11 ms·

I just want working RCS messaging

318 points by joecool1029 11mo ago

oblio 11mo ago
I had working RCS on Android. Turns out that random people can add you to groups, send spam and from what I can see you can do nothing to prevent it. I've disabled it. So don't fret too much about not having it.
- TavsiE9s 11mo ago
  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.
- z0mghii 11mo ago
  That's exactly why they are banning it on lineage and custom roms
- zeeZ 11mo ago
  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.
- vel0city 11mo ago
  I had random people adding me to groups to send spam to my phone even before RCS. In fact, I don't think I've ever received spam through RCS, but I have through MMS and even more so through SMS. Looking back at all the spam texts I've received in the past several months, every single instance was SMS/MMS. Not a single time of RCS.
  - oblio 11mo ago
    For some reason Android is quite good at blocking SMS spam these days, except for the RCS group thing. At least for my specific use case, in Europe.
worthless-trash 11mo ago
> say “I have been using opensource tools to analyze the logs from this phone and think it’s a failure with Jibe”. Do you get how crazy this sounds? No sir, this isnt crazy, the problem is that we're paying for a service that isnt accountable for their issues. Thats crazy.
- joecool1029 11mo ago
  > 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 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.
  - jeroenhd 11mo ago
    Jibe has different forms, but essentially, it's software that's supposed to be run on your carrier's network. As a customer, it doesn't matter if your carrier is using the network-hosted version of Jibe or the cloud version, it's your carrier's responsibility to Make It Work. For things like SMS/MMS servers, SIP servers, and other carrier infrastructure, carriers still like to run this stuff themselves. For RCS this was also the case a decade ago, but then RCS died an unceremonious death when third party messengers ate its lunch and carriers failed spectacularly trying to advertise "joyn". Jibe is a black box that must follow the RCS specification. It's your carrier's responsibility to make that work. As long as Apple is following the RCS spec, they're right in saying it's not their problem. Your carrier should be telling Google to fix their shit.
edbaskerville 11mo ago
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. :(
- Dusseldorf 11mo ago
  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.
- eredengrin 11mo ago
  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-messages-on-grapheneos https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/1353-using-rcs-with-google-...
  - Dusseldorf 11mo ago
    Honestly at this point, untangling my group chat mess was such a headache that I'll never turn RCS on again. I need to have 100% confidence that my messages are received and sent, and Google has forever broken that trust re: RCS. I managed to coax most of them over to alternative platforms, but I can't subject my poor grandmother to that headache, so it's SMS/MMS going forward for me.
Moto7451 11mo ago
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.
- paulddraper 11mo ago
  I’m curious about what part of RCS requires specialized hardware support.
  - joecool1029 11mo ago
    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 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-Shot-2013-08-21-at-12.54.53-PM.png https://www.tmonews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Screen-Sh...
dmitrygr 11mo ago
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?" https://clip.cafe/detroit-rock-city-1999/we-must-get-the-cops-in-on-volvo-situation-s1/ https://clip.cafe/detroit-rock-city-1999/we-must-get-the-cop... Now, if iMessage was broken, apple would surely care.
- webworker 11mo ago
  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.
wrs 11mo ago
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.
- semi-extrinsic 11mo ago
  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.
  - fastball 11mo ago
    You think the messaging protocol itself is causing heightened bullying?
    - immibis 11mo ago
      Messaging protocol features determine social aspects. Harder to bully someone in a group chat if there isn't a group chat.
      - fastball 11mo ago
        There are dozens of ways to have a group chat. iMessage is not enabling this in any meaningful way.
        Zak 11mo ago
        There are, but if kids are using iMessage for it and not using other things even though they could, not having iMessage can serve to insulate a kid from it. Parental controls may prevent some of the kids from installing third-party messaging apps, or maybe they're just unwilling to. There are a weird number of adults in my social circle who I can't convince to do so, though I'd imagine kids to be a little more flexible.
par 11mo ago
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.
OptionOfT 11mo ago
Have you tried a Visible Trial to see if RCS activates there?
charcircuit 11mo ago
Why bother with Google's new, shiny chat app. Why not use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord, etc which are more neutral apps.
- frfl 11mo ago
  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.
  - happymellon 11mo ago
    Yes it is. 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.
  - ocdtrekkie 11mo 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.
  - throwawaysoxjje 11mo ago
    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
  - issafram 11mo ago
    I'm surprised at the other responses that you have received. RCS isn't a Google only thing. And it isn't an "app". It is disappointing that people don't understand that RCS is a great replacement for SMS/MMS.
    - piva00 11mo ago
      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.
Barrin92 11mo ago
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.
- throwawaysoxjje 11mo ago
  That’s the best part: RCS is an IP based messenger
  - kevincox 11mo ago
    But it's still tied to your carrier. I'd really prefer to keep my communication disconnected from my connectivity provider. These should be two completely separate services that I can manage independently. I just want my mobile provider to provide internet. Full stop. Nothing else. But of course they want to inject themselves into as much of my life as possible to make themselves stickier with a nice side of siphoning up more data.
    - Telaneo 11mo ago
