorities to disclose everything you've ever said at the drop of a hat. Exhibit A is SMS, which is totally unencrypted, plagued by bad actors, and a cesspool of spam and fraud.

In an ideal world you could choose who does your RCS, in the same way that you can pick your email provider, but the way it's baked into the telco ecosystem makes this basically impossible.

The year is 2076. An independent panel of experts has finally confirmed Sam Altman achieved AGI, for real this time. Quantum computers are factorizing numbers left and right. Cold nuclear fusion got so cold that we have to warm it up a little. Americans are still trying to communicate over something called "SMS", a text message protocol from 1993, but nobody knows why.

A task force of former nuclear fusion scientists has been established to fix bluetooth audio quality for once and forever.

Come on! Get real!

Invalidate every patent that is older than the maximum lifetime allowed by law, and you'll see it magically fix itself up.

IPv6 is almost fully adopted, for reals

Woah let's calm down, we were talking about the future not some future sci-fi fantasy land.

I actually took this to heart and deployed it natively on multiple VLANs in my home. Then, even with the abundance of address space, Comcast pulled the ability to use IPv6 in this manner and I'm back to to using NAT on all my VLANs except for one. Progress.

> Comcast pulled the ability to use IPv6 in this manner

Can you expand on this?

It's been a while since I've explored IPv6, but I'm on Comcast and I recently switched from OpenWRT to an Ubiquiti router and was surprised that 1) it doesn't enable IPv6 by default and 2) It asks for configuration [2] that I'm not sure how to answer. I thought everything "just worked" with Router Advertisement.

[2] https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005868927-UniFi-Gat...

In a nutshell, Comcast used to provide a /60 to residential customers and this could be subnetted into more than one LAN. Nowadays they only provide a single /64 and this can only be used for one subnet.

It sounds like your router can request a larger prefix length than /64 and Comcast will give up to a /60. That requires a router that knows how to do that.

That seems like reasonable approach when most people just need /64, and those who want more have to configure to get it.

Comcast USED to give up a /60 when requested; they now ignore the request and provide a /64.

the problem with SMS is not the year it was made. TCP is much older

Every time the "backwards Americans are still using SMS!" snark comes up:

* SMS is cheaper in America than in Europe where carriers gouge their customers for it.

* Usually this means the non-Americans are just using WhatsApp (owned by Meta/Zuckerberg) instead, which is hardly something to be proud of.

I don’t know a lot about the rest of Europe on this, but here in France it’s been more than a decade SMS are unlimited in mobile plans, and these plans are quite cheap.

We also have free roaming in the whole Europe.

Whatsapp came out 16 years ago. Yes, the main driver for adoption was avoiding fees. They still emphasize it being free to this day.

The adoption of messaging apps caused a lot of carriers to reduce or eliminate the SMS fees, as they saw the business was evaporating.

Carriers actually massively jacked up SMS fees, just not for consumers.

One of Signal's main cost centers is activation SMS messages. For many other small players it is a significant factor too.

Finding and eating roadkill is cheap too, free even. Free protein in this year? Yeah, I'd rather do that than use fucking SMS for anything.

Dogs eat roadkill and poop. Dogs are very popular. You may have a point!

Ignoring pride, WhatsApp has major advantages over SMS/MMS, including high-quality media, group chats that actually work, free international messaging, video calls, and (unless they're lying) encryption.

I would be pleased if everyone who uses SMS with me switched to WhatsApp. I would be more pleased if they switched to Signal, but the UX benefits of either one are significant.

I was in a working RCS chat with two Android users. One of them switched to iOS and it’s been sheer chaos ever since. The conversation splits and rejoins, messages randomly choose which copy to appear in, my view is full of little daily notes that I added and removed the switcher from the conversation (of course I didn’t), old titles for the group are resurrected and then disappear…and the Mac client has a few of its own quirky ways of destroying the same chat.

FWIW, RCS group chat on Android being horribly broken is actually a feature if you have kids. I've spoken to many parents of girls in the 7 - 13 age group (and have two myself), and the amount of drama and bullying due to iMessage group chats is several orders of magnitude higher than what kids with Android experience.

I actually think iMessage group chats should have a minimum age limit, from a kids perspective they are no different than Snapchat et al.

You think the messaging protocol itself is causing heightened bullying?

Messaging protocol features determine social aspects. Harder to bully someone in a group chat if there isn't a group chat.

There are dozens of ways to have a group chat. iMessage is not enabling this in any meaningful way.

There are, but if kids are using iMessage for it and not using other things even though they could, not having iMessage can serve to insulate a kid from it.

Parental controls may prevent some of the kids from installing third-party messaging apps, or maybe they're just unwilling to. There are a weird number of adults in my social circle who I can't convince to do so, though I'd imagine kids to be a little more flexible.

Kids in most european countries use whatsapp even though they are under the minimum age.

Ban an app, another appear. Ban all apps and they would join any of the services that provide a web frontend. Kids in the late 90's/early 2000 were using IRC when ICQ and MSN messenger didn't support group chat, usually from a web client before they were introduced to mirc and other irc clients.

Bottom line: they would find a way.

Yes. That's also part of the technical experience that also changes the resulting social landscape. I used to think "what's the point of banning something if people can get it anyway" but after seeing how cannabis became hyper-commercialized in the USA, I see that both the ban and evasion are just part of the game. (Which nobody should get prison for)

Not the protocol, the group chat UX. iMessage gives kids easy access to a place where they can create groups, name them, invite and kick out other kids at will, and send messages + audio/video. It's minimally different from Snap or Discord - except that those actually have parental controls, and there is no easy way to disable iMessage group chats.

The equivalent is simply lacking from Android due to RCS group chat being a broken mess.

I'm surprised you seem to presume that WhatsApp, Discord etc. wouldn't immediately fill the gap.

At least in Berlin (School and Uni) my experience was that WhatsApp was far more prevalent already (due to more mixed Android/iOS environment likely).

If all the "mean girls" are on iMessage, then being on Android is insulating.

yes. Android is "broke broke", so the cool kids won't use it

Src: my 12 yo daughter

> create groups, name them, invite and kick out other kids at will, and send messages + audio/video.

All of that has been (and still is) available on everyone's phones since the dawn of time except for "name them": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service

  - create group: send an MMS message to whoever you want in the "group". Now you have a group chat.
  - invite people: send a new MMS message including all past participants and the one additional participant.
  - kick them out: Send a new MMS message including all past participants except for the person you want to remove.
  - send messages + audio/video: MMS supports all of this.

   > kick them out: Send a new MMS message including all past participants except for the person you want to remove.

That's forming a new group. When I'm kicking people out of my group it's because I no longer want them to participate.

It's the same thing. Just like how a "cash discount" is the same thing as a "credit card surcharge", the end result is the same regardless of how you word it. Simply stop using the first group. You can even be explicit by sending a message to the first group of "I'm forming a new group without Becky because she's a loser" or you can start the new group with a message "I started this new group without Becky because she's a loser" which has the added benefit of humiliating Becky as she keeps sending messages to a group that will not respond to her.

I don't know if you are purposefully being pedantic here, but they are very different things. Even as an adult who has been in several of these very active iMessage group chats with "mutual bullying", they are vastly different from any of the RCS/SMS groups I'm in due to some of the features in iMessage.

What are those features? I've never used iMessage but my ultimate point is that iMessage isn't enabling bullying, it just happens to be the platform these kids are currently using. The same bullying tactics have been possible since long before the iPhone existed.

So far semi-extrinsic provided a list of features they think is uniquely enabling bullying in iMessage but I've just established those features are actually commonly available to everyone, so what other features does iMessage have that uniquely makes it enable bullying compared to MMS?

I don't have an iPhone but surely you see how the UX is very different between:

(a) create new group minus Becky and minus all previous messages, plus every participant has to migrate over (b) "admin" kicks Becky and no one else has to do anything and all the history and context is retained

> plus every participant has to migrate over

I've been in plenty of MMS group chats where we've had to create a new group to add or remove someone (for non-bullying reasons) and it has always gone smoothly without issue. SMS/MMS apps tend to sort your list of groups by most recently received message, so as soon as people stop using the first group it will naturally decay to the bottom of your list where no one looks.

> "admin" kicks Becky and no one else has to do anything

"admin" creates a new group chat, no one else has to consciously do anything because they're just selecting the group that has the most recent messages and therefore is at the top of their SMS/MMS app.

There is one difference here in that with SMS/MMS there is no "admin" so anyone can create new groups, but if you're going to start evicting people without buy-in from the group then the dissenters are just going to form their own groups anyway regardless of platform.

> all the history and context is retained

That is a fair point, you wouldn't maintain the history/context but how important is that for bullying? My ultimate point here is that fastball is correct in that the iMessage platform isn't enabling bullying, it is just the kids preferred platform. We have all been perfectly capable of the same bullying since long before the iPhone existed, and I don't think losing history/context when forming new groups changes that.

Have you ever actually been in an MMS group chat?

MMS is the worst standard in telco and that's saying something. The spec is impossibly complex, so it's not properly supported by carriers or device manufacturers, and even basic cases like "send this photo" fail alarmingly regularly.

