I’d assume this isn’t the issue here but RCS seems to be a bit fickle.
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...
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.
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.
https://clip.cafe/detroit-rock-city-1999/we-must-get-the-cop...
Now, if iMessage was broken, apple would surely care.
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 actually think iMessage group chats should have a minimum age limit, from a kids perspective they are no different than Snapchat et al.
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.
Ban an app, another appear. Ban all apps and they would join any of the services that provide a web frontend. Kids in the late 90's/early 2000 were using IRC when ICQ and MSN messenger didn't support group chat, usually from a web client before they were introduced to mirc and other irc clients.
Bottom line: they would find a way.
The equivalent is simply lacking from Android due to RCS group chat being a broken mess.
At least in Berlin (School and Uni) my experience was that WhatsApp was far more prevalent already (due to more mixed Android/iOS environment likely).
Src: my 12 yo daughter
All of that has been (and still is) available on everyone's phones since the dawn of time except for "name them": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service
- 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. > kick them out: Send a new MMS message including all past participants except for the person you want to remove.
So far semi-extrinsic provided a list of features they think is uniquely enabling bullying in iMessage but I've just established those features are actually commonly available to everyone, so what other features does iMessage have that uniquely makes it enable bullying compared to MMS?
(a) create new group minus Becky and minus all previous messages, plus every participant has to migrate over (b) "admin" kicks Becky and no one else has to do anything and all the history and context is retained
I've been in plenty of MMS group chats where we've had to create a new group to add or remove someone (for non-bullying reasons) and it has always gone smoothly without issue. SMS/MMS apps tend to sort your list of groups by most recently received message, so as soon as people stop using the first group it will naturally decay to the bottom of your list where no one looks.
> "admin" kicks Becky and no one else has to do anything
"admin" creates a new group chat, no one else has to consciously do anything because they're just selecting the group that has the most recent messages and therefore is at the top of their SMS/MMS app.
There is one difference here in that with SMS/MMS there is no "admin" so anyone can create new groups, but if you're going to start evicting people without buy-in from the group then the dissenters are just going to form their own groups anyway regardless of platform.
> all the history and context is retained
That is a fair point, you wouldn't maintain the history/context but how important is that for bullying? My ultimate point here is that fastball is correct in that the iMessage platform isn't enabling bullying, it is just the kids preferred platform. We have all been perfectly capable of the same bullying since long before the iPhone existed, and I don't think losing history/context when forming new groups changes that.
MMS is the worst standard in telco and that's saying something. The spec is impossibly complex, so it's not properly supported by carriers or device manufacturers, and even basic cases like "send this photo" fail alarmingly regularly.
Verizon had the wackiest system with their vtext service where it really tried to customize more than the GSM carriers and they ran their own web portal. When they phased that out a few years ago it broke picture scaling for pretty much all non-iphone devices on their network. This is another big reason I wanted working RCS because if I send a picture to Android users on Verizon it ends up scaled down.
I have sent exactly zero MMS messages successfully. They've always failed on some stupid carrier setting being wrong. I've also "received" MMS image messages - that were links to a carrier portal because the image could not be delivered.
It's a shit standard that nobody bothered to implement properly =)
I was brought up in a household where we had very limited access to TV. As a teenager I thought this was terrible. As an adult I realise what a huge benefit it was to me. I am sure that the same goes for kids and smartphones and group chats. They are not necessary. No one is missing out.
I feel like I am missing something important here.
The great-grandparent comment was talking about things like not being invited/kicked out of group chats, not being spammed/harassed through the messaging protocol in question.
Unless I am genuinely missing something important, I agree with the grandparent comment. How does not being invited to certain group chats is different from not being invited to "cool kids groups" at school/playgrounds? As in, how is it "always on"? Not being invited to a chat or being kicked out of a group chat isn't "always on".
I was able to send full fat (640x480 at the time) videos to people over SMS in 2008 using a flip phone. I was able to do group chats and share photos and all sorts of nice things.
I could do all that in android land as well over SMS with other android users, before RCS.
It's only when my iPhone having family members attempt to send me multimedia texts that things don't freaking work. My dad's new wife tried to send me pictures of their wedding and Apple reduced them to a hundred pixels because fuck you.
