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.
> 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.
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.
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.
- 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :/
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
"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.
> 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.
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 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.
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?"
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.
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.