Yeah, I really tried to cover a part of how it's so bad in my post. It's really something from a different time. There's a lot of the old WAP 1.0 kind of thinking where the carrier ran their own proxy to make the content consumable by the end device due to limitations at the time. If you don't fetch the content off the MMSC in time it expires. I know there's lots of RCS spam complaints, but the carriers ran email to MMS gateways that had abuse for years.

Verizon had the wackiest system with their vtext service where it really tried to customize more than the GSM carriers and they ran their own web portal. When they phased that out a few years ago it broke picture scaling for pretty much all non-iphone devices on their network. This is another big reason I wanted working RCS because if I send a picture to Android users on Verizon it ends up scaled down.

I have owned a mobile phone since 1996-ish IIRC (Nokia 1610).

I have sent exactly zero MMS messages successfully. They've always failed on some stupid carrier setting being wrong. I've also "received" MMS image messages - that were links to a carrier portal because the image could not be delivered.

It's a shit standard that nobody bothered to implement properly =)

how is that different than regular kids groups at school and/or in the playgrounds?

It’s more insidious, and “always on”. The bullied have no respite from the bullies. As someone who was horribly bullied at school I can only imagine the horror kids face now. It’s not the technology per se, it’s the fact that society seems to think it’s not only ok but often expected for kids to have smartphones and all the digital footprint that goes along with them.

I was brought up in a household where we had very limited access to TV. As a teenager I thought this was terrible. As an adult I realise what a huge benefit it was to me. I am sure that the same goes for kids and smartphones and group chats. They are not necessary. No one is missing out.

> The bullied have no respite from the bullies

I feel like I am missing something important here.

The great-grandparent comment was talking about things like not being invited/kicked out of group chats, not being spammed/harassed through the messaging protocol in question.

Unless I am genuinely missing something important, I agree with the grandparent comment. How does not being invited to certain group chats is different from not being invited to "cool kids groups" at school/playgrounds? As in, how is it "always on"? Not being invited to a chat or being kicked out of a group chat isn't "always on".

I have experience where my child with a working android phone was socially excluded by the girls with hand-me-down Apple products because she couldn't "text" with them. Most of them didn't even have working cell service, just iMessage over wifi.

SMS is legitimately a trash protocol. I don’t text people without iMessage either. Either they get signal or we don’t communicate.

You know this is because apple intentionally makes their SMS shitty right?

I was able to send full fat (640x480 at the time) videos to people over SMS in 2008 using a flip phone. I was able to do group chats and share photos and all sorts of nice things.

I could do all that in android land as well over SMS with other android users, before RCS.

It's only when my iPhone having family members attempt to send me multimedia texts that things don't freaking work. My dad's new wife tried to send me pictures of their wedding and Apple reduced them to a hundred pixels because fuck you.

Partly yes its apples fault. Im too bought into their ecosystem to switch though. Either way my biggest problem with SMS is the 5+ second delay that I always seem to have. Impossible to have a conversation like that.

SMS is shitty because it is unreliable and always has been because the carriers proxy it. It delivers late or not at all at rate beyond what is usable for anything important.

Some of this blame can be placed on carriers but they don’t care.

SMS is terrible because it’s always been terrible, and carriers didn’t care. You can blame Apple for not making iMessage open but it’s just absurd to claim that SMS was ever good to an audience of people who’ve used it. RCS isn’t perfect but it fixed so many problems which SMS had back before the iPhone even launched.

on Android they will just experience social exclusion

iPhone users can also experience this if unlucky :D

"Missing out because my parents are lame" is a minor social stigma that kids will (should!) experience in many situations anyways. The benefits significantly outweigh the drawbacks.

Minor?

Friendships are importance for psychological health and development.

When you're excluded from the primary means of communications with potential friends, and can never find out where and when they are meeting to get together, it's not "minor".

So you buy your kid an iPhone to be friends with green bubble bullies on iMessage? They're probably not the best potential friends anyway.

Guess what, it's also common to buy kids clothing that lets them fit in, a haircut that lets them fit in, and let them watch the movies and TV shows other kids are watching so they can fit in. Kids want to fit in, in order to make friends, and it's healthy to make that easier than put arbitrary obstacles in their way.

And who's talking about bullies? When most of your kids' potential friends communicate using iMessage, it seems pretty presumptuous of you to say that they're all "not the best potential friends anyways." Actually, they might turn out to be great friends, because people are complex, and their messaging preference isn't determinative of their entire personality, or much of it at all.

Wanting to fit in is normal but unfortunately not everyone can afford to. There are a good amount of people out there who shame others for using Android ("green bubbles") because they treat their iPhone as a status symbol. If anything the arbitrary obstacles are put up by Apple and the people who choose to exclusively use iMessage because every other messaging service works on any device.

Used iPhones are cheap. Kids don't need to be treating their phone as a status symbol. iMessage just genuinely works better. Blame Apple all you want, but don't make your kid suffer socially for it.

> Used iPhones are cheap Not everyone wants to buy used.

> Kids don't need to be treating their phone as a status symbol. Nobody needs to treat anything as a status symbol but they do. You see it all the time with different brand names, including Apple. It could even happen with different/older models.

> Blame Apple all you want, but don't make your kid suffer socially for it. Buying your kid an Android phone should not make them suffer socially. It's just as capable of running quality messaging apps minus the arbitrary exclusivity of iMessage. I wouldn't want my kid using iMessage even if they had an iPhone just because it will exclude other kids for no good reason.

Buying your kid an Android phone shouldn't make them suffer socially, in a just world.

But in the real world, if it does, then buy them the damn phone. Used, if that's the only way to afford it and that's what they want.

Don't make your kid suffer because of your stance on a corporation. That's just being mean to your kid. Go ahead and use Android yourself if you want, but don't do that to your kid if they're having trouble making friends and Android is a reason. That's just cruel.

This kind of thinking is wild to me. Apple is only enabling this behavior. It's the kids themselves who are excluding others by only using iMessage and shaming other kids for their green bubbles.

Nobody wants their kids to be bullied so I understand. But even worse than that I wouldn't want my own kid to be a bully. Kids are going to be a lot more likely to bully others if they befriend others who are bullying.

I think you're exaggerating or misunderstanding this.

It's not bullying or shaming by most kids. It's just, including SMS in an iMessage group chat is a terrible user experience. It's genuinely super annoying and breaks all the time. To the kids, the Android kid basically just has a broken phone. The kid won't get added to group chats because it doesn't really work.

If you give your kid an iPhone it's not going to turn him into a bully. That's absurd. It's just going to let him be included in the group chats where friendships grow and plans get made.

Don't make a poor kid suffer when there's no reason for it. Their suffering is not going to make Apple disable iMessage.

Look up green bubble bullying - it's a real thing.

> The kid won't get added to group chats because it doesn't really work.

Yes, but exclusion is a form of bullying. Apple is enabling it by making iMessage only work on Apple devices. There are many other messaging apps that are far better than SMS and are inclusive. It's better to encourage everyone to use one of those.

> Don't make a poor kid suffer when there's no reason for it.

It's quite literally the poor kids who suffer from things like this. It's not just fancy phones that they miss out on. Could be clothing brands, games, toys, etc. being used by kids to exclude others. Buying into everything is not a solution.

I didn't say bullying doesn't exist -- I'm saying it's not the case with most kids.

> It's better to encourage everyone to use one of those.

But if you can't succeed at this (and you won't), then don't make your poor kid suffer. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

> Buying into everything is not a solution.

No, but buying a few important things goes a long way. A cool pair of shoes isn't functional, but sharing the same communications platform is. And you can buy a lower-end used iPhone on eBay for next to nothing.

I have a parent who thought they were fighting a lot of these battles and on the "right side", and I was miserable because of it. Don't do this to your kid. Making friends is hard enough without a parent putting even more obstacles in the way.

This seems to be a disingenuous comparison. With RCS it’s supposed to work but it’s broken, which is your “parental control.”

But I don’t think either platform lets you control messaging group chat functionality this way. They just offer approved contacts and complete disable as your options to control messaging.

I also think your “amount of drama” might be badly measured simply because the majority of kids in the US use iOS.

87% of teens have an iPhone.

https://www.pipersandler.com/teens

I don’t think this is a messaging technology problem. So I don’t see how broken technology should be perceived as a solution or silver lining.

I have an iphone, previously had an android. I had trouble with RCS chats and then did the "Don't have your previous device" part here, https://messages.google.com/disable-chat. And since then things have been pretty good for me.

RCS has been a royal pain for me on Android, too. Partially my fault since I'm using non-default ROMs (LineageOS on my Fairphone 4, which I then replaced with GrapheneOS on my Pixel 9a), but also mostly Google's fault for taking as janky of an approach as possible when it comes to its Messages app (which seems to be the only actively-maintained Android SMS app with RCS support, because of course it is).