Some of this blame can be placed on carriers but they don’t care.
Friendships are importance for psychological health and development.
When you're excluded from the primary means of communications with potential friends, and can never find out where and when they are meeting to get together, it's not "minor".
And who's talking about bullies? When most of your kids' potential friends communicate using iMessage, it seems pretty presumptuous of you to say that they're all "not the best potential friends anyways." Actually, they might turn out to be great friends, because people are complex, and their messaging preference isn't determinative of their entire personality, or much of it at all.
> Kids don't need to be treating their phone as a status symbol. Nobody needs to treat anything as a status symbol but they do. You see it all the time with different brand names, including Apple. It could even happen with different/older models.
> Blame Apple all you want, but don't make your kid suffer socially for it. Buying your kid an Android phone should not make them suffer socially. It's just as capable of running quality messaging apps minus the arbitrary exclusivity of iMessage. I wouldn't want my kid using iMessage even if they had an iPhone just because it will exclude other kids for no good reason.
But in the real world, if it does, then buy them the damn phone. Used, if that's the only way to afford it and that's what they want.
Don't make your kid suffer because of your stance on a corporation. That's just being mean to your kid. Go ahead and use Android yourself if you want, but don't do that to your kid if they're having trouble making friends and Android is a reason. That's just cruel.
Nobody wants their kids to be bullied so I understand. But even worse than that I wouldn't want my own kid to be a bully. Kids are going to be a lot more likely to bully others if they befriend others who are bullying.
It's not bullying or shaming by most kids. It's just, including SMS in an iMessage group chat is a terrible user experience. It's genuinely super annoying and breaks all the time. To the kids, the Android kid basically just has a broken phone. The kid won't get added to group chats because it doesn't really work.
If you give your kid an iPhone it's not going to turn him into a bully. That's absurd. It's just going to let him be included in the group chats where friendships grow and plans get made.
Don't make a poor kid suffer when there's no reason for it. Their suffering is not going to make Apple disable iMessage.
> The kid won't get added to group chats because it doesn't really work.
Yes, but exclusion is a form of bullying. Apple is enabling it by making iMessage only work on Apple devices. There are many other messaging apps that are far better than SMS and are inclusive. It's better to encourage everyone to use one of those.
> Don't make a poor kid suffer when there's no reason for it.
It's quite literally the poor kids who suffer from things like this. It's not just fancy phones that they miss out on. Could be clothing brands, games, toys, etc. being used by kids to exclude others. Buying into everything is not a solution.
> It's better to encourage everyone to use one of those.
But if you can't succeed at this (and you won't), then don't make your poor kid suffer. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
> Buying into everything is not a solution.
No, but buying a few important things goes a long way. A cool pair of shoes isn't functional, but sharing the same communications platform is. And you can buy a lower-end used iPhone on eBay for next to nothing.
I have a parent who thought they were fighting a lot of these battles and on the "right side", and I was miserable because of it. Don't do this to your kid. Making friends is hard enough without a parent putting even more obstacles in the way.
But I don’t think either platform lets you control messaging group chat functionality this way. They just offer approved contacts and complete disable as your options to control messaging.
I also think your “amount of drama” might be badly measured simply because the majority of kids in the US use iOS.
87% of teens have an iPhone.
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.
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.
MMS did, which far predates RCS.
Everything about the concept of a phone number is confusing to me. It's a string of digits that if someone guesses, they can activate the most active notification your phone has (ringing), at any time, no matter if you know them or not. Better yet, depending on your notification and MMS app settings, they might be able to make a dick pic appear on your lock screen on a whim - big spammers of this seem to get marked by the carriers and apps pretty quickly, but for a more targeted one off, still easy.
As opposed to tcp/IP based chat apps that basically require a bilateral human-initiated handshake before someone can message you...
Tying and account to a phone number is a privacy nightmare.
I guess Facebook/Meta does it for easier social graph extraction/profiling, while Signal tried to hand of verification to precent spam. But for the sake of this argument, we may just assume all of them are evil.
And there is one singular app which supports RCS.
In many ways, it's a regression from SMS. In that SMS is somewhat universal, and RCS is so specialized it's almost worthless.
