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Comment by fc417fc802 | Hacker News Reader

The point of the exercise is for Google and Apple to maintain control over the ecosystem.

RCS is technically superior (protocol, transport, security, all of it) but is captured from the start on the technical level by design by the big players. From the perspective of the vast majority of users who have very limited technical awareness, it was silently slipped in as an upgrade at one point or another. This means that those not adopting the proprietary BigTech solution are perceived as being difficult by insisting on using software that's now perceived as outdated or as otherwise mildly incompatible.

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GrapheneOS does not want to adopt RCS for public perception. It is still a better option than SMS/MMS and providing it is beneficial. GrapheneOS will still recommend using better platforms and protocols but RCS being bundled and cross platform are great reasons to implement it.

Suppose GrapheneOS becomes highly popular. Then I have to fight the average Joe who insists RCS is fine enough.

I understood from other comments that RCS is the default communication channel in N.America an I can sort of see why you want to give people a somewhat less worse option here than Google's Messenger. But RCS should not be the default imho, because lazy people gonna be lazy. So I hereby endorse you to gently push newcomers towards a safe and privacy friendly default by pre-installing Signal or whatever meets the bar and give it a prominent place.

Whether or not you tolerate using RCS is up to you. Not supporting it for the sake of having a worse default option on the off-chance you can use the to convince them to use a better option is not a good reason to not support RCS.

Either you will have people content with SMS, or you will have people content with RCS. Which is better is obvious.

I am not on the GrapheneOS team but the community does push better options such as Molly/Signal and RCS is usually only advised as a fallback messenger.

Eh, I don’t think you have to include Apple here. If it were up to them, the iPhone would still have zero RCS support right now. The current implementation of RCS, even in iOS 27 beta, is clunky.

To me, the only they’re trying to maintain control of is AppleOS-to-AppleOS text communication.

Idk, I mean RCS on iPhone is just SMS/MMS but fixing like 90% of the issues. I don’t find it that clunky.

More like it's iMessage, since it's locked to two vendors.

> To me, the only they’re trying to maintain control of is AppleOS-to-AppleOS text communication.

Yes, exactly. Apple and Google are both acting to maintain control and this has resulted in a standard that improves functionality but is effectively poisoned at the technical level. Left to their own devices I'm sure Apple would have preferred to stay with their original solution that is even more closed off.

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