      Imagine a world where your ISP also separately provided an IRC messaging service. Why would you ever use that over actual IRC? This is how I feel about SMS, and phone numbers too for that matter. They're still around for historical reasons, but if we started anew, I can't imagine we would build out that infrastructure separately from the greater internet, and if we would have, I can't think of a reason why.
- arcfour 11mo ago
  "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.
  - jeroenhd 11mo ago
smelendez 11mo ago
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.
- joecool1029 11mo ago
  >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.
- jjtech 11mo ago
  Jibe actually will ask iOS for App Attest attestation (this is actually spec, unfortunately: see section 2.11 Client Authenticity in RCC.14) So it is entirely plausible that they banned the device, I guess. (Or they could have banned the IMEI, as mentioned)
Rebelgecko 11mo ago
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
- joecool1029 11mo ago
  T-Maybe is T-Mobile postpaid, had it since 2014 or so. Death Star is US Mobile AT&T network they brand as Darkstar.
- ddalcino 11mo ago
  That’s what I thought too. The author appears to have tried every obvious debugging step, except for switching away from US Mobile. I’ve been using US Mobile myself for a little over a year, and I remember a period of about 2-3 months where most carriers had implemented RCS for iOS on their services, but US Mobile had not, so I couldn’t use RCS for a while. I don’t know what they had to implement to get RCS working on iOS, but it’s possible that their implementation does not work with iOS 26.
INTPenis 11mo ago
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.
- garbagewoman 11mo ago
  Rcs existed years ago?
  - Jtsummers 11mo ago
    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.
  - cweagans 11mo ago
    Yes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
- immibis 11mo ago
  FWIW SimpleX is owned by some not very good people.
  - INTPenis 11mo ago
    Explain.
    - immibis 11mo ago
SanjayMehta 11mo ago
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.
SamDc73 11mo ago
It's weird to me when Google market RCS as universal protocol when it doesn't work on Android devices without Google services. (I use GraphenOS and couldn't make it work for the life of me)
- joecool1029 11mo ago
  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)
- jeroenhd 11mo ago
  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.
  - Telaneo 11mo ago
    > GSMA spec assumed everyone would download/install their carriers' messenger apps to use RCS Who in their right mind would make this assumption? I'd hate to have to explain that one to grandma.
    - codedokode 11mo ago
      If you have to install an app, you can just install Signal or Element, and not bother with RCS.
      - Telaneo 11mo ago
        Exactly!
      - 11mo ago
yellowapple 11mo ago
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.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 11mo ago
  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.
  - seany 11mo ago
    Are there reasonable foss WhatsApp clients?
  - YellowTech 11mo ago
    Not that a Meta product is a perfect solution either
  - zdragnar 11mo ago
    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.
floppyd 11mo ago
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.
- bergfest 11mo ago
  A task force of former nuclear fusion scientists has been established to fix bluetooth audio quality for once and forever.
  - f1shy 11mo ago
    Come on! Get real!
  - marcosdumay 11mo ago
    Invalidate every patent that is older than the maximum lifetime allowed by law, and you'll see it magically fix itself up.
- captainkrtek 11mo ago
  IPv6 is almost fully adopted, for reals
  - jofzar 11mo ago
    Woah let's calm down, we were talking about the future not some future sci-fi fantasy land.
  - binkHN 11mo ago
    I actually took this to heart and deployed it natively on multiple VLANs in my home. Then, even with the abundance of address space, Comcast pulled the ability to use IPv6 in this manner and I'm back to to using NAT on all my VLANs except for one. Progress.
looperhacks 11mo ago
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.
- jeroenhd 11mo ago
  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.
  - tcfhgj 11mo ago
    > 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. sounds like a violation of net neutrality
    - jeroenhd 11mo ago
      Phone calls also can get priority over plain SIP traffic and SMS messages get transmitted on mobile networks before 3G connections are established to send Teams messages. I don't think net neutrality laws covers carrier network functionality like this. I'm not a lawyer, though, so who knows.
      - tcfhgj 11mo ago
        > and SMS messages get transmitted on mobile networks before 3G connections are established to send Teams messages. this is different as you already explained Net neutrality: > Net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers (ISPs) treat all online traffic equally and openly, without discrimination, blocking, throttling or prioritisation. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/open-internet-and-net-neutrality.html https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/open-int...
tamimio 11mo ago
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.
- jjice 11mo ago
  +1 for this being my experience. Used RCS on a Pixel 6a and a Pixel 8 before switching to an iPhone. As soon as my carrier got approved by Apple (or whatever the hell that process was), RCS just worked out of the box with my (increasingly few) Android friends. I was actually surprised by how smooth it was, once it was actually available from Apple.
  - imp0cat 11mo ago
    On Android, RCS always seems to work great until it suddenly doesn't.
immibis 11mo ago
Thanks RCS for showcasing why design by committee doesn't work, and why dumb packet-switched networks won.
nextstep 11mo ago
Just use Signal
- joecool1029 11mo ago
  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.
  - hurricanepootis 11mo ago
    I've switched devices and had my Signal history and identity carry over. Signal does do chat backups.
    - joecool1029 11mo ago
      I think you need the old device in hand to do it. If you wipe the device and restore from a backup, there's no way to transfer the history. There's some new cloud backup feature in Signal Android Beta, but this wouldn't help on an iPhone.
      - Zak 11mo ago
        There's an option for a password-protected backup to the local filesystem. Of course you need to copy that backup to somewhere else if you want to be able to restore it without the old phone.
- jeroenhd 11mo ago
  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.
Groxx 11mo ago