To put it another way, Google can't kill SMS short of literally removing the app from Android because it's not their infrastructure, but if they shut off their RCS servers tomorrow, it would be dead for good. That's a Google-only service.
They could just layer their own chat platform on top of Google Messages but we all saw how Google's IM business went along: Chat, Hangouts, Alo, Meet etc. So they muddied the water so deep (to a carrier level) to make it look like it's Apple's issue for not adopting RCS. And people actually fall for it.
Nobody wanted RCS. Even carriers don't want to maintain RCS. They just use Jibe. And that's exactly what Google wanted. My RCS communication with friends don't even show up in carrier's usage. How is that ever different from iMessage...
You know who chose to selfhost their own RCS server? Yes, Chinese carriers! They call it 5G Message. New ad delivery channel for businesses hooray! Instead of plain text and a link, now your campaigns can even have MENUs inside! I can send SMS to a Chinese number, I can send iMessage to a Chinese number, but I can't send RCS. Truly "Universal" profile.
It's a complete shitshow.
Have you tried to restore a backup? You cant, unless it is uploaded to google cloud. No google account, no backup. (including the adress book that's tied to the account, since you are asking, they changed restore rules recently)
Have you tried denying adress book access? Whatsapp barrs you from starting a conversation. But there is the workaround with https://wa.me/+phone ...except for WhatsApp web
Have you ever tried putting Whatsapp in an Android work profile? Now try to export a chat!
Every once in a while a get the task to save all pictures of a conversation and it is usually a pain (If you think its easy, try again in Androids work profile).
From a UX perspective I would never mourn WhatsApp
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.
We're stuck with iMessage, which Apple is actively hostile towards non-users. Even for me, who had an iPhone, it was a royal pain in the ass. What do you mean I can't see my messages online? I need a Mac? Are you fucking kidding me? I'm a paying customer, why am I being nickled and dimed?
That, and then SMS MMS. Which are so unbelievably bad they're basically worthless.
I shouldnt have to spend 2.5 thousand dollars to get an acceptable messaging experience. I shouldn't. RCS isn't really helping, but the situation is absolutely NOT for the better IMO.
It's patently ridiculous to trust the Signal Foundation more than phone carriers? I wasn't aware that AT&T and T-Mobile are run for the benefit of humanity.
Any app that implements RCS is run by gigantic corporations, most of which I'd argue are closer to the US government than even Meta, it's not obvious to me where the ridicule comes in.
The spec also handles video calls, conference calls, sending/receiving money, and just about anything else a modern messenger does.
It just lacked E2EE for the longest time, which makes sense when you consider that the police and secret service have their tendrils in the standards body that publishes the spec.
Synchronisation is not part of the problem it's trying to solve (sending messages between devices), the same way SMS and MMS don't, so that's up to the apps implementing the protocol.
E2EE has been added very recently (https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/technologies/netwo... came out a few months ago), and post-quantum encryption is still being developed. It uses standard MLS (RFC 9420) for messaging, so verification will have to be implemented however normal MLS implementations do it. I don't know if there's a standardised way to do it, I haven't fully read the most recent RCS spec yet.
I oversimplified RCS somewhat, it's not just HTTP wrapped in carrier stuff. It's also SIP, SDP, XML, OIDC, RTP, and JSON wrapped in carrier stuff. Still, page 428 of the second link shows an example of a POST request that you can make after combining all of the tidbits of specification that came before it, and that's where the simple JSON+XML shine through the stack of protocols that are tasked with delivering it. The E2EE layer is basically just sending base64'd encrypted messages over that same interface.
Apple, Google, and Samsung can synchronize SMS messages through their cloud services, so the same also goes for RCS. For more privacy-oriented folk, KDE Connect can also offer SMS messaging to the desktop by synchronising locally with a connected phone.
I still hope for a protocol to win out that's not tied to one party.
Not to mention that the choice isn't really between your carrier and Meta, but rather Google and Meta, since most people on Android end up just using Google servers for RCS, and that choice is much more of a toss-up.
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.
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.
So it is entirely plausible that they banned the device, I guess. (Or they could have banned the IMEI, as mentioned)
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.
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.
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.
