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Is Google Messages the only messaging app on android that allows RCS interactions? On the iPhone, iMessages is the only app that has direct access to SMS functi

Is Google Messages the only messaging app on android that allows RCS interactions? On the iPhone, iMessages is the only app that has direct access to SMS functionality, but I understand that this isn't the case on android. Is this true?

charcircuit 3y ago
No, there are some Samsung apps that can, but the RCS API is not able to used by 3rd party developers
ajayyy 3y ago
There is a whitelisted set of apps in the OS. Samsung's messenger also is allowed on Samsung devices. They talked about opening the API many years ago and then suddenly stopped talking about it. For most people, Google Messenger app now uses Google's RCS gateway anyway, so the carrier does not need to support RCS. I do not know of anyone trying to get carrier-based RCS working with a non Google app using a custom rom with a different whitelisted set of apps, but it sounds to like maybe that would be possible
- jwells89 3y ago
  Additionally, only Google’s is capable of encrypted RCS as far as I’m aware (as the standard does not include that), so using other clients means giving up encryption.
AAAAaccountAAAA 3y ago
To my understanding, to use RCS on Android, you need to: - to be able to access Internet - to be able to read incoming SMS messages for identification - to implement a full RCS client stack of your own. There is an open source RCS client library in existence: https://github.com/Hirohumi/rust-rcs-core https://github.com/Hirohumi/rust-rcs-core I am not aware of anyone having been managed to connect it to Jibe servers, though. It is completely possible that Google is somehow actively blocking third party implementations, but I don't know for sure.