The Graphene folks have at least been making progress on getting it working (my understanding is that Messages expects special permissions from Android and Play Services that GrapheneOS has to specifically whitelist without blowing massive holes in the Google Play sandbox, and without those permissions it fails to verify the phone number for certain carriers — T-Mobile included, in my case). Hopefully whatever fix they come up with works for the long haul; it was really annoying to have RCS working fine for all of two weeks only for it to immediately start failing again when the required RCS endpoint switched from Google's Jibe instance to whatever T-Mobile is allegedly maintaining themselves.

To be fair this is a north america problem.

The rest of the world is on WhatsApp and doesn't even know what RCS messaging is.

But here in North America,we like pain.

Are there reasonable foss WhatsApp clients?

Not that a Meta product is a perfect solution either

Early adopter syndrome strikes again. None of my friends or family have Whatsapp, Whatsapp doesn't (currently) work with other services, and all of us have had SMS for nearly as long as we have had cell phones.

Slow cable Internet and 120v residential electricity are two more examples. I fortunately have fiber now, but I'll be stuck dreaming of 240v outlets and appliances for the rest of my life.

Ovens, induction cooking, electric car charging, dryer etc is already 240V at high amperage. With a dedicated circuit.

EU also mandates dedicated circuits for big appliances, so there is no difference in practice.

The two things I can think of are electric kettle and a raclette machine.

Tools are mostly battery powered those days. A home workshop would most likely be wired in 240 or three phases anyways.

What else are you missing?

Alas, my workshop didn't come with 240 already run, so that was an added expense to get my welder set up.

An electric tea kettle that didn't take an hour to warm up would be very nice.

My well pump runs on 120v, and when the motor kicks in the whole house knows.

240v has lower voltage drop over distances, puts off less heat due to lower amperage for the same wattage, and since we're dreaming, we could switch over to a sane plug design like Type F or G instead of A and B.

> An electric tea kettle that didn't take an hour to warm up would be very nice.

I've been using electric kettles in north america and whilst they take longer, we're talking 5 minutes not an hour.

Some hyperbole can be appropriate but you're just being disingenuous here, or you've never actually used a kettle.

I don’t believe early adoption applies to SMS. In a lot of Europe people just migrated from SMS to other services around 2010 because it worked better

Yeah but sms just doesn't support modern messaging (rcs probably does).

Very poor quality for images and videos, emoji reactions, editable messages, deletable messages, group administration.

You've got 240V in your panel. You can make any outlet in your home a 240V outlet if you want.

That's a great way to warm up your house if the wires between the panel and the outlet ain't rated for the higher amperage ;)

Running the same wattage device at 240V instead of 120V would decrease the amperage, assuming the device was designed to handle either voltage.

My desktop PC uses about 600W running at full tilt. It can take 120V or 240V. At 120V, it will pull 5A to run its 600W load. At 240V, it'll only use 2.5A. This means for the same gauge of wire, it'll experience less resistive losses and thus be cooler and less prone to overheating.

You wouldn't change the outlet to a higher amperage outlet, you'd just change to the 240V equivalent of that same amperage rating. For the US, it looks pretty much the same as a regular wall outlet but has the blades horizontal instead of vertical. Something like this:

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Leviton-15-Amp-250-V-NEMA-6-15R-...

> Running the same wattage device at 240V instead of 120V would decrease the amperage, assuming the device was designed to handle either voltage.

Well yes, but usually the whole point of switching to 240V is to get more power than what 120V can supply. The people complaining about electric kettles being “slow” in the US compared to the EU would still be complaining if those kettles always pulled the same number of Watts on both 120V and 240V, because it's the Watts that determine how fast the water heats up. The amperage is therefore probably going to be at minimum approximately the same in that case — and probably higher if you're doing something more intensive (and therefore requiring more current) with that new 240V outlet than just running an electric kettle (like running a stove or a clothes dryer or an air conditioner or an electric car charger or a rack of 10+ of those 600W-PSU-laden computers — hence those usually getting beefier 20A+ circuits while everything else in a house might be 15A).

Theres some argument they might be 208 (75% power for resistive heat), rennovations for apartments suck, etc.

The rest of the world isn't on WhatsApp. What a bizarre claim. Vietnam uses Zalo. Japan uses Line. Korea uses Kakaotalk. China uses WeChat. Iran is Telegram.

And in the US more people are using iMessage than SMS thanks to iPhone's 58% market share.

The other countries not mentioned are on Facebook's Messenger.

I think Germany has a high amount of users on Signal, it's quite interesting seeing the stats about messaging apps in different countries, it's very fractured internationally while being very consistent inside borders.

I for one fucking hate that most of Sweden uses FB Messenger, it's the clunkiest of them all, and since I don't like using it all I constantly miss important messages from friends from not having the app installed and checking Facebook once in a blue moon :/

>it's very fractured internationally while being very consistent inside borders

I think it's caused by the network effect [1].

>I for one fucking hate that most of Sweden uses FB Messenger

I agree. Denmark is the same, everybody uses FB Messenger or, even worse, Snapchat.

And don't even get me started on payment systems: Sweden has Swish, Denmark has MobilePay, Italy has Satispay, etc. It's completely fractured and it's so annyoing when travelling across the EU.

At least there's a new European system called Wero [2], I wonder if it's going to help fixing this situation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

[2] https://wero-wallet.eu/

This is probably a lot more work than you're willing to put in, but the Facebook Messenger bridge for Matrix has actually been reliable, set'n'forget, and headache-free for me, whenever I have to use it for Marketplace.

I wouldn't otherwise mention it, but this is one of the few sites where "Stand up your own messaging server" isn't a completely insane suggestion.

That's not dominant anywhere right now. Facebook now somehow merged it back to the main app... again.

Check India and Indonesia next, there's quite a lot of WA users for you.

Nobody claimed there weren't a lot of WhatsApp users.

always has been. some countries used AIM, Others Yahoo messenger, others MSN.

> Iran is Telegram

I don't know about you, but I personally talk with Iranians more on Whatsapp than telegram. I know the Iranian government did ban whatsapp for a while, but its still popular. I remember reading an article on here about a whatsapp leak, and it mentioned that there are over 60 million whatsapp users in Iran. Considering that Iran has a population of around 91 million, that's a huge majority of the country.

Can confirm, my family back in Iran doesn't use Telegram and haven't for quite some time. They're all on WhatsApp. Telegram seemed to be popular in Iran during the Whatsapp ban and it switched back to Whatsapp being dominant it seems. Which is very annoying to me because I loathe Meta and don't use any of their products.

If only Signal wasn't blocked/banned in Iran without a proxy...

I remember installing WhatsApp and it proceeded to delete all contacts from my phone. Haven't ever installed WhatsApp ever since. Have told people to either contact me through e-mail, google chat, LINE, discord or irc after that incident.

> The rest of the world is on WhatsApp and doesn't even know what RCS messaging is.

Absolutely _not_ the case here (France), the overwhelming default is SMS (and now RCS). Sure people use WhatsApp but also Telegram just as much these days, but in both cases it's _not the default_.

Maybe because it's been, I don't know, one to two decades that SMS have been unlimited in even the most basic plans.

Also RCS Just Works here, I've seen my non-Apple contacts move to RCS over time as they got OS or phone upgrades.

I'd blame NA carriers, which, from afar, seem to have a habit of screwing up in so many ways.

I refuse to use Google's builtin messenger so RCS definitely won't "Just Work" with me...

I guess it depends on each other’s bubble. In France my perception is that most messaging is on Whatsapp. Not that I’m happy about that…

I don't know- I'm in England whastapp is the default and it makes me sad.

I was hoping when I first learnt about RCS that it could be an alternative to Meta owning everyone's comminications channels, but I've given up that hope a fair while ago.

> The rest of the world is on WhatsApp

That's not true at all. Random data point. Estonia. I have a _single_ contact that uses WhatsApp. Everybody else is reachable via FB Messenger/Discord/SMS/Signal/Google Chat/Instagram.

Can you not just sms your contacts? Why everything have to be an app?

Last time I checked the usage percentage of whatsapp was extremely high in the whole world.

China is always an exception,but they are locked partially out of the whole internet

I have WeChat and WhatsApp. From a user perspective they do not differ much.

There is a rumor when both companies tried to enter the Indian market: Whatsapp won.

WeChat assumes there is good reception and fast data transfer anywhere so there is no need to compress pictures and videos.

Whatsapp could be passed as Android APK between phones. And it resizes and recompresses every picture you send.

So thats my guess why WhatsApp won 1/6 of the planets pooulation in India.

The fact that the "rest of the world" is using a messaging app that's owned by one company is ridiculous.

Unfortunately on the web it's like this for almost everything, messaging is no different.

I can use email from multiple providers without issue and it interoperates nicely with anyone else who has an email address.

I'm not saying it's 100% that way, but a large chunk works like that. Videoconference, chat, collaborative document editing are pretty much centralized in the hands of private companies, even if open source solutions do exist.

SMS also has crazy weird limitations with messaging across countries due to ISP pricing, even though the messaging apps such as whatsapp have no problem with this.

> SMS also has crazy weird limitations with messaging across countries due to ISP pricing

Yeah, the carriers shot themselves in the foot here trying to monetize this and they opened the flood gates for replacements to come to fruition.

No, in India RCS is a thing. It’s popular as an spam distribution channel and nothing else, so people may learn just enough about it to turn it off.

