> 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.

Then in practice it’s just Whatsapp owned by Meta

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.

IPv6 is almost fully adopted, for reals

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

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

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.

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

>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.

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-...

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.

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

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

Rcs existed years ago?

FWIW SimpleX is owned by some not very good people.

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

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.

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.

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

"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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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 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.