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 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.
- ljlolel 11mo ago
  Then in practice it’s just Whatsapp owned by Meta
  - mfru 11mo ago
    Signal exists. Whoever knows how to download WhatsApp, knows how to download Signal.
    - atoav 11mo ago
      Our IT department has found a way. Want to get some credentials sent to you (usually just for new accounts)? They send it only via Signal as a out of band method. This turned Signal into the defacto default in our org.
    - gsa 11mo ago
      Signal does some things well, but lacks far behind other apps in UX. It doesn't do cloud backups either, which keeps me from recommending it to less technical folks.
juliangmp 11mo ago
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.
- jeroenhd 11mo ago
  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.
  - thyristan 11mo ago
    SMS and MMS followed that flow, yes. But since all the networks since 4G, there is no more low-level network support for things like SMS. Everything, including voice and messages, is IP- and packet-based. So the only thing the carrier does anymore is to authenticate that IP connection through your SIM card and bind your identity to the phone number. It actually doesn't really matter if messages are "network native" or through a third-party app, there is no more guaranteed timeslot and reliable delivery that SMS used to have. And nowadays, RCS is also outsourced to Google by basically every carrier. So RCS is the same as WhatsApp et al., only that the app you are using doesn't tell you that Google will monitor all your communications in addition to the monitoring your carrier does...
    - zamadatix 11mo ago
      It doesn't really matter what the encapsulation is/was, the values of a federated protocol the carrier participates in directly remain the same. The downside is you bundle the privacy to your carrier but that concern should really be solved with E2EE, not trust in a given provider. The upside is your communication service status is tied to your connection service status, and federated out immediately from there. You also gain the ability to fallback transparently to SMS/MMS in the exact same way RCS would work. Google botched up RCS a bit in order to get it momentum, but plenty of carriers do support RCS natively as that's the only way Apple did it with iOS. Google did at least push E2EE options, but those only landed in GSM with RCS Universal Profile 3.0 and I don't think Apple has given a date for when they will support that profile on iOS. That is to say, the problems here are not inherent to RCS itself but the typical adoption and rollout problems of communication protocols. All that aside, I'd gladly sacrifice the federated service provider flow if there were actually an equally popular federated solution to latch on to with full fallback capability to aid the remaining transition (+ the protocol actually be designed with radio power saving in mind). It's just RCS is by far the closest thing to that full package vs any other generic data messaging service.
novia 11mo ago
I have this reddit thread bookmarked for how to fix RCS every time I get a new phone: https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMessages/comments/1be8gxk/fix_for_rcs_chat_not_setting_up_verifying_after/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMessages/comments/1be8gxk/fix...
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
globalnode 11mo ago
my cheapo plan gives unlimited sms but not free data, so id rather just turn rcs off instead.
tcfhgj 11mo ago
I don't. RCS is probably the worst messaging option right after SMS.
codedokode 11mo ago
What's good in RCS? As I understand, they are cleartext, sender and receiver number are also cleartext and go through mobile telco which means they can charge for every message and the government can see everything. Looks like garbage technology to me. Also the idea that anyone can send messages to anyone without permission is ridiculous. Made specially for spammers and scammers. If phone makers want an universal message exchange standard, it should be encrypted and completely ignore telecoms interests.
vertnerd 11mo ago
I admit I didn't even know I was using RCS on Android until I switched to a cheap flip-phone and I could no longer post to a Wordle group chat that I had been in for years. What is the possible advantage to the user for a messaging platform that ONLY works on an Android or iOS device with an active number? Don't want.
jackconsidine 11mo ago
We send many thousands of delivery notifications per day on SMS over Twilio. I've been wanting to use RCS for a long time (better group notification experiences, branded identification etc). Tried to do so last month: you pay a fee (I think $500) to enable RCS with a third-party only to find out that a small percentage of devices have it enabled making it effectively useless. So we switched to WhatsApp.
- dspillett 11mo ago
  > only to find out that a small percentage of devices have it enabled making it effectively useless. Which means a lot of people actively don't want it and have turned it off or not elected to turn it on when setting up a new phone. I got prompted to turn it on with my now S65 a while ago and said no (I just want basic works-everywhere simple SMS, thanks, for anything fancier I've got chat-app-de-jour. It got turned on anyway so I had to find the option and turn it back off.
intothemild 11mo ago
Here's a really simple solution... Apple, run your own RCS servers. That skips the carrier nonsense, and it also means that for iPhone users they're not actually running on google jibe servers. Thing is. Apple won't do this. Malicious compliance and all.
- joshstrange 11mo ago
  Why should they? I honestly think they would have been justified giving RCS the middle finger indefinitely. It's effectively google-owned and a shitty protocol (no e2e by default being top of mind). Also, the idea of wanting the carriers more involved in messaging is hilarious, just use one of the 10+ 100x better messaging platforms. The carries horribly bungled SMS/MMS and they ceded all control of RCS to google, why in the world would anyone want them involved. They barely can do their jobs as dumb pipes.
  - Groxx 11mo ago
    By spec E2EE (via MLS, or something extremely similar) is in fact the default - it's part of the Universal Profile, at least as of 3.0 which I have been reading. Is Google following that with Google Messages? We have no way to verify! How great for everyone.
    - joshstrange 11mo ago