(I use GraphenOS and couldn't make it work for the life of me)
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.
Who in their right mind would make this assumption? I'd hate to have to explain that one to grandma.
So unfortunately SMS will still be around for quite some time
now RCS compared to SMS is a bit more secure (in theory at least), so would rather over plain SMS but never over signal
The reason iMessage is popular in the US is the fact that it's functionally just SMS, being used by the default message app. The reason that didn't happen in Europe is that SMS used to cost money to send, so nobody was already deeply invested in that system, but instead rushed to Whatsapp et al., since those were free and SMS was not. SMSes are free nowadays, but by now we're all already invested, and all the apps provide a better experience than SMS and RCS (the former due to lack of features, the latter because its often broken) and even Grandma has Whatsapp to keep in touch with family, if only because little Timmy installed it.
The iPhone was unique in that it refused to let carriers customize its operating system. That's part of why Apple had to partner with a relatively obscure carrier on launch, while Motorola/Samsung/Nokia/Sony Ericsson/Android phones launched on random carriers all the time.
Many people still buy phones from their carriers which comes with all kinds of apps pre-installed, including carrier-branded SMS apps in many cases.
Everyone in their right mind would have made that assumption when the system was designed. Only some weirdoes at Apple and a few hard-core open source enthusiasts cared.
Of course, that doesn't mean that operating system vendors such as Apple and Google can't simply implement RCS and all the weird carrier quirks they need to deal with in their own apps anyway, and to make messaging available using an API. They already do that kind of stuff with SMS, MMS, location information, internet connectivity, and practically anything else the phone does. They just decided that they're not really gonna bother with an API for this specific trick your phone can do.
The past truly is a foreign country.
> Many people still buy phones from their carriers which comes with all kinds of apps pre-installed, including carrier-branded SMS apps in many cases.
You're joking, right? I've never seen this in Europe since the flip phone days. I thought we had left that in the past. Most people here buy their phones outright, but even when on a plan, they don't fill your phone with malware.
Apple has basically had the balls to tell carriers to go fuck themselves and do it their way, and it's been a huge boon. Google still hasn't done this enough, IMO.
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 is on WhatsApp and doesn't even know what RCS messaging is.
But here in North America,we like pain.
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.
EU also mandates dedicated circuits for big appliances, so there is no difference in practice.
The two things I can think of are electric kettle and a raclette machine.
Tools are mostly battery powered those days. A home workshop would most likely be wired in 240 or three phases anyways.
What else are you missing?
An electric tea kettle that didn't take an hour to warm up would be very nice.
My well pump runs on 120v, and when the motor kicks in the whole house knows.
240v has lower voltage drop over distances, puts off less heat due to lower amperage for the same wattage, and since we're dreaming, we could switch over to a sane plug design like Type F or G instead of A and B.
I've been using electric kettles in north america and whilst they take longer, we're talking 5 minutes not an hour.
Some hyperbole can be appropriate but you're just being disingenuous here, or you've never actually used a kettle.
Very poor quality for images and videos, emoji reactions, editable messages, deletable messages, group administration.
My desktop PC uses about 600W running at full tilt. It can take 120V or 240V. At 120V, it will pull 5A to run its 600W load. At 240V, it'll only use 2.5A. This means for the same gauge of wire, it'll experience less resistive losses and thus be cooler and less prone to overheating.
You wouldn't change the outlet to a higher amperage outlet, you'd just change to the 240V equivalent of that same amperage rating. For the US, it looks pretty much the same as a regular wall outlet but has the blades horizontal instead of vertical. Something like this:
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Leviton-15-Amp-250-V-NEMA-6-15R-...
Well yes, but usually the whole point of switching to 240V is to get more power than what 120V can supply. The people complaining about electric kettles being “slow” in the US compared to the EU would still be complaining if those kettles always pulled the same number of Watts on both 120V and 240V, because it's the Watts that determine how fast the water heats up. The amperage is therefore probably going to be at minimum approximately the same in that case — and probably higher if you're doing something more intensive (and therefore requiring more current) with that new 240V outlet than just running an electric kettle (like running a stove or a clothes dryer or an air conditioner or an electric car charger or a rack of 10+ of those 600W-PSU-laden computers — hence those usually getting beefier 20A+ circuits while everything else in a house might be 15A).