One issue with Google's RCS implementation is that they've added root detection, something mandatory if you follow the RCS payments spec. Google will probably eventually want to mirror Apple's "send money*" feature to their messenger which precludes GrapheneOS and other non-official software (including Google's GSI images).

*: unless someone does a chargeback after, which makes the money disappear from your account, a major source of "oops I accidentally sent (too much) money (to the wrong person)" scams

Yeah, that root detection is the bane of my existence, beyond just RCS. Even entirely ignoring my phone having much stronger security than with the stock OS (and therefore rendering the whole “security” excuse to be complete BS), if I want to take on the risk of using an “insecure” device for payments or whatever then that's my choice to make and mine alone.

Your credit card probably has a policy where they take on the liability for fraud. At least in that case, you're not the one primarily taking on the risk for using an insecure device

The risk they'd allegedly take on by letting me use an “insecure” device is far lower than the risk already inherent in, say, the card having an RFID chip in it that anyone can silently scan from a distance unless I happen to have the foresight to buy and use a fancy RF-blocking wallet (that actually does block RF signals), or the card having all of the authenticating info¹ printed directly on it such that anyone who has access to it for the whole three seconds it takes to snap a photo of both sides can then use it to make purchases on quite literally every website that accepts credit cards.

Needless to say: letting me use an “insecure” device for tap-to-pay would considerably lower their risk compared to me not using a device at all and instead using a physical card — even, again, ignoring that my device is in all likelihood considerably more secure (and therefore exposing them to even less risk) than it was in its stock configuration.

----

¹ except for my ZIP code, which is easily guessable if you know roughly where I live — which I don't exactly keep particularly secret!

I use a rooted android phone with a custom ROM and I'm on your side. I was just pointing out that you wouldn't be taking on all the risk if your credit card provider assumes some liability for fraud.

RCS was doomed from the start by virtue of the carriers playing any kind of role beyond acting as dumb pipes. Any standard that the carriers have their fingers in will be doomed to the same fate.

It’s one of the main reasons why WhatsApp, iMessage, etc have such popularity. A cell connection is merely one of many means of access and carriers have no structural role whatsoever, meaning that if you’ve got cell data you’ve got messaging.

Yeah it's kind of wild how many Americans want to regress to the bad old days of SMS. WhatsApp is just so much better. At least it has been for the last decade. Maybe Meta will ruin it soon but if that happens we can all move to Signal (until they ruin it). Either way it's better than giving an ounce of power back to telcos.

Without the carriers RCS wouldn't have been rolled out. it's why the builtin carrier texting apps support RCS.

I guess what I'm getting at is that there should've been standardization around a fully web-based protocol that does not involve the carriers in any way.

Like imagine if instead of investing in RCS, Google instead created a web-based "Advanced Messaging Protocol" or something to that effect, which specifies capabilities roughly in line with those of RCS. The big guys like Google, Apple, Meta, and MS would run their own servers, but there'd be no reason why smaller players like FastMail and Proton couldn't also run them. Most users would just roll with the major providers pre-configured on their platform of choice but more savvy users could choose their own.

That could've rolled out and been adopted and iterated upon far more quickly than RCS has.

Exactly. There's absolutely no reason why I should even need a phone number in 2025. All person-to-person communication (text, call, video, file transfer, etc) should just be an open standard running on TCP.

I hope one day that Matrix becomes this, but it doesn't seem likely. Fingers crossed Proton at least does it one day.

It's weird to me when Google market RCS as universal protocol when it doesn't work on Android devices without Google services.

(I use GraphenOS and couldn't make it work for the life of me)

Wait til you find out Google Voice still doesn't support RCS. (To be fair bandwidth.com runs the service under it and it feels like a product Google wanted to get rid of but was stuck with)

The RCS protocol is universal. Carrier RCS support is minimal, though, and third-party RCS support was never part of the spec and essentially unimplemented.

Google had to pretend to be everyone's carrier to make RCS work because the GSMA spec assumed everyone would download/install their carriers' messenger apps to use RCS, like you would back in the day with SMS/MMS. This expectation was broken the day Google allowed app developers to write third-party SMS apps, but that hasn't bothered the spec people so far.

> GSMA spec assumed everyone would download/install their carriers' messenger apps to use RCS

Who in their right mind would make this assumption? I'd hate to have to explain that one to grandma.

If you have to install an app, you can just install Signal or Element, and not bother with RCS.

Exactly!

My current contacts (out of ~120) only ~20 are on signal ..

So unfortunately SMS will still be around for quite some time

now RCS compared to SMS is a bit more secure (in theory at least), so would rather over plain SMS but never over signal

If Grandma had to install a seperate app to use RCS, she too would probably end up using Signal, since the barrier to entry is the same.

The reason iMessage is popular in the US is the fact that it's functionally just SMS, being used by the default message app. The reason that didn't happen in Europe is that SMS used to cost money to send, so nobody was already deeply invested in that system, but instead rushed to Whatsapp et al., since those were free and SMS was not. SMSes are free nowadays, but by now we're all already invested, and all the apps provide a better experience than SMS and RCS (the former due to lack of features, the latter because its often broken) and even Grandma has Whatsapp to keep in touch with family, if only because little Timmy installed it.

When RCS was designed, carriers still programmed most of the phones, and if not, provisioning SMS messages would program generic vendor implementations on the phones. That's essentially what RCS still does, except now we have phone operating systems that let users freely install system applications.

The iPhone was unique in that it refused to let carriers customize its operating system. That's part of why Apple had to partner with a relatively obscure carrier on launch, while Motorola/Samsung/Nokia/Sony Ericsson/Android phones launched on random carriers all the time.

Many people still buy phones from their carriers which comes with all kinds of apps pre-installed, including carrier-branded SMS apps in many cases.

Everyone in their right mind would have made that assumption when the system was designed. Only some weirdoes at Apple and a few hard-core open source enthusiasts cared.

Of course, that doesn't mean that operating system vendors such as Apple and Google can't simply implement RCS and all the weird carrier quirks they need to deal with in their own apps anyway, and to make messaging available using an API. They already do that kind of stuff with SMS, MMS, location information, internet connectivity, and practically anything else the phone does. They just decided that they're not really gonna bother with an API for this specific trick your phone can do.

> When RCS was designed, carriers still programmed most of the phones

The past truly is a foreign country.

> Many people still buy phones from their carriers which comes with all kinds of apps pre-installed, including carrier-branded SMS apps in many cases.

You're joking, right? I've never seen this in Europe since the flip phone days. I thought we had left that in the past. Most people here buy their phones outright, but even when on a plan, they don't fill your phone with malware.

I'm pretty sure the person you're responding to is talking about the flip phone era pre-iphone. Think Treo 650 / Blackjack era.

Nope, if you go out and buy a cheapish android phone from a carrier in the US today, it will have a ton of shit preinstalled that is carrier specific. Including sometimes messages, visual voicemail, etc.

Apple has basically had the balls to tell carriers to go fuck themselves and do it their way, and it's been a huge boon. Google still hasn't done this enough, IMO.

The context I was talking about how when RCS was designed, carriers still were mostly responsible for "apps" on the phones.

I don’t fully get what he thinks the issue is and how it relates to Google Jibe (which apparently is the RCS-as-a-service platform the US carriers use).

Has Jibe somehow blacklisted his phone? In that case, Apple might technically be right — it’s a carrier issue, but with all major carriers, since he says they’re all using Jibe on the backend.

Anyway, I doubt he’d sound crazy, as he puts it, to the Apple Store people making this case. They might even be sympathetic, but this is probably the best he’ll get, since Apple’s whole protocol is to get you on one centrally preauthorized track or another to having a working phone.

>Has Jibe somehow blacklisted his phone? In that case, Apple might technically be right — it’s a carrier issue, but with all major carriers, since he says they’re all using Jibe on the backend.

That's my guess, yeah. The only unrelated carrier I haven't tried yet is Boost/DISH. I can hop networks on US Mobile but I don't think it'll help. So far I've tried 3 T-Mobile lines on this phone, the US Mobile line on AT&T's network, and my mom's Verizon Wireless line.

> Anyway, I doubt he’d sound crazy, as he puts it, to the Apple Store people making this case.

It's difficult: I probably should have had a write-up before going in, my list in the blog is not complete of steps I tried to get this going. Understand though that all the user facing and employee facing documentation says if it's RCS it must be the carrier.

Had an awesome senior support agent a few calls ago that knew what he was talking about. Actually described previous issues where RCS would not activate early in iOS 26 with a single sim user that had an inactive but not deleted eSIM. I believe the store also repeated a similar mention today.

The senior support agent on the phone just hadn't gotten to the point of fully ruling out an on-phone software state issue. What I mean is I restored a backup from iTunes that their diagnostics reported as incompletely restored. So after our call he wanted me to either try that again or do an iCloud backup. I did the latter, since it seemed to be described as a different restore process that's less likely to copy back a broken state to the device.