      > at least as of 3.0 And this is what I find so galling, it took them to version 3.0 to decide to do that? My quick googling shows: v1: 2016 v2: 2017 v3: 2025 So, yes "by default" in the current year it supports it but no one (including google) is using 3.0 yet. Apple has pledged to do it in iOS 26 (currently using 2.4) and Google has some proprietary e2ee on top of 2.6. It's just all a mess, the furthest thing possible from an "open standard" (not saying anyone claimed it was, that's just what I would have prefered if we were trying to replace SMS/MMS), and hopelessly behind all other messaging platforms.
      - Groxx 11mo ago
boesboes 11mo ago
would have been nice to include what RCS is, never heard of it. Appearantly it's the successor of MMS, basically.
- ctkhn 11mo ago
  I think it's pretty fair to expect people on here to know what RCS is, it's not exactly new this year
SirMaster 11mo ago
Many of my chats keep switching back and forth between RCS and SMS. No idea why.
dfawcus 11mo ago
I did notice one oddity with RCS on Apple, namely that initially it could not be enabled if the device was in Lockdown Mode. In one of the recent updates, 18.x for some lowish value of x, that was fixed, and so my iPhone now has RCS enabled. However, I found that Apple have screwed another part of Lockdown Mode as of 18.7.2. If a website makes use of Javascript, and is viewed in Safari then the page reloads a couple of times then crashes with no content but an error message. That can generally be fixed by turning off Javascript in Settings, or by turning off Lockdown mode for that specific web page - rather defeating its purpose.
debo_ 11mo ago
Too bad. You get AI instead.
Joshua-Peter 11mo ago
[flagged]
- nshireman 11mo ago
  LLM comment spam
cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
RCS was doomed from the start by virtue of the carriers playing any kind of role beyond acting as dumb pipes. Any standard that the carriers have their fingers in will be doomed to the same fate. It’s one of the main reasons why WhatsApp, iMessage, etc have such popularity. A cell connection is merely one of many means of access and carriers have no structural role whatsoever, meaning that if you’ve got cell data you’ve got messaging.
- IshKebab 11mo ago
  Yeah it's kind of wild how many Americans want to regress to the bad old days of SMS. WhatsApp is just so much better. At least it has been for the last decade. Maybe Meta will ruin it soon but if that happens we can all move to Signal (until they ruin it). Either way it's better than giving an ounce of power back to telcos.
- tylergetsay 11mo ago
  Without the carriers RCS wouldn't have been rolled out. it's why the builtin carrier texting apps support RCS.
  - cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
    I guess what I'm getting at is that there should've been standardization around a fully web-based protocol that does not involve the carriers in any way. Like imagine if instead of investing in RCS, Google instead created a web-based "Advanced Messaging Protocol" or something to that effect, which specifies capabilities roughly in line with those of RCS. The big guys like Google, Apple, Meta, and MS would run their own servers, but there'd be no reason why smaller players like FastMail and Proton couldn't also run them. Most users would just roll with the major providers pre-configured on their platform of choice but more savvy users could choose their own. That could've rolled out and been adopted and iterated upon far more quickly than RCS has.
    - Ajedi32 11mo ago
      Exactly. There's absolutely no reason why I should even need a phone number in 2025. All person-to-person communication (text, call, video, file transfer, etc) should just be an open standard running on TCP.
aimor 11mo ago
Do you mean my message inbox isn't supposed to look like this? https://i.ibb.co/mFhdGkbH/Samsung-Google-Android-Messages.jpg https://i.ibb.co/mFhdGkbH/Samsung-Google-Android-Messages.jp... This has been a problem (for others) for years and apparently nobody knows why or how to fix it. So go through a checklist of disabling, uninstalling, clearing, removing, inserting, restarting, updating, toggling, calling, waiting, praying.
dz0ny 11mo ago
Btw Google also stopped providing RCS proxy or whatever that was for small mobile providers. Message in settings will just say RCS is not supported, funnily that also breaks Gemini in Messages app, with infinite spinner.
msh 11mo ago
I hate sms/mms/rcs. Ideally from my point of view imode email would have been the ideal cross platform solution.
nicholashead 11mo ago
I am going through something very similar. My entire family is on the same T-Mobile plan, and on recent iPhones - however, my wife's phone is the only one where RCS fails to work over Wi-Fi (only works over cellular). I've reset her network settings completely, no dice. T-Mobile support is worthless on this and basically just offered to recreate her eSim (didn't work). Apple said I need to talk to T-Mobile, not them. When she's off Wi-Fi, it seems to work. I honestly have no idea what could be broken here.
johndoh42 11mo ago
I just want an option to opt-out of that flaming broken pile of spam fire that RCS is.
yapyap 11mo ago
Well for your sake I am happy the Windows phone is dead if you had to carry it otherwise
nerdjon 11mo ago
I got so angry that I turned off RCS on my iPhone after I was somewhere with limited service, I was sending messages and they were being seriously delayed. Friends were trying to reach me and the same was happening. I finally broke down and got out of the group chat I was in and messaged the friend in the group chat that had iMessage and things worked great (still spotty but at least I did not think that things were working when they were not). I don't know or frankly care where the problem is but it has made me swear off RCS completely. iMessage works and SMS gets the job done when I can't use iMessage. I know why Google is pushing RCS so hard, but that alone should be concerning.
lxgr 11mo ago
And I just want actual interoperable, Internet standards based messaging. In both aspects, RCS is at most cosplaying, to say nothing of using phone numbers as the primary identifier. I’ll gladly welcome any blunder by its proponents, as it gives more people the chance to realize this.
singpolyma3 11mo ago
I had hopes for RCS but with Google's stranglehold its basically just another silo and not at all like SMS and MMs have been.
juancn 11mo ago
Does anyone care about RCS? I mean, most of the world just uses WhatsApp (with the notable exception of the US which for some reason likes iMessage). RCS is as crappy as SMS or MMS because it give carriers a say in the matter. Interoperability should have just used plain old IP based protocols, having carriers in the mix is just asking for trouble.
priyaaasharma 11mo ago
[dead]