And in the US more people are using iMessage than SMS thanks to iPhone's 58% market share.
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 :/
I think it's caused by the network effect [1].
>I for one fucking hate that most of Sweden uses FB Messenger
I agree. Denmark is the same, everybody uses FB Messenger or, even worse, Snapchat.
And don't even get me started on payment systems: Sweden has Swish, Denmark has MobilePay, Italy has Satispay, etc. It's completely fractured and it's so annyoing when travelling across the EU.
At least there's a new European system called Wero [2], I wonder if it's going to help fixing this situation.
I wouldn't otherwise mention it, but this is one of the few sites where "Stand up your own messaging server" isn't a completely insane suggestion.
I don't know about you, but I personally talk with Iranians more on Whatsapp than telegram. I know the Iranian government did ban whatsapp for a while, but its still popular. I remember reading an article on here about a whatsapp leak, and it mentioned that there are over 60 million whatsapp users in Iran. Considering that Iran has a population of around 91 million, that's a huge majority of the country.
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.
I was hoping when I first learnt about RCS that it could be an alternative to Meta owning everyone's comminications channels, but I've given up that hope a fair while ago.
That's not true at all. Random data point. Estonia. I have a _single_ contact that uses WhatsApp. Everybody else is reachable via FB Messenger/Discord/SMS/Signal/Google Chat/Instagram.
China is always an exception,but they are locked partially out of the whole internet
There is a rumor when both companies tried to enter the Indian market: Whatsapp won.
WeChat assumes there is good reception and fast data transfer anywhere so there is no need to compress pictures and videos.
Whatsapp could be passed as Android APK between phones. And it resizes and recompresses every picture you send.
So thats my guess why WhatsApp won 1/6 of the planets pooulation in India.
SMS also has crazy weird limitations with messaging across countries due to ISP pricing, even though the messaging apps such as whatsapp have no problem with this.
Yeah, the carriers shot themselves in the foot here trying to monetize this and they opened the flood gates for replacements to come to fruition.
*: unless someone does a chargeback after, which makes the money disappear from your account, a major source of "oops I accidentally sent (too much) money (to the wrong person)" scams
Needless to say: letting me use an “insecure” device for tap-to-pay would considerably lower their risk compared to me not using a device at all and instead using a physical card — even, again, ignoring that my device is in all likelihood considerably more secure (and therefore exposing them to even less risk) than it was in its stock configuration.
----
¹ except for my ZIP code, which is easily guessable if you know roughly where I live — which I don't exactly keep particularly secret!
Can you expand on this?
It's been a while since I've explored IPv6, but I'm on Comcast and I recently switched from OpenWRT to an Ubiquiti router and was surprised that 1) it doesn't enable IPv6 by default and 2) It asks for configuration [2] that I'm not sure how to answer. I thought everything "just worked" with Router Advertisement.
[2] https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005868927-UniFi-Gat...
That seems like reasonable approach when most people just need /64, and those who want more have to configure to get it.
* SMS is cheaper in America than in Europe where carriers gouge their customers for it.
* Usually this means the non-Americans are just using WhatsApp (owned by Meta/Zuckerberg) instead, which is hardly something to be proud of.
We also have free roaming in the whole Europe.
The adoption of messaging apps caused a lot of carriers to reduce or eliminate the SMS fees, as they saw the business was evaporating.
One of Signal's main cost centers is activation SMS messages. For many other small players it is a significant factor too.
I would be pleased if everyone who uses SMS with me switched to WhatsApp. I would be more pleased if they switched to Signal, but the UX benefits of either one are significant.
I disabled RCS that day and never enabled it again.
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
I'm not a lawyer, though, so who knows.
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-int...
With the introduction of LTE, everything from calls to texts have been IP based TCP/UDP/maybe SCTP packets. Does WhatsApp get to file a net neutrality violation because the phone's native SIP client gets priority by the modem/carrier? Does Gmail get to file a claim because SMS messages exchanged through SIP are delivered faster than their push notifications? Does Telegram get to file a claim because you have to pay for a megabyte of roaming costs traveling abroad while you only pay for a single "SMS" despite both being a TCP packet? I don't know. I don't expect those claims to apply.