Jibe actually will ask iOS for App Attest attestation (this is actually spec, unfortunately: see section 2.11 Client Authenticity in RCC.14)

So it is entirely plausible that they banned the device, I guess. (Or they could have banned the IMEI, as mentioned)

Oh man. It's not just Apple. I've had months of RCS not working on GrapheneOS, and have no idea who to blame. The first time it stopped working, I fixed it by switching carriers (AT&T -> T-Mobile). Maybe I'll try switching back! Or maybe I'll switch back to an iPhone and give in to iMessage. :(

I had the same issue, with Google Fi! The only thing that briefly resolved it was swapping my number over to an older phone running stock android. Stopped working again when I switched back to my other phone. I just ended up turning it off entirely, but it irreparably broke a few group chats I was in.

It worked for me on GrapheneOS for quite a while, but a couple months ago things started breaking and I no longer have it enabled. There's an absolute behemoth of a thread discussing the issue, and unfortunately it's still active which I assume means I'm not safe to enable it again yet. If you want some light reading to help put yourself to sleep: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/1353-using-rcs-with-google-...

Honestly at this point, untangling my group chat mess was such a headache that I'll never turn RCS on again. I need to have 100% confidence that my messages are received and sent, and Google has forever broken that trust re: RCS. I managed to coax most of them over to alternative platforms, but I can't subject my poor grandmother to that headache, so it's SMS/MMS going forward for me.

We send many thousands of delivery notifications per day on SMS over Twilio. I've been wanting to use RCS for a long time (better group notification experiences, branded identification etc). Tried to do so last month: you pay a fee (I think $500) to enable RCS with a third-party only to find out that a small percentage of devices have it enabled making it effectively useless. So we switched to WhatsApp.

> only to find out that a small percentage of devices have it enabled making it effectively useless.

Which means a lot of people actively don't want it and have turned it off or not elected to turn it on when setting up a new phone. I got prompted to turn it on with my now S65 a while ago and said no (I just want basic works-everywhere simple SMS, thanks, for anything fancier I've got chat-app-de-jour. It got turned on anyway so I had to find the option and turn it back off.

Man, I remember a few years ago when I was in a place without good Internet reception, but good enough phone reception. Wanted to send a SMS instead of a WhatsApp message and only noticed hours later that my phone switched to RCS without fallback and my "SMS" didn't go out because of the missing internet connection.

I disabled RCS that day and never enabled it again.

2G and 3G networks are dying. 4G+ is entirely packet based. "Phone reception without internet reception" simply isn't a thing once the final analogue networks die out. That's what RCS is built for.

RCS has the advantage of theoretically being able to get priority through the baseband, but if you're using Google's RCS servers rather than your carrier's, that's not going to work.

> RCS has the advantage of theoretically being able to get priority through the baseband, but if you're using Google's RCS servers rather than your carrier's, that's not going to work.

sounds like a violation of net neutrality

Phone calls also can get priority over plain SIP traffic and SMS messages get transmitted on mobile networks before 3G connections are established to send Teams messages. I don't think net neutrality laws covers carrier network functionality like this.

I'm not a lawyer, though, so who knows.

> and SMS messages get transmitted on mobile networks before 3G connections are established to send Teams messages.

this is different as you already explained

Net neutrality:

> Net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers (ISPs) treat all online traffic equally and openly, without discrimination, blocking, throttling or prioritisation.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/open-int...

I know what net neutrality is. I just doubt it applies to RCS. Packet switched versus circuit switched transmission of digital messages is just an implementation detail.

With the introduction of LTE, everything from calls to texts have been IP based TCP/UDP/maybe SCTP packets. Does WhatsApp get to file a net neutrality violation because the phone's native SIP client gets priority by the modem/carrier? Does Gmail get to file a claim because SMS messages exchanged through SIP are delivered faster than their push notifications? Does Telegram get to file a claim because you have to pay for a megabyte of roaming costs traveling abroad while you only pay for a single "SMS" despite both being a TCP packet? I don't know. I don't expect those claims to apply.

RCS is the same, in that it's a core carrier feature that communicates between your phone's messaging service and your carrier's infrastructure. RCS' envelope is actually quite similar to MMS' design, except MMS' data transmission still had to be implemented in a circuit-switched way because it came from the 3G era.

Google muddied the water by offering carrier infrastructure (an RCS server) worldwide to any phone that wants to connect to it. It's as if I would host my own SMSC I'd let anyone in the world connect to. It's not the normal use case and as carriers are implementing their own RCS services, I expect this anomaly to slowly disappear over time.

The distinction between third party messengers and SMS/MMS/RCS is a good thing, in my opinion. SMS/MMS/RCS providers need to be able to exchange what is essentially a live feed on a phone number with law enforcement at a moment's notice. Messengers like Signal don't. If third party services would fall under the same category as RCS, it'd stand to reason that the same would also apply in terms of law enforcement orders, and I don't think anyone but the law enforcement agencies would want that.

IMS traffic (voice & conventional SMS) runs on a different PDP context or "bearer" (think "VLAN" but on the cellular interface) which is prioritized at the network level over the general-purpose internet access bearer. I assume that if RCS is offered by the carrier then it would also be running over a dedicated bearer.

I haven't seen separate APNs for RCS here†. Since the iOS support, what "offered by the carrier" means in most the world is only (de)registration through IMS service entitlement. Unlike the Google Jibe / Messages pairing done OTT using an SMS token to check your phone number, which is still the case in a lot of countries. Once the registration established, it's plain data traffic to Google servers.

† Here = "global" RCS, de facto controlled by Google. I haven't checked carrier settings for RCS islands such as the deployment in China or Korea.

No, RCS is 'built for' a cheap and thinly vieled attempt for carriers to retain some control over messaging. Oh, and for mass surveillance purposes.

It's not a coincidence that RCS still requires carrier hardware and coordination, despite being an IP messaging protocol. It's also not a coincidence that the protocol did not feature E2EE, despite even student project protocols providing that.

My sister had an issue with RCS not working on her Samsung. It turned out she had a SIM card too old for AT&T to support RCS on it and some Samsung related software issues related to their SMS apps and Google’s SMS apps conflicting. A fresh SIM and a couple software tweaks netted her RCS.

I’d assume this isn’t the issue here but RCS seems to be a bit fickle.

I’m curious about what part of RCS requires specialized hardware support.

There isn't specialized hardware support. As I remember Samsung had their own RCS implementation with some carriers (T-Mobile, possibly AT&T but I'm not sure there). They sunset this and moved to Google Messages. Those android devices would report which servers they used. This of course is hidden from the Apple user.

I was going to make the MMS section of this post about the 'ISIS Wallet' boondoggle that is the closest business parallel I can think of to RCS and actually did require specialized hardware support. Same 3 carriers I've been trying RCS with on the iPhone tried to make a mobile payment wallet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softcard They rebranded it to Softcard since the 'We support ISIS' branding aged like milk. Google Wallet competed and took over the assets, sort of like what happened with RCS.

For the specialized hardware... the SIM card needed to have an embedded secure element that handled the keys for the payment system and the phone needed to support connecting to that secure element on the SIM card. I think these started to hit the market in 2010 or so, and you would have had to have a SIM card new enough to support it, here's a pic of the T-Mobile one, I had one: https://www.tmonews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Screen-Sh...

I had working RCS on Android.

Turns out that random people can add you to groups, send spam and from what I can see you can do nothing to prevent it. I've disabled it.

So don't fret too much about not having it.

Same, it got enabled for me during an iOS update, forgot about it and suddenly got added to groups without my knowledge or consent and after about 100+ spam messages during a night I disabled RCS. What a waste.

That's exactly why they are banning it on lineage and custom roms

Last time I had enabled RCS I received a flood of "DHL needs your address" and "Mom I have a new phone number" scams from the UK and the Philippines. So far I'm not aware of anything useful I've missed out on by not having it enabled.

I had random people adding me to groups to send spam to my phone even before RCS.

In fact, I don't think I've ever received spam through RCS, but I have through MMS and even more so through SMS. Looking back at all the spam texts I've received in the past several months, every single instance was SMS/MMS. Not a single time of RCS.

For some reason Android is quite good at blocking SMS spam these days, except for the RCS group thing. At least for my specific use case, in Europe.

Why bother with Google's new, shiny chat app. Why not use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord, etc which are more neutral apps.

This isn't Google's shiny new chat app. If you take 30s to look up RCS you'll understand what it actually is and its intended purpose.

Yes it is.

No one gave a crap about RCS and no one was supporting it until Google decided that they needed a new chat app because they hadn't made everyone switch in a while.

It's Google's way to openwash their new chat app into a "standard" where 100% of the data runs through their servers in the backend for every carrier they care about.

Yeah I took a look at it: Google added the encryption extensions a full two years before the GSMA put them into the standard so it feels like their new chat app. Not to mention that it’s been around since 2007 and everyone started tailing about it when google started talking about it a couple years ago

I'm surprised at the other responses that you have received.

RCS isn't a Google only thing. And it isn't an "app". It is disappointing that people don't understand that RCS is a great replacement for SMS/MMS.