318 points by joecool1029 11mo ago

oblio 11mo ago

I had working RCS on Android. Turns out that random people can add you to groups, send spam and from what I can see you can do nothing to prevent it. I've disabled it. So don't fret too much about not having it.

TavsiE9s 11mo ago
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.
z0mghii 11mo ago
That's exactly why they are banning it on lineage and custom roms
zeeZ 11mo ago
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.
vel0city 11mo ago
I had random people adding me to groups to send spam to my phone even before RCS. In fact, I don't think I've ever received spam through RCS, but I have through MMS and even more so through SMS. Looking back at all the spam texts I've received in the past several months, every single instance was SMS/MMS. Not a single time of RCS.
- oblio 11mo ago
  For some reason Android is quite good at blocking SMS spam these days, except for the RCS group thing. At least for my specific use case, in Europe.

worthless-trash 11mo ago

> say “I have been using opensource tools to analyze the logs from this phone and think it’s a failure with Jibe”. Do you get how crazy this sounds? No sir, this isnt crazy, the problem is that we're paying for a service that isnt accountable for their issues. Thats crazy.

joecool1029 11mo ago
> 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 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.
- jeroenhd 11mo ago
  Jibe has different forms, but essentially, it's software that's supposed to be run on your carrier's network. As a customer, it doesn't matter if your carrier is using the network-hosted version of Jibe or the cloud version, it's your carrier's responsibility to Make It Work. For things like SMS/MMS servers, SIP servers, and other carrier infrastructure, carriers still like to run this stuff themselves. For RCS this was also the case a decade ago, but then RCS died an unceremonious death when third party messengers ate its lunch and carriers failed spectacularly trying to advertise "joyn". Jibe is a black box that must follow the RCS specification. It's your carrier's responsibility to make that work. As long as Apple is following the RCS spec, they're right in saying it's not their problem. Your carrier should be telling Google to fix their shit.

edbaskerville 11mo ago

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. :(

Dusseldorf 11mo ago
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.
eredengrin 11mo ago
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-messages-on-grapheneos https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/1353-using-rcs-with-google-...
- Dusseldorf 11mo ago
  Honestly at this point, untangling my group chat mess was such a headache that I'll never turn RCS on again. I need to have 100% confidence that my messages are received and sent, and Google has forever broken that trust re: RCS. I managed to coax most of them over to alternative platforms, but I can't subject my poor grandmother to that headache, so it's SMS/MMS going forward for me.

Moto7451 11mo ago

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.

paulddraper 11mo ago
I’m curious about what part of RCS requires specialized hardware support.
- joecool1029 11mo ago
  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 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-Shot-2013-08-21-at-12.54.53-PM.png https://www.tmonews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Screen-Sh...

dmitrygr 11mo ago

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?" https://clip.cafe/detroit-rock-city-1999/we-must-get-the-cops-in-on-volvo-situation-s1/ https://clip.cafe/detroit-rock-city-1999/we-must-get-the-cop... Now, if iMessage was broken, apple would surely care.

webworker 11mo ago
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.

wrs 11mo ago

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.

semi-extrinsic 11mo ago
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.
- fastball 11mo ago
  You think the messaging protocol itself is causing heightened bullying?
  - immibis 11mo ago
    Messaging protocol features determine social aspects. Harder to bully someone in a group chat if there isn't a group chat.
    - fastball 11mo ago
      There are dozens of ways to have a group chat. iMessage is not enabling this in any meaningful way.
      - Zak 11mo ago
        There are, but if kids are using iMessage for it and not using other things even though they could, not having iMessage can serve to insulate a kid from it. Parental controls may prevent some of the kids from installing third-party messaging apps, or maybe they're just unwilling to. There are a weird number of adults in my social circle who I can't convince to do so, though I'd imagine kids to be a little more flexible.

par 11mo ago

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.

OptionOfT 11mo ago

Have you tried a Visible Trial to see if RCS activates there?

charcircuit 11mo ago

Why bother with Google's new, shiny chat app. Why not use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord, etc which are more neutral apps.

frfl 11mo ago
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.
- happymellon 11mo ago
  Yes it is. 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.
- ocdtrekkie 11mo 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.
- throwawaysoxjje 11mo ago
  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
- issafram 11mo ago
  I'm surprised at the other responses that you have received. RCS isn't a Google only thing. And it isn't an "app". It is disappointing that people don't understand that RCS is a great replacement for SMS/MMS.
  - piva00 11mo ago
    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.

Barrin92 11mo ago

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.

throwawaysoxjje 11mo ago
That’s the best part: RCS is an IP based messenger
- kevincox 11mo ago
  But it's still tied to your carrier. I'd really prefer to keep my communication disconnected from my connectivity provider. These should be two completely separate services that I can manage independently. I just want my mobile provider to provide internet. Full stop. Nothing else. But of course they want to inject themselves into as much of my life as possible to make themselves stickier with a nice side of siphoning up more data.
  - Telaneo 11mo ago
    Imagine a world where your ISP also separately provided an IRC messaging service. Why would you ever use that over actual IRC? This is how I feel about SMS, and phone numbers too for that matter. They're still around for historical reasons, but if we started anew, I can't imagine we would build out that infrastructure separately from the greater internet, and if we would have, I can't think of a reason why.
arcfour 11mo ago
"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.
- jeroenhd 11mo ago

smelendez 11mo ago

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.