RCS is the same, in that it's a core carrier feature that communicates between your phone's messaging service and your carrier's infrastructure. RCS' envelope is actually quite similar to MMS' design, except MMS' data transmission still had to be implemented in a circuit-switched way because it came from the 3G era.
Google muddied the water by offering carrier infrastructure (an RCS server) worldwide to any phone that wants to connect to it. It's as if I would host my own SMSC I'd let anyone in the world connect to. It's not the normal use case and as carriers are implementing their own RCS services, I expect this anomaly to slowly disappear over time.
The distinction between third party messengers and SMS/MMS/RCS is a good thing, in my opinion. SMS/MMS/RCS providers need to be able to exchange what is essentially a live feed on a phone number with law enforcement at a moment's notice. Messengers like Signal don't. If third party services would fall under the same category as RCS, it'd stand to reason that the same would also apply in terms of law enforcement orders, and I don't think anyone but the law enforcement agencies would want that.
† Here = "global" RCS, de facto controlled by Google. I haven't checked carrier settings for RCS islands such as the deployment in China or Korea.
It's not a coincidence that RCS still requires carrier hardware and coordination, despite being an IP messaging protocol. It's also not a coincidence that the protocol did not feature E2EE, despite even student project protocols providing that.
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.
I do receive spam in Signal, because i had to register a phone number.
I loose my chat history if I do not log into the desktop client for FIXNUM days.
The desktop client may crash as soon as you kill its supporting terminal.
I have tried the user name feature once and signal reported, that they had lost my username, I would need to create a new one.
I have not tried backup and restore. So far I am not in the mood for a potential failure.
This thread was depressing to me — I can't believe we're still dealing with the lack of a truly open near universally used secure messaging system.
I bridge signal to matrix on my homeserver using signal-mautrix: https://github.com/mautrix/signal
This allows me to use different phones without going through transfer/wipe. Still needs a primary device though, which was the iPhone until yesterday.
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.
Whoever knows how to download WhatsApp, knows how to download Signal.
This turned Signal into the defacto default in our org.
Yes it does.
Last time I had to reinstall my phone I ended up finding an implementation of their phone-to-phone transfer protocol to emulate a "new" device I'm transferring to just to get a dump of the data (I'd share, but don't want them to close this option, since clearly the lack of export option is very much intentional).
Then I deleted Signal and begrudgingly moved to WhatsApp (in addition to iMessage which I've already been using).
WhatsApp, which is infamous by association with Meta, backs up to Google Drive or wherever.
I hate writing on a phone - anything longer than a few words I use my computer for.
Their developers are also very responsive to PR's, I have a couple GCC build fixes in it.
I really soured on Signal early with when running BB10, they would not let us fork and use/distribute websocket builds to get around not having google play services on available on that platform: https://github.com/libresignal/libresignal/issues/37#issueco...
I'm still a little sour on it now because there's still no way to transfer the identity since they refuse itunes/icloud backup, refuse any way to export a key, and I have to look at hideous corporate memphis icons every time I set up Signal new again on iOS (at least Android doesn't have the last thing).
I mentioned before, but I use mautrix-signal to be able to have a unified (except for telegram) messenger on desktop with nheko or element via matrix. It works really well.
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'm very happy that they're essentially using MLS, that's a real benefit[1]. But other chat apps can (and some do) do that too, without actively driving every single carrier globally to give Google all of your messaging activity. We're better off having diversity.
This all could reverse course and become acceptable, but I don't see how it would happen in practice. It seems much more likely that everyone will just give up and say "yeah that didn't work".
1: Though without alternate impls they can just silently MITM it and how would you know? RCS users: have you ever verified your messaging keys out of band? Do you know how? I can't find it in Messages. The "Universal Profile https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/technologies/netwo..." for RCS that describes a ton of things compliant apps have to do (many of which Google Messages does not seem to do, as far as I can tell) has no instructions at all to show users their keys or provide a common way to verify them (as far as I can tell). Client diversity provides a way to detect some attacks here, but there is currently almost no client diversity, and instead it seems to be shrinking towards just Google Messages, using Google's servers.
