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Cell phone carriers can set up their own RCS servers. All the major US carriers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile US) outsourced their RCS to Google's Jibe platform, tho
by e_y_ 2y ago
Cell phone carriers can set up their own RCS servers. All the major US carriers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile US) outsourced their RCS to Google's Jibe platform, though.
Messaging apps haven't been pure SMS for a long time. If you've sent photos/images, it's using MMS, which basically uploads the picture to a HTTP server hosted by your carrier and sends the URL in a SMS message that the receiving app knows to automatically download and display the image, provided you have a data connection.
iMessage is proprietary to Apple, so of course it goes through Apple's servers. When you set up your iPhone, it registers your phone number with Apple's iMessage server so that whenever someone tries to send a message to your number, it sends it to the iMessage cloud instead of SMS. This can actually cause problems when you switch from an iPhone to Android because other Apple users trying to send you text messages might still get routed to iMessage instead of SMS, and there's no iMessage available for Android. You may have to use a website that Apple provides to manually deregister the phone number from iMessage in that case.
I'm not all that familiar with how RCS works but presumably there's a similar registration process so that other phones know that your phone is RCS capable, except decentralized since it's not controlled by a single company.
- brokenmachine 2y ago>This can actually cause problems when you switch from an iPhone to Android because other Apple users trying to send you text messages might still get routed to iMessage instead of SMS, and there's no iMessage available for Android. You may have to use a website that Apple provides to manually deregister the phone number from iMessage in that case. Wow, Apple really manages to come up with every possible way to lock-in and hamstring competitors.
- JohnFen 2y agoI had this exact problem with RCS on my Android phone. I didn't realize that it had been enabled by default at first. Since I don't want to use it, I disabled it once I noticed -- but then a couple of the people I had been texting with could no longer receive my texts. I didn't know how to resolve it at the time and it only got fixed for me after I replaced my phone and got a new phone number.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoThis is why I get so furious when I hear Apple apologists try to defend the lock-in nature of iMessage. Before iMessage was so ubiquitous on iPhones, everyone just expected that you could message anyone else, regardless of their phone or carrier, over SMS/MMS. And I also don't fault Apple at all for releasing iMessage. But it's not like they released iMessage as just another app in the App Store like Whatsapp or Telegram. In true "Embrace/Extend/Extinguish" fashion, iMessage was just released as the default "texting app" on iPhones, and over the years the situation became more and more awful for iPhone -> Android communication. Non-US folks often don't understand the situation - "Why don't you just choose another messaging app?" Because in the US most people never "chose" a messaging app to begin with - they just used the default texting app on their phone. The US didn't really have the issue with exhorbitant SMS fees that other countries had that pushed usage to other messaging apps.
- Angostura 2y agoDid the situation become more and more awful? Here's the deregister tool, btw https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/ https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/
- drcongo 2y agoI guess they meant the situation became more and more awful for Android users as Google released a new messaging app and killed the last one every month.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoThat's not what I was talking about. Google's messaging apps were famously a mess, but my guess is that the vast majority of Android users never cared. There was always a default texting app on Android devices that handled SMS and MMS, and later RCS, and that's what most people (again, in the US) used for texting.
- bbatha 2y ago> You may have to use a website that Apple provides to manually deregister the phone number from iMessage in that case. You can just tap to resend a message as sms which will send all future messages as sms.
- brokenmachine 2y agoNot if you didn't know about this problem and have switched to Android.
- lxgr 2y agoNote that MMS is extremely uncommon outside the US, so many people might not be personally familiar with it. I think the last MMS I sent must have been some time in 2004. P2P SMS is also quickly becoming obsolete in favor of OTT messengers like WhatsApp.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]