It had the potential to be a great replacement if it just worked™ like SMS/MMS (well, MMS was also quite fickle back in the days), given it's so brittle across devices even on the same OS, with little means of troubleshooting by end-users and even less from non-tech savvy users, it's kinda dead in the water.

Not dead in the water at all. By default, it is enabled for all Android phones and iPhones

Not true. My carrier only enables it when you have a Samsung phone. I have an iPhone, so no luck.

It really isn't. SMS did not support adding random mobile numbers to a group chat and blasting them with spam. Someone needs to either fix RCS properly for current day use-cases or it just needs to go away.

> SMS did not support adding random mobile numbers to a group chat and blasting them with spam.

MMS did, which far predates RCS.

I understand what RCS is and I don't understand why it matters.

Everything about the concept of a phone number is confusing to me. It's a string of digits that if someone guesses, they can activate the most active notification your phone has (ringing), at any time, no matter if you know them or not. Better yet, depending on your notification and MMS app settings, they might be able to make a dick pic appear on your lock screen on a whim - big spammers of this seem to get marked by the carriers and apps pretty quickly, but for a more targeted one off, still easy.

As opposed to tcp/IP based chat apps that basically require a bilateral human-initiated handshake before someone can message you...

I do receive occasional spam on WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal. Besides the operator spam (try our shiny new AI feature!)

Tying and account to a phone number is a privacy nightmare.

I guess Facebook/Meta does it for easier social graph extraction/profiling, while Signal tried to hand of verification to precent spam. But for the sake of this argument, we may just assume all of them are evil.

RCS is, effectively, Google only.

And there is one singular app which supports RCS.

In many ways, it's a regression from SMS. In that SMS is somewhat universal, and RCS is so specialized it's almost worthless.

It literally isn't Google only. It is enabled, by default, on all iPhones. Stop with the misinformation.

It literally is Google-only. The RCS backend theoretically could be provided by carriers, but they've all chosen not to do that, so the actual service is provided by Google. No matter what the specification says, in reality it's a Google service running on Google's servers.

To put it another way, Google can't kill SMS short of literally removing the app from Android because it's not their infrastructure, but if they shut off their RCS servers tomorrow, it would be dead for good. That's a Google-only service.

It's sad to see so many people are blinded by this. The current situation of RCS is just that Google saw Apple disguised iMessage as SMS and wanted to do the same. RCS is merely a vehicle for Google.

They could just layer their own chat platform on top of Google Messages but we all saw how Google's IM business went along: Chat, Hangouts, Alo, Meet etc. So they muddied the water so deep (to a carrier level) to make it look like it's Apple's issue for not adopting RCS. And people actually fall for it.

Nobody wanted RCS. Even carriers don't want to maintain RCS. They just use Jibe. And that's exactly what Google wanted. My RCS communication with friends don't even show up in carrier's usage. How is that ever different from iMessage...

You know who chose to selfhost their own RCS server? Yes, Chinese carriers! They call it 5G Message. New ad delivery channel for businesses hooray! Instead of plain text and a link, now your campaigns can even have MENUs inside! I can send SMS to a Chinese number, I can send iMessage to a Chinese number, but I can't send RCS. Truly "Universal" profile.

I agree with all of this except for the claim that "Google wanted this". I think Google is as annoyed with this situation as everyone else. They would've preferred to have their own iMessage alternative, but they launched a dozen which all failed, so they went "Well, we can't make our own that people want to use, so let's get the carriers to make an upgraded version of SMS". And then the carriers didn't want to do that but the "it's decentralized!" message stuck with users and even a few governments, so now RCS is the worst of all worlds: it's a de facto Google service, but with a janky, half-baked decentralized protocol, where Google has limited capability to improve it compared to a native Google chat app.

It's a complete shitshow.

Right, and does that use Apple's servers? This is a rhetorical question, we both know it goes through Google, both literally and figuratively. Google effectively controls RCS - if Apple just implemented RCS 'per spec', it would not work. So, there is no spec, it's as if it doesn't exist. That's how that works.

Because getting my mom to use any of those would be a gargantuan task.

Europeans and Africans of all ages don't seem to have a problem with Whatsapp.

They are not referring to a WhatsApp specific UX issue, but to the cognitive load of having multiple apps that you have to remember who to use which for, and their different interfaces.

raises hand I have a bunch of problems with WhatsApp.

Have you tried to restore a backup? You cant, unless it is uploaded to google cloud. No google account, no backup. (including the adress book that's tied to the account, since you are asking, they changed restore rules recently)

Have you tried denying adress book access? Whatsapp barrs you from starting a conversation. But there is the workaround with https://wa.me/+phone ...except for WhatsApp web

Have you ever tried putting Whatsapp in an Android work profile? Now try to export a chat!

Every once in a while a get the task to save all pictures of a conversation and it is usually a pain (If you think its easy, try again in Androids work profile).

From a UX perspective I would never mourn WhatsApp

Btw Google also stopped providing RCS proxy or whatever that was for small mobile providers. Message in settings will just say RCS is not supported, funnily that also breaks Gemini in Messages app, with infinite spinner.

I have this reddit thread bookmarked for how to fix RCS every time I get a new phone:

https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMessages/comments/1be8gxk/fix...

I have sympathy with the technical and debugging plight but genuinely why are people still dealing with this, SMS/RCS is to the US what fax machines are to Japan. You can only put so much lipstick on a pig. Any bog standard IP based messenger has had none of these issues and all of the features that RCS is supposed to fix for a decade.

That’s the best part: RCS is an IP based messenger

But it's still tied to your carrier. I'd really prefer to keep my communication disconnected from my connectivity provider. These should be two completely separate services that I can manage independently. I just want my mobile provider to provide internet. Full stop. Nothing else. But of course they want to inject themselves into as much of my life as possible to make themselves stickier with a nice side of siphoning up more data.

Imagine a world where your ISP also separately provided an IRC messaging service. Why would you ever use that over actual IRC?

This is how I feel about SMS, and phone numbers too for that matter. They're still around for historical reasons, but if we started anew, I can't imagine we would build out that infrastructure separately from the greater internet, and if we would have, I can't think of a reason why.

"hey bro, just download this crappy totally trustworthy app and add me just to talk to me and only me!" is a patently ridiculous thing to try and sell people on.

I don't know, WhatsApp won my local market decades ago by not having to pay 10 cents per message. People didn't really care about encrypted chats until maybe ten years ago, and even today millions are using Telegram for their every day messaging. No idea what the security situation of Vibe and Facebook Messenger are these days, but their numbers also exceed the hundreds of millions together.

Nobody in the US uses these apps, and in my opinion, for the better.

I live in the US, how is this for the better?

We're stuck with iMessage, which Apple is actively hostile towards non-users. Even for me, who had an iPhone, it was a royal pain in the ass. What do you mean I can't see my messages online? I need a Mac? Are you fucking kidding me? I'm a paying customer, why am I being nickled and dimed?

That, and then SMS MMS. Which are so unbelievably bad they're basically worthless.

I shouldnt have to spend 2.5 thousand dollars to get an acceptable messaging experience. I shouldn't. RCS isn't really helping, but the situation is absolutely NOT for the better IMO.

>is a patently ridiculous

It's patently ridiculous to trust the Signal Foundation more than phone carriers? I wasn't aware that AT&T and T-Mobile are run for the benefit of humanity.

Any app that implements RCS is run by gigantic corporations, most of which I'd argue are closer to the US government than even Meta, it's not obvious to me where the ridicule comes in.

RCS is basically email over HTTP, wrapped in a layer of carrier stuff. The same way Visual Voicemail is IMAP but wrapped in a layer of carrier stuff.

The spec also handles video calls, conference calls, sending/receiving money, and just about anything else a modern messenger does.

It just lacked E2EE for the longest time, which makes sense when you consider that the police and secret service have their tendrils in the standards body that publishes the spec.

does it handle group chats, synchronization of messages, identity verification (for e2ee)?

Group chats and just about everything else messaging clients have supported for a decade are part of the Universal Profile that came out nine years ago (file sharing, location sharing, audio messages, etc., although Signal still lacks location sharing so I guess RCS is still ahead of the curve here). These features will not always fall back well to SMS/MMS, though, according to the spec: https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/technologies/netwo...

Synchronisation is not part of the problem it's trying to solve (sending messages between devices), the same way SMS and MMS don't, so that's up to the apps implementing the protocol.

E2EE has been added very recently (https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/technologies/netwo... came out a few months ago), and post-quantum encryption is still being developed. It uses standard MLS (RFC 9420) for messaging, so verification will have to be implemented however normal MLS implementations do it. I don't know if there's a standardised way to do it, I haven't fully read the most recent RCS spec yet.

I oversimplified RCS somewhat, it's not just HTTP wrapped in carrier stuff. It's also SIP, SDP, XML, OIDC, RTP, and JSON wrapped in carrier stuff. Still, page 428 of the second link shows an example of a POST request that you can make after combining all of the tidbits of specification that came before it, and that's where the simple JSON+XML shine through the stack of protocols that are tasked with delivering it. The E2EE layer is basically just sending base64'd encrypted messages over that same interface.

Apps won't be able to synchronize if the service doesn't support it and there is no protocol support for it?