joecool1029 11mo ago
>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.
jjtech 11mo ago
Jibe actually will ask iOS for App Attest attestation (this is actually spec, unfortunately: see section 2.11 Client Authenticity in RCC.14) So it is entirely plausible that they banned the device, I guess. (Or they could have banned the IMEI, as mentioned)

Rebelgecko 11mo ago

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

joecool1029 11mo ago
T-Maybe is T-Mobile postpaid, had it since 2014 or so. Death Star is US Mobile AT&T network they brand as Darkstar.
ddalcino 11mo ago
That’s what I thought too. The author appears to have tried every obvious debugging step, except for switching away from US Mobile. I’ve been using US Mobile myself for a little over a year, and I remember a period of about 2-3 months where most carriers had implemented RCS for iOS on their services, but US Mobile had not, so I couldn’t use RCS for a while. I don’t know what they had to implement to get RCS working on iOS, but it’s possible that their implementation does not work with iOS 26.

INTPenis 11mo ago

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.

garbagewoman 11mo ago
Rcs existed years ago?
- Jtsummers 11mo ago
  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.
- cweagans 11mo ago
  Yes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
immibis 11mo ago
FWIW SimpleX is owned by some not very good people.
- INTPenis 11mo ago
  Explain.
  - immibis 11mo ago

SanjayMehta 11mo ago

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.

SamDc73 11mo ago

It's weird to me when Google market RCS as universal protocol when it doesn't work on Android devices without Google services. (I use GraphenOS and couldn't make it work for the life of me)

joecool1029 11mo ago
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)
jeroenhd 11mo ago
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.
- Telaneo 11mo ago
  > GSMA spec assumed everyone would download/install their carriers' messenger apps to use RCS Who in their right mind would make this assumption? I'd hate to have to explain that one to grandma.
  - codedokode 11mo ago
    If you have to install an app, you can just install Signal or Element, and not bother with RCS.
    - Telaneo 11mo ago
      Exactly!
    - 11mo ago

yellowapple 11mo ago

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.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 11mo ago
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.
- seany 11mo ago
  Are there reasonable foss WhatsApp clients?
- YellowTech 11mo ago
  Not that a Meta product is a perfect solution either
- zdragnar 11mo ago
  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.

floppyd 11mo ago

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.

bergfest 11mo ago
A task force of former nuclear fusion scientists has been established to fix bluetooth audio quality for once and forever.
- f1shy 11mo ago
  Come on! Get real!
- marcosdumay 11mo ago
  Invalidate every patent that is older than the maximum lifetime allowed by law, and you'll see it magically fix itself up.
captainkrtek 11mo ago
IPv6 is almost fully adopted, for reals
- jofzar 11mo ago
  Woah let's calm down, we were talking about the future not some future sci-fi fantasy land.
- binkHN 11mo ago
  I actually took this to heart and deployed it natively on multiple VLANs in my home. Then, even with the abundance of address space, Comcast pulled the ability to use IPv6 in this manner and I'm back to to using NAT on all my VLANs except for one. Progress.

looperhacks 11mo ago

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.

jeroenhd 11mo ago
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.
- tcfhgj 11mo ago
  > 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. sounds like a violation of net neutrality
  - jeroenhd 11mo ago
    Phone calls also can get priority over plain SIP traffic and SMS messages get transmitted on mobile networks before 3G connections are established to send Teams messages. I don't think net neutrality laws covers carrier network functionality like this. I'm not a lawyer, though, so who knows.
    - tcfhgj 11mo ago
      > and SMS messages get transmitted on mobile networks before 3G connections are established to send Teams messages. this is different as you already explained Net neutrality: > Net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers (ISPs) treat all online traffic equally and openly, without discrimination, blocking, throttling or prioritisation. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/open-internet-and-net-neutrality.html https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/open-int...

tamimio 11mo ago

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.

jjice 11mo ago
+1 for this being my experience. Used RCS on a Pixel 6a and a Pixel 8 before switching to an iPhone. As soon as my carrier got approved by Apple (or whatever the hell that process was), RCS just worked out of the box with my (increasingly few) Android friends. I was actually surprised by how smooth it was, once it was actually available from Apple.
- imp0cat 11mo ago
  On Android, RCS always seems to work great until it suddenly doesn't.

immibis 11mo ago

Thanks RCS for showcasing why design by committee doesn't work, and why dumb packet-switched networks won.

nextstep 11mo ago

Just use Signal

joecool1029 11mo ago
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.
- hurricanepootis 11mo ago
  I've switched devices and had my Signal history and identity carry over. Signal does do chat backups.
  - joecool1029 11mo ago
    I think you need the old device in hand to do it. If you wipe the device and restore from a backup, there's no way to transfer the history. There's some new cloud backup feature in Signal Android Beta, but this wouldn't help on an iPhone.
    - Zak 11mo ago
      There's an option for a password-protected backup to the local filesystem. Of course you need to copy that backup to somewhere else if you want to be able to restore it without the old phone.
jeroenhd 11mo ago
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.