^ They are correct, the MLS / E2EE part of RCS is quite new and not yet implemented ~anywhere. So it gets no points until widespread, and this is now a decade after RCS's introduction. I think we can expect it to take a long time yet, if at all.
Why would you want to go into this closed model, where you’ll likely be charged per-account? How is this any better than XMPP, email, or any other IM protocol out there?
Should you use it for day-to-day messaging? No. But having it for emergencies is nice - if anything, just to bootstrap an alternative, secure channel.
* There's a terrible hack called concatenated SMS that strings together multiple messages to build one longer message under the hood, but if any of those parts go missing along the way, the whole thing gets dropped on the floor.
Sure, RCS has those functions, but half of them are broken 60% of the time, and you don't need those anyway for bootstraping into wherever you actually want to talk, and for short messaging.
RCS brings nothing to the table if all you need is to tell mum she needs to come pick you up. On the contrary, it might fail you because it tried and failed to send that message over a 4G connection you barely have, rather than sending it as an SMS and then actually arriving. And you're never going to use it for group messages, attachments or with emojis unless its an actual service you intend to use for serious purposes, which is exactly what the comment I was responding to said you weren't going to use RCS for anyway.
I disabled RCS (and iMessage back when I had an iPhone) for exactly these reasons, but still use SMS as a fallback with people I don't actually know and never intend to talk to again, and see no reason to upgrade to RCS even if it wasn't broken, since for my use cases, the extra feature set isn't needed. If I need more fancy features, its for use with people I actually know, and thus people I can get in touch with on not-SMS.
RCS is, by spec and in practice, intended to fall back to sms/mms if it doesn't work for some reason (e.g. you're roaming and not connected to your carrier. or have opted out. or they're having an outage. or...).
And there's an opt-out (partly because it kinda requires syncing your contacts to the RCS servers... technically only for "online presence" and for any individual you contact to check their RCS status (which is completely reasonable) but do you know where that presence toggle is in Google Messages? I don't).
The fallback is not really automatic or anything, RCS's feature-set is gigantic and allows senders to have far more control over the message's presentation (https://developers.google.com/business-communications/rcs-bu... currently has visual examples of this). It's rather clearly a "built for businesses" system, at least in part. But "RCS might not be available" is very much a core expectation for the stacks as a whole - the world is a big place, and there are many old phones and out of date apps, even if every carrier gets on board. (this is very likely one of the reasons why everyone's just piling into Google's stuff)
If they ever get things working, they might try to force it everywhere, but that's probably like a decade or three away at a minimum. Accurately predicting industry and legal trends on that kind of horizon is basically impossible. They might be planning on it (I have no evidence either way), but achieving is an entirely different matter.
Er, what? The main reason why most of the world moved from SMS to internet-based messaging is because SMS was far more expensive.
> having it for emergencies is nice
In what kind of emergency could SMS be useful?
> just to bootstrap an alternative, secure channel.
But you need to exchange SMS numbers to do that. You might just as well exchange emails, XMPP, or whatever other protocol your going to use later and skip SMS entirely.
But that obviously didn’t work because there are hundreds (thousands?) of cellular carriers around the world and they are the wrong people to manage such a thing.
So they basically are steering it back to “Google’s shitty iMessage.”
The universal thing isn’t the carrier anymore, the universal thing is the Internet that runs on top of it, which is perhaps why just about everyone outside the US tends to use messaging apps like WhatsApp/Signal/WeChat/etc.
In the US we don't reliably use WhatsApp, iMessage is locked down, and Signal, etc., are just for tech bros or political hacks. Yet, everyone wants to text instead of call, so we are in this world where we need to make RCS work, and they are just not putting in the effort.
The user base pales in comparison to WhatsApp but it did double in the last couple of years.
What I mean is that in Mexico, Brazil, and many other countries, WhatsApp is the de facto messaging standard. Businesses expect you to have it, restaurant ordering is integrated with it, etc.
In the US, we don't have anything except SMS/RCS.
> just about everyone outside the US tends to use messaging apps like WhatsApp/Signal/WeChat/etc.
This is The Way. Well, several ways, since you inevitably end up a bit fragmented, but usually a country will settle on one, usually WhatsApp. Further east Telegram is also popular.