The protocol makes sure a message sent from one phone/tablet/watch makes it to the other end. If you want to synchronise that message between your devices, you'll have to build that locally.

Apple, Google, and Samsung can synchronize SMS messages through their cloud services, so the same also goes for RCS. For more privacy-oriented folk, KDE Connect can also offer SMS messaging to the desktop by synchronising locally with a connected phone.

You're right, but between my carrier and Meta, I'd prefer to trust my carrier, even if it's just to know which window to throw a brick through. Maybe I'm being too European on this, but I'm not willing to hand over basic communications to private industry, especially companies whose entire business strategy is building profiles on people.

I still hope for a protocol to win out that's not tied to one party.

Between your carrier and Meta, the choice is clear, but your carrier is almost certainly not a saint. Between your carrier and literally and open source message service, Signal being the obvious one, the choice is again clear.

Not to mention that the choice isn't really between your carrier and Meta, but rather Google and Meta, since most people on Android end up just using Google servers for RCS, and that choice is much more of a toss-up.

It looks like they're using US Mobile (which resells T-Mobile as "Death Star"). IIRC US Mobile has some big gaps, I wouldn't be surprised if RCS if one of them. With their rebadged Verizon service you don't even get Visual Voicemail

T-Maybe is T-Mobile postpaid, had it since 2014 or so. Death Star is US Mobile AT&T network they brand as Darkstar.

That’s what I thought too. The author appears to have tried every obvious debugging step, except for switching away from US Mobile.

I’ve been using US Mobile myself for a little over a year, and I remember a period of about 2-3 months where most carriers had implemented RCS for iOS on their services, but US Mobile had not, so I couldn’t use RCS for a while. I don’t know what they had to implement to get RCS working on iOS, but it’s possible that their implementation does not work with iOS 26.

Here's a really simple solution... Apple, run your own RCS servers.

That skips the carrier nonsense, and it also means that for iPhone users they're not actually running on google jibe servers.

Thing is. Apple won't do this. Malicious compliance and all.

Why should they? I honestly think they would have been justified giving RCS the middle finger indefinitely. It's effectively google-owned and a shitty protocol (no e2e by default being top of mind).

Also, the idea of wanting the carriers more involved in messaging is hilarious, just use one of the 10+ 100x better messaging platforms. The carries horribly bungled SMS/MMS and they ceded all control of RCS to google, why in the world would anyone want them involved. They barely can do their jobs as dumb pipes.

By spec E2EE (via MLS, or something extremely similar) is in fact the default - it's part of the Universal Profile, at least as of 3.0 which I have been reading.

Is Google following that with Google Messages? We have no way to verify! How great for everyone.

> at least as of 3.0

And this is what I find so galling, it took them to version 3.0 to decide to do that?

My quick googling shows:

v1: 2016

v2: 2017

v3: 2025

So, yes "by default" in the current year it supports it but no one (including google) is using 3.0 yet. Apple has pledged to do it in iOS 26 (currently using 2.4) and Google has some proprietary e2ee on top of 2.6.

It's just all a mess, the furthest thing possible from an "open standard" (not saying anyone claimed it was, that's just what I would have prefered if we were trying to replace SMS/MMS), and hopelessly behind all other messaging platforms.

I was curious about the adoption timeline actually, yeah - hadn't looked at that in detail yet. Thanks!

How wonderful that they've been claiming better security all along too. (it may be true, sms is terrible - but they know many people will think E2EE or similar when they hear that)

>>> Apple, run your own RCS servers.

I believe they can't. RCS is implemented over IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), part of the mobile carrier infra and tightly tied to them (SIM card auth, APN settings pushed from the operator, etc)

... unless they become a mobile operator

I've seen this same behaviour with IOS messaging ten years ago; I would travel between countries with roaming enabled and every time I changed countries and turned on my iPhone, iMessage would be waiting for activation.

Once spent 5 hours on the phone with an iMessage developer in Ireland helping them debug the issue.

At that time, we didn't have eSIM so I ended up with an Android phone for roaming and my iPhone for home country.

Many months later I got an update from Apple. It was something to do with activation. iOS used to send a hidden SMS to a server in the UK and sometimes while roaming it would time out.

I am going through something very similar. My entire family is on the same T-Mobile plan, and on recent iPhones - however, my wife's phone is the only one where RCS fails to work over Wi-Fi (only works over cellular). I've reset her network settings completely, no dice. T-Mobile support is worthless on this and basically just offered to recreate her eSim (didn't work). Apple said I need to talk to T-Mobile, not them. When she's off Wi-Fi, it seems to work. I honestly have no idea what could be broken here.

I don't. RCS is probably the worst messaging option right after SMS.

Most of my friends here in Sweden use Signal. But on the rare occasions that we had to switch back to messages lately, for example when Signal was down, I noticed RCS has been working flawlessly.

It's quite the nice surprise because it's a technology you heard about years ago and now suddenly it crops up in daily life. We all gave up on it years ago too and used other IM apps like Signal, Briar or SimpleX.

Rcs existed years ago?

It was originally started in 2007 and first deployments started rolling out around 2012. The US carriers were just spectacularly bad at implementing it, so Google swooped in and did it themselves. Then they extended it in non-standard ways and added E2EE. Good, but not standard so also not as helpful as it sounds because if your conversation partners aren't (or weren't, maybe it's better now?) using Google's implementation then your conversations were sent in the clear, just like MMS and SMS before it.

Yes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

FWIW SimpleX is owned by some not very good people.

Explain.

https://xcancel.com/epoberezkin

What are we supposed to be outraged by here exactly?

You where all on android I presume? Since RCS does not work on iPhone in sweden. NONE of the carriers have support for it, they support it for android but not ios.

I admit I didn't even know I was using RCS on Android until I switched to a cheap flip-phone and I could no longer post to a Wordle group chat that I had been in for years. What is the possible advantage to the user for a messaging platform that ONLY works on an Android or iOS device with an active number? Don't want.

And I just want actual interoperable, Internet standards based messaging.

In both aspects, RCS is at most cosplaying, to say nothing of using phone numbers as the primary identifier.

I’ll gladly welcome any blunder by its proponents, as it gives more people the chance to realize this.

I did notice one oddity with RCS on Apple, namely that initially it could not be enabled if the device was in Lockdown Mode. In one of the recent updates, 18.x for some lowish value of x, that was fixed, and so my iPhone now has RCS enabled.

However, I found that Apple have screwed another part of Lockdown Mode as of 18.7.2.

If a website makes use of Javascript, and is viewed in Safari then the page reloads a couple of times then crashes with no content but an error message. That can generally be fixed by turning off Javascript in Settings, or by turning off Lockdown mode for that specific web page - rather defeating its purpose.

Do you mean my message inbox isn't supposed to look like this? https://i.ibb.co/mFhdGkbH/Samsung-Google-Android-Messages.jp...

This has been a problem (for others) for years and apparently nobody knows why or how to fix it. So go through a checklist of disabling, uninstalling, clearing, removing, inserting, restarting, updating, toggling, calling, waiting, praying.

I can almost guarantee that the issue is a carrier issue, I use RCS on an iphone and it works out of the box, and I have all the things you listed for troubleshooting.

+1 for this being my experience. Used RCS on a Pixel 6a and a Pixel 8 before switching to an iPhone. As soon as my carrier got approved by Apple (or whatever the hell that process was), RCS just worked out of the box with my (increasingly few) Android friends. I was actually surprised by how smooth it was, once it was actually available from Apple.

On Android, RCS always seems to work great until it suddenly doesn't.

I got so angry that I turned off RCS on my iPhone after I was somewhere with limited service, I was sending messages and they were being seriously delayed. Friends were trying to reach me and the same was happening. I finally broke down and got out of the group chat I was in and messaged the friend in the group chat that had iMessage and things worked great (still spotty but at least I did not think that things were working when they were not).

I don't know or frankly care where the problem is but it has made me swear off RCS completely. iMessage works and SMS gets the job done when I can't use iMessage.

I know why Google is pushing RCS so hard, but that alone should be concerning.

I just want an option to opt-out of that flaming broken pile of spam fire that RCS is.

i Have no idea what RCS is but i know i disabled it on my iphone because it basically always makes my phone fall back to SMS when i have even the slightest lapse in network connectivity.

I had hopes for RCS but with Google's stranglehold its basically just another silo and not at all like SMS and MMs have been.

What's good in RCS? As I understand, they are cleartext, sender and receiver number are also cleartext and go through mobile telco which means they can charge for every message and the government can see everything. Looks like garbage technology to me.

Also the idea that anyone can send messages to anyone without permission is ridiculous. Made specially for spammers and scammers.

If phone makers want an universal message exchange standard, it should be encrypted and completely ignore telecoms interests.

RCS issue on iPhone, reminds me of an old movie qupte... "Lex, this is Detroit. You think the cops are gonna waste city-dollars on a stolen Swedish car?"

https://clip.cafe/detroit-rock-city-1999/we-must-get-the-cop...

Now, if iMessage was broken, apple would surely care.

I truly do wonder about the amount of tech debt that must be inside of the Messages app on MacOS and iOS. It's got to be massive.

