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Comment by greatgib | Hacker News Reader

I'm thinking quite the opposite. I hope RCS can die fast. We already have chat apps WhatsApp, signal, telegram, you can even create your own. I'm quite happy that SMS for one are not something centralized by the giant US big corp. Would be the dream of Google to get all your messages as a gateway.

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So I looked into this because my idea of RCS was that it was pretty decentralized direct encrypted communication.

TIL that RCS was designed as a fairly decentralized protocol where every carrier could run their own RCS servers, but it didnt get adoption. So Google stepped in and built their own routing infrastructure, and now mostly all RCS is centralized on Google's servers (even if you use an iPhone, because the RCS server is mandated by your carrier)

The implementations of RCS servers that were being done (here in the UK) by carriers, had many issues. A lot of the time your Google messages couldn't connect to the carrier RCS server, messages silently didn't send. I don't know if that was due to something like the carriers not updating their servers, or bad implementation though.

In my neck of the woods Google actually disabled some of that routing infra, breaking RCS, I guess wanting to force the carriers to build out parts of it? Needless to say the carriers wouldn’t have any of it, so as it stands RCS is fully broken, has been for some time, and will continue to be.

This just shows the fragility of the tech and why I wouldn’t want to rely on it for anything crucial.

RCS has been an absolutely unmitigated disaster, and it's just a black box when it breaks. There's no reason why messaging in 2026 should need to have cell carriers involved whatsoever - everyone's phone is connected to the internet, every phone should have an IP based messaging app by default.

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