I don't know if RCS is the way, but monopolistic messaging apps definitely aren't.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/474179/how-do-i-di...
*that you can't filter.
Every time an app begs me to enable notifications, I give it the side-eye because I immediately assume it's going to include notifications that I don't want to see, which are essentially ads for some app feature / some part of their walled garden.
I want to be able to filter notifications at the OS level. That could be by a substring search on the content of the notification, or by a unique-per-call-site (in the code) identifier included in the API the app uses to surface a notification (though I suspect most apps would just re-use the same identifier everywhere because the developers don't want me to be able to filter their ads).
With RCS, you have at least multiple providers and the ability to switch without being socially exiled.
Isn't it fair to say the US has settled on iMessage and, to a lesser extent, RCS/SMS?
I'm not sure who you are calling "carriers", but it sounds like the people who own a mobile network. They buy gear off a supplier like Nokia / Huawei, contract them to install and maintain it, then make their money back over time by selling the bandwidth to consumers and hopefully a "free" phone as well.
They aren't the engineering power houses the telco's of old were, like AT&T. Rather they are reverse - a marketing powerhouse, duking it out with other marketing power houses. Their technical know how is close to 0. In fact on the retail support side, it might even be negative. When I deal with them, I come away with the impression would have trouble fixing a propelling pencil. If Google thought they could manage a massively parallel e2e messaging stack, they were deluding themselves.
This is the real reason Huawei was banned by the West. It wasn't just that it meant they were using Chinese make the gear, with opaque Chinese firmware, although I guess that was bad enough. It was that if the telco's bought Huawei, Huawei ran it for them. "Ran" means hands on, 24 hours a day, with in Huawei engineers deployed around the country keeping it ticking. Having a Chinese company running your countries mobile phone infrastructure was an impossible swallow.
Whatever it is, Google of all org should not be at the Helm of this.
And the amount of moral policing they did to apple. Disgusting assholes. I hate Apple for a lot of reasons. iMessage is definitely not one of them.
The alternative is to hand all your communications to carriers, who have a consistent history of being incompetent, extortionate and bending over to authorities to disclose everything you've ever said at the drop of a hat. Exhibit A is SMS, which is totally unencrypted, plagued by bad actors, and a cesspool of spam and fraud.
In an ideal world you could choose who does your RCS, in the same way that you can pick your email provider, but the way it's baked into the telco ecosystem makes this basically impossible.
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.
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...
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.
This is my guess also. It was published in March[1] this year and I think it was too late to include in this year's iOS 26 release, so possibly iOS 27.
They have promised to implement it:
> "End-to-end encryption is a powerful privacy and security technology that iMessage has supported since the beginning, and now we are pleased to have helped lead a cross industry effort to bring end-to-end encryption to the RCS Universal Profile published by the GSMA," said an Apple spokesperson. "We will add support for end-to-end encrypted RCS messages to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS in future software updates." [2]
1 https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/technologies/netwo...
2 https://www.macrumors.com/2025/03/14/apple-encrypted-rcs-mes...
Whatsapp provides metadata about my social profile and my active ours of the day to Facebook/Meta.
Carrier text message available is a bonus to me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMessages/comments/1be8gxk/fix...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is Google following that with Google Messages? We have no way to verify! How great for everyone.
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.
How wonderful that they've been claiming better security all along too. (it may be true, sms is terrible - but they know many people will think E2EE or similar when they hear that)
I believe they can't. RCS is implemented over IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), part of the mobile carrier infra and tightly tied to them (SIM card auth, APN settings pushed from the operator, etc)
... unless they become a mobile operator
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
worthless-trash•2mo ago
No sir, this isnt crazy, the problem is that we're paying for a service that isnt accountable for their issues.
Thats crazy.
joecool1029•2mo ago
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.
jeroenhd•2mo ago
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.
ziml77•2mo ago
Funny, I more or less said a few weeks ago that SIM cards do not guarantee freely being able to swap numbers between phones more than eSIMs do, because the carrier could tie the SIM's phone number to the IMEI in the backend either way. That was just kinda dismissed as a not being a real threat... and yet here it seems exactly what's happened for the RCS part of your service!