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> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Then in practice it’s just Whatsapp owned by Meta

Signal exists.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

> It doesn't do cloud backups either,

Yes it does.

> 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.