I also wonder what they're using (protocol) under the hood that lags behind other chat clients like Telegram and Signal and WhatsApp. It works, but I wonder how/if it'll continue to scale and stay competitive.

Just use Signal

It’s fine for ephemeral chats. But one of the pissoffs of restoring the phone is losing all of my signal messages each time. I threw it on Android device today since it was getting annoying explaining to my active signal contacts each time my identity changed and I will have at least another restore ahead of me still.

I've switched devices and had my Signal history and identity carry over. Signal does do chat backups.

I think you need the old device in hand to do it. If you wipe the device and restore from a backup, there's no way to transfer the history. There's some new cloud backup feature in Signal Android Beta, but this wouldn't help on an iPhone.

There's an option for a password-protected backup to the local filesystem. Of course you need to copy that backup to somewhere else if you want to be able to restore it without the old phone.

Signal's sub-par desktop app and "you can't restore more than five days of history and if you want more you're wrong" approach, together with the complete inability to use the normal app on more than one device (phone + tablet, for instance), makes for a pretty terrible user experience.

The protocol and the service behind it are state-of-the-art, but it's a tough sell if you're coming from something that just works on every device, like iMessage or WhatsApp.

I do not understand why your comment got downvoted:

I do receive spam in Signal, because i had to register a phone number.

I loose my chat history if I do not log into the desktop client for FIXNUM days.

The desktop client may crash as soon as you kill its supporting terminal.

I have tried the user name feature once and signal reported, that they had lost my username, I would need to create a new one.

I have not tried backup and restore. So far I am not in the mood for a potential failure.

That or something like Matrix, although I use Signal myself.

This thread was depressing to me — I can't believe we're still dealing with the lack of a truly open near universally used secure messaging system.

> That or something like Matrix, although I use Signal myself.

I bridge signal to matrix on my homeserver using signal-mautrix: https://github.com/mautrix/signal

This allows me to use different phones without going through transfer/wipe. Still needs a primary device though, which was the iPhone until yesterday.

my cheapo plan gives unlimited sms but not free data, so id rather just turn rcs off instead.

Well for your sake I am happy the Windows phone is dead if you had to carry it otherwise

Many of my chats keep switching back and forth between RCS and SMS. No idea why.

> say “I have been using opensource tools to analyze the logs from this phone and think it’s a failure with Jibe”. Do you get how crazy this sounds?

No sir, this isnt crazy, the problem is that we're paying for a service that isnt accountable for their issues.

Thats crazy.

> No sir, this isnt crazy, the problem is that we're paying for a service that isnt accountable for their issues.

Once again there's no direct business relationship between Google Jibe and me. The carriers ceded monopoly control to Google Jibe, at that point they have effectively become a wholesale utility; for the US market at least. Internationally this may not be the case.

Apple is adamant to say they don't handle running RCS and there's nothing to suggest in the phone logs that they do anything but connect to carrier, verify RCS provisioning from the carrier, and then try to activate on jibecloud.net and (mis)handle the response from it.

So from my view: Jibe is a black box that customer facing Apple employees are not even aware exists for RCS and the only way to handle a device Jibe service doesn't like is to replace it or swap the board, since they can't troubleshoot it. I can't see Google's documentation and my guess is carriers only handle the initial provisioning to communicate to Jibe that <blank> phone number on <blank> IMEI/IMSI should be allowed to register presence on Jibe. Just like I was able to reset my phone's state by wiping the esims and factory resetting, Jibe should have such an accessible function from either the carrier's end or Apple's end.

I actually forgot to mention in the post that I tried https://messages.google.com/disable-chat weeks ago on both numbers and then waiting days after before re-enabling. Didn't work, and transferring the lines to other phones after would activate on RCS within seconds.

Jibe has different forms, but essentially, it's software that's supposed to be run on your carrier's network. As a customer, it doesn't matter if your carrier is using the network-hosted version of Jibe or the cloud version, it's your carrier's responsibility to Make It Work.

For things like SMS/MMS servers, SIP servers, and other carrier infrastructure, carriers still like to run this stuff themselves. For RCS this was also the case a decade ago, but then RCS died an unceremonious death when third party messengers ate its lunch and carriers failed spectacularly trying to advertise "joyn".

Jibe is a black box that must follow the RCS specification. It's your carrier's responsibility to make that work. As long as Apple is following the RCS spec, they're right in saying it's not their problem. Your carrier should be telling Google to fix their shit.

> <blank> phone number on <blank> IMEI/IMSI should be allowed to register presence on Jibe

Funny, I more or less said a few weeks ago that SIM cards do not guarantee freely being able to swap numbers between phones more than eSIMs do, because the carrier could tie the SIM's phone number to the IMEI in the backend either way. That was just kinda dismissed as a not being a real threat... and yet here it seems exactly what's happened for the RCS part of your service!

Have you tried a Visible Trial to see if RCS activates there?

Does anyone care about RCS?

I mean, most of the world just uses WhatsApp (with the notable exception of the US which for some reason likes iMessage).

RCS is as crappy as SMS or MMS because it give carriers a say in the matter.

Interoperability should have just used plain old IP based protocols, having carriers in the mix is just asking for trouble.

would have been nice to include what RCS is, never heard of it. Appearantly it's the successor of MMS, basically.

I think it's pretty fair to expect people on here to know what RCS is, it's not exactly new this year

Thanks RCS for showcasing why design by committee doesn't work, and why dumb packet-switched networks won.

Too bad. You get AI instead.

I hate sms/mms/rcs. Ideally from my point of view imode email would have been the ideal cross platform solution.

I've never heard of RCS until this day, and honestly... what's the point of it? Why would you even touch your phones "vanilla" messaging app? I know Americans go feral and will try to murder you if you don't use iMessage or whatever, but I never understood why.

Not having to rely on the good intentions of Signal or the corporate interests of WhatsApp/Line/WeChat/Telegram/etc. is a good reason in my book. There's no proof of bad intentions, but if I were the NSA/CIA, I'd set up a service like Signal, tweaked to encrypt in such a way that only I can decrypt its messages.

SMS/MMS is simply terrible to use, but at least it follows the normal "my carrier sends messages to your carrier" approach. The alternative "my carrier sends messages to Facebook to send messages to your carrier" flow adds an unnecessary middle-man, most of which will sell your data.

SMS and MMS followed that flow, yes.

But since all the networks since 4G, there is no more low-level network support for things like SMS. Everything, including voice and messages, is IP- and packet-based. So the only thing the carrier does anymore is to authenticate that IP connection through your SIM card and bind your identity to the phone number. It actually doesn't really matter if messages are "network native" or through a third-party app, there is no more guaranteed timeslot and reliable delivery that SMS used to have.

And nowadays, RCS is also outsourced to Google by basically every carrier.

So RCS is the same as WhatsApp et al., only that the app you are using doesn't tell you that Google will monitor all your communications in addition to the monitoring your carrier does...

It doesn't really matter what the encapsulation is/was, the values of a federated protocol the carrier participates in directly remain the same. The downside is you bundle the privacy to your carrier but that concern should really be solved with E2EE, not trust in a given provider. The upside is your communication service status is tied to your connection service status, and federated out immediately from there. You also gain the ability to fallback transparently to SMS/MMS in the exact same way RCS would work.

Google botched up RCS a bit in order to get it momentum, but plenty of carriers do support RCS natively as that's the only way Apple did it with iOS. Google did at least push E2EE options, but those only landed in GSM with RCS Universal Profile 3.0 and I don't think Apple has given a date for when they will support that profile on iOS. That is to say, the problems here are not inherent to RCS itself but the typical adoption and rollout problems of communication protocols.

All that aside, I'd gladly sacrifice the federated service provider flow if there were actually an equally popular federated solution to latch on to with full fallback capability to aid the remaining transition (+ the protocol actually be designed with radio power saving in mind). It's just RCS is by far the closest thing to that full package vs any other generic data messaging service.

> Google did at least push E2EE options, but those only landed in GSM with RCS Universal Profile 3.0 and I don't think Apple has given a date

This is my guess also. It was published in March[1] this year and I think it was too late to include in this year's iOS 26 release, so possibly iOS 27.

They have promised to implement it:

> "End-to-end encryption is a powerful privacy and security technology that iMessage has supported since the beginning, and now we are pleased to have helped lead a cross industry effort to bring end-to-end encryption to the RCS Universal Profile published by the GSMA," said an Apple spokesperson. "We will add support for end-to-end encrypted RCS messages to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS in future software updates." [2]

1 https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/technologies/netwo...

2 https://www.macrumors.com/2025/03/14/apple-encrypted-rcs-mes...

So instead you rely on the good intentions of your phone carrier? At least there are N third party messaging options that compete as well as open source/decentralized ones that aren't just run by a single business. But I'd rather pick between all of the various messaging options than having another thing that my phone provider needs to do well.

If I want to ask my neighbor for a cup of sugar, I can either send a text or whatsapp. I get to choose which messenger I trust more.

Whatsapp provides metadata about my social profile and my active ours of the day to Facebook/Meta.

Carrier text message available is a bonus to me.

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