Groxx 11mo ago

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 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.

ljlolel 11mo ago
Then in practice it’s just Whatsapp owned by Meta
- mfru 11mo ago
  Signal exists. Whoever knows how to download WhatsApp, knows how to download Signal.
  - atoav 11mo ago
    Our IT department has found a way. Want to get some credentials sent to you (usually just for new accounts)? They send it only via Signal as a out of band method. This turned Signal into the defacto default in our org.
  - gsa 11mo ago
    Signal does some things well, but lacks far behind other apps in UX. It doesn't do cloud backups either, which keeps me from recommending it to less technical folks.

juliangmp 11mo ago

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.

jeroenhd 11mo ago
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.
- thyristan 11mo ago
  SMS and MMS followed that flow, yes. But since all the networks since 4G, there is no more low-level network support for things like SMS. Everything, including voice and messages, is IP- and packet-based. So the only thing the carrier does anymore is to authenticate that IP connection through your SIM card and bind your identity to the phone number. It actually doesn't really matter if messages are "network native" or through a third-party app, there is no more guaranteed timeslot and reliable delivery that SMS used to have. And nowadays, RCS is also outsourced to Google by basically every carrier. So RCS is the same as WhatsApp et al., only that the app you are using doesn't tell you that Google will monitor all your communications in addition to the monitoring your carrier does...
  - zamadatix 11mo ago
    It doesn't really matter what the encapsulation is/was, the values of a federated protocol the carrier participates in directly remain the same. The downside is you bundle the privacy to your carrier but that concern should really be solved with E2EE, not trust in a given provider. The upside is your communication service status is tied to your connection service status, and federated out immediately from there. You also gain the ability to fallback transparently to SMS/MMS in the exact same way RCS would work. Google botched up RCS a bit in order to get it momentum, but plenty of carriers do support RCS natively as that's the only way Apple did it with iOS. Google did at least push E2EE options, but those only landed in GSM with RCS Universal Profile 3.0 and I don't think Apple has given a date for when they will support that profile on iOS. That is to say, the problems here are not inherent to RCS itself but the typical adoption and rollout problems of communication protocols. All that aside, I'd gladly sacrifice the federated service provider flow if there were actually an equally popular federated solution to latch on to with full fallback capability to aid the remaining transition (+ the protocol actually be designed with radio power saving in mind). It's just RCS is by far the closest thing to that full package vs any other generic data messaging service.

novia 11mo ago

I have this reddit thread bookmarked for how to fix RCS every time I get a new phone: https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMessages/comments/1be8gxk/fix_for_rcs_chat_not_setting_up_verifying_after/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMessages/comments/1be8gxk/fix...

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

globalnode 11mo ago

my cheapo plan gives unlimited sms but not free data, so id rather just turn rcs off instead.

tcfhgj 11mo ago

I don't. RCS is probably the worst messaging option right after SMS.

codedokode 11mo ago

What's good in RCS? As I understand, they are cleartext, sender and receiver number are also cleartext and go through mobile telco which means they can charge for every message and the government can see everything. Looks like garbage technology to me. Also the idea that anyone can send messages to anyone without permission is ridiculous. Made specially for spammers and scammers. If phone makers want an universal message exchange standard, it should be encrypted and completely ignore telecoms interests.

vertnerd 11mo ago

I admit I didn't even know I was using RCS on Android until I switched to a cheap flip-phone and I could no longer post to a Wordle group chat that I had been in for years. What is the possible advantage to the user for a messaging platform that ONLY works on an Android or iOS device with an active number? Don't want.

jackconsidine 11mo ago

We send many thousands of delivery notifications per day on SMS over Twilio. I've been wanting to use RCS for a long time (better group notification experiences, branded identification etc). Tried to do so last month: you pay a fee (I think $500) to enable RCS with a third-party only to find out that a small percentage of devices have it enabled making it effectively useless. So we switched to WhatsApp.

dspillett 11mo ago
> only to find out that a small percentage of devices have it enabled making it effectively useless. Which means a lot of people actively don't want it and have turned it off or not elected to turn it on when setting up a new phone. I got prompted to turn it on with my now S65 a while ago and said no (I just want basic works-everywhere simple SMS, thanks, for anything fancier I've got chat-app-de-jour. It got turned on anyway so I had to find the option and turn it back off.

intothemild 11mo ago

Here's a really simple solution... Apple, run your own RCS servers. That skips the carrier nonsense, and it also means that for iPhone users they're not actually running on google jibe servers. Thing is. Apple won't do this. Malicious compliance and all.

joshstrange 11mo ago
Why should they? I honestly think they would have been justified giving RCS the middle finger indefinitely. It's effectively google-owned and a shitty protocol (no e2e by default being top of mind). Also, the idea of wanting the carriers more involved in messaging is hilarious, just use one of the 10+ 100x better messaging platforms. The carries horribly bungled SMS/MMS and they ceded all control of RCS to google, why in the world would anyone want them involved. They barely can do their jobs as dumb pipes.
- Groxx 11mo ago
  By spec E2EE (via MLS, or something extremely similar) is in fact the default - it's part of the Universal Profile, at least as of 3.0 which I have been reading. Is Google following that with Google Messages? We have no way to verify! How great for everyone.
  - joshstrange 11mo ago
    > at least as of 3.0 And this is what I find so galling, it took them to version 3.0 to decide to do that? My quick googling shows: v1: 2016 v2: 2017 v3: 2025 So, yes "by default" in the current year it supports it but no one (including google) is using 3.0 yet. Apple has pledged to do it in iOS 26 (currently using 2.4) and Google has some proprietary e2ee on top of 2.6. It's just all a mess, the furthest thing possible from an "open standard" (not saying anyone claimed it was, that's just what I would have prefered if we were trying to replace SMS/MMS), and hopelessly behind all other messaging platforms.
    - Groxx 11mo ago

boesboes 11mo ago

would have been nice to include what RCS is, never heard of it. Appearantly it's the successor of MMS, basically.

ctkhn 11mo ago
I think it's pretty fair to expect people on here to know what RCS is, it's not exactly new this year

SirMaster 11mo ago

Many of my chats keep switching back and forth between RCS and SMS. No idea why.

dfawcus 11mo ago

I did notice one oddity with RCS on Apple, namely that initially it could not be enabled if the device was in Lockdown Mode. In one of the recent updates, 18.x for some lowish value of x, that was fixed, and so my iPhone now has RCS enabled. However, I found that Apple have screwed another part of Lockdown Mode as of 18.7.2. If a website makes use of Javascript, and is viewed in Safari then the page reloads a couple of times then crashes with no content but an error message. That can generally be fixed by turning off Javascript in Settings, or by turning off Lockdown mode for that specific web page - rather defeating its purpose.

debo_ 11mo ago

Too bad. You get AI instead.

Joshua-Peter 11mo ago

[flagged]

nshireman 11mo ago
LLM comment spam

cosmic_cheese 11mo ago

RCS was doomed from the start by virtue of the carriers playing any kind of role beyond acting as dumb pipes. Any standard that the carriers have their fingers in will be doomed to the same fate. It’s one of the main reasons why WhatsApp, iMessage, etc have such popularity. A cell connection is merely one of many means of access and carriers have no structural role whatsoever, meaning that if you’ve got cell data you’ve got messaging.

IshKebab 11mo ago
Yeah it's kind of wild how many Americans want to regress to the bad old days of SMS. WhatsApp is just so much better. At least it has been for the last decade. Maybe Meta will ruin it soon but if that happens we can all move to Signal (until they ruin it). Either way it's better than giving an ounce of power back to telcos.
tylergetsay 11mo ago
Without the carriers RCS wouldn't have been rolled out. it's why the builtin carrier texting apps support RCS.
- cosmic_cheese 11mo ago
  I guess what I'm getting at is that there should've been standardization around a fully web-based protocol that does not involve the carriers in any way. Like imagine if instead of investing in RCS, Google instead created a web-based "Advanced Messaging Protocol" or something to that effect, which specifies capabilities roughly in line with those of RCS. The big guys like Google, Apple, Meta, and MS would run their own servers, but there'd be no reason why smaller players like FastMail and Proton couldn't also run them. Most users would just roll with the major providers pre-configured on their platform of choice but more savvy users could choose their own. That could've rolled out and been adopted and iterated upon far more quickly than RCS has.
  - Ajedi32 11mo ago
    Exactly. There's absolutely no reason why I should even need a phone number in 2025. All person-to-person communication (text, call, video, file transfer, etc) should just be an open standard running on TCP.

aimor 11mo ago

Do you mean my message inbox isn't supposed to look like this? https://i.ibb.co/mFhdGkbH/Samsung-Google-Android-Messages.jpg https://i.ibb.co/mFhdGkbH/Samsung-Google-Android-Messages.jp... This has been a problem (for others) for years and apparently nobody knows why or how to fix it. So go through a checklist of disabling, uninstalling, clearing, removing, inserting, restarting, updating, toggling, calling, waiting, praying.

dz0ny 11mo ago

Btw Google also stopped providing RCS proxy or whatever that was for small mobile providers. Message in settings will just say RCS is not supported, funnily that also breaks Gemini in Messages app, with infinite spinner.

msh 11mo ago

I hate sms/mms/rcs. Ideally from my point of view imode email would have been the ideal cross platform solution.

nicholashead 11mo ago

I am going through something very similar. My entire family is on the same T-Mobile plan, and on recent iPhones - however, my wife's phone is the only one where RCS fails to work over Wi-Fi (only works over cellular). I've reset her network settings completely, no dice. T-Mobile support is worthless on this and basically just offered to recreate her eSim (didn't work). Apple said I need to talk to T-Mobile, not them. When she's off Wi-Fi, it seems to work. I honestly have no idea what could be broken here.

johndoh42 11mo ago

I just want an option to opt-out of that flaming broken pile of spam fire that RCS is.

yapyap 11mo ago

Well for your sake I am happy the Windows phone is dead if you had to carry it otherwise

nerdjon 11mo ago

I got so angry that I turned off RCS on my iPhone after I was somewhere with limited service, I was sending messages and they were being seriously delayed. Friends were trying to reach me and the same was happening. I finally broke down and got out of the group chat I was in and messaged the friend in the group chat that had iMessage and things worked great (still spotty but at least I did not think that things were working when they were not). I don't know or frankly care where the problem is but it has made me swear off RCS completely. iMessage works and SMS gets the job done when I can't use iMessage. I know why Google is pushing RCS so hard, but that alone should be concerning.

lxgr 11mo ago

And I just want actual interoperable, Internet standards based messaging. In both aspects, RCS is at most cosplaying, to say nothing of using phone numbers as the primary identifier. I’ll gladly welcome any blunder by its proponents, as it gives more people the chance to realize this.

singpolyma3 11mo ago

I had hopes for RCS but with Google's stranglehold its basically just another silo and not at all like SMS and MMs have been.

juancn 11mo ago

Does anyone care about RCS? I mean, most of the world just uses WhatsApp (with the notable exception of the US which for some reason likes iMessage). RCS is as crappy as SMS or MMS because it give carriers a say in the matter. Interoperability should have just used plain old IP based protocols, having carriers in the mix is just asking for trouble.

priyaaasharma 11mo ago

[dead]