Yeah... I just started getting back into building sms/mms/rcs apps on Android and oh boy. It's much more of a mess than I expected, and much more "oh so it's basically just Google now, and they seem to be trying to lock it down further" than I expected (or hoped).
And you can't even implement it yourself because it requires special permissions on Android, which you can only get if you're a carrier/oem-blessed app. And the early "you'll be able to build other apps, there will be an API like this: https://github.com/android-rcs/rcsjta" promises (which would put it on par with sms/mms) never materialized, despite a reference implementation that did exactly that over a decade ago.
At this point I'm just totally against RCS and I'm intentionally turning it off. Why hand all of your messaging communications over to Google, when they've got such a consistent history of being hostile? We're much better off going back to telling people not to use sms (or mms or rcs) at all because it's insecure.
show comments
floppyd
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.
show comments
wrs
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.
show comments
yellowapple
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.
show comments
cosmic_cheese
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.
show comments
jackconsidine
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.
show comments
intothemild
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.
show comments
smelendez
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.
show comments
edbaskerville
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. :(
show comments
dfawcus
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.
SamDc73
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)
show comments
Moto7451
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.
show comments
charcircuit
Why bother with Google's new, shiny chat app. Why not use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord, etc which are more neutral apps.
show comments
looperhacks
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.
show comments
tcfhgj
I don't. RCS is probably the worst messaging option right after SMS.
novia
I have this reddit thread bookmarked for how to fix RCS every time I get a new phone:
Many of my chats keep switching back and forth between RCS and SMS. No idea why.
INTPenis
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.
show comments
vertnerd
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.
Rebelgecko
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
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debo_
Too bad. You get AI instead.
Joshua-Peter
Honestly, all I want is reliable RCS messaging that just works—no extra setup, no bugs, just smooth texting like it should be.
show comments
codedokode
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.
boesboes
would have been nice to include what RCS is, never heard of it.
Appearantly it's the successor of MMS, basically.
show comments
par
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.
oblio
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.
show comments
OptionOfT
Have you tried a Visible Trial to see if RCS activates there?
nextstep
Just use Signal
show comments
tamimio
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.
show comments
SanjayMehta
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.
Barrin92
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.
show comments
juliangmp
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.
show comments
worthless-trash
> 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.
show comments
globalnode
my cheapo plan gives unlimited sms but not free data, so id rather just turn rcs off instead.
immibis
Thanks RCS for showcasing why design by committee doesn't work, and why dumb packet-switched networks won.
dmitrygr
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?"
Yeah... I just started getting back into building sms/mms/rcs apps on Android and oh boy. It's much more of a mess than I expected, and much more "oh so it's basically just Google now, and they seem to be trying to lock it down further" than I expected (or hoped).
And you can't even implement it yourself because it requires special permissions on Android, which you can only get if you're a carrier/oem-blessed app. And the early "you'll be able to build other apps, there will be an API like this: https://github.com/android-rcs/rcsjta" promises (which would put it on par with sms/mms) never materialized, despite a reference implementation that did exactly that over a decade ago.
At this point I'm just totally against RCS and I'm intentionally turning it off. Why hand all of your messaging communications over to Google, when they've got such a consistent history of being hostile? We're much better off going back to telling people not to use sms (or mms or rcs) at all because it's insecure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh man. It's not just Apple. I've had months of RCS not working on GrapheneOS, and have no idea who to blame. The first time it stopped working, I fixed it by switching carriers (AT&T -> T-Mobile). Maybe I'll try switching back! Or maybe I'll switch back to an iPhone and give in to iMessage. :(
I 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.
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)
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.
Why bother with Google's new, shiny chat app. Why not use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord, etc which are more neutral apps.
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.
I don't. RCS is probably the worst messaging option right after SMS.
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...
Many of my chats keep switching back and forth between RCS and SMS. No idea why.
Most of my friends here in Sweden use Signal. But on the rare occasions that we had to switch back to messages lately, for example when Signal was down, I noticed RCS has been working flawlessly.
It's quite the nice surprise because it's a technology you heard about years ago and now suddenly it crops up in daily life. We all gave up on it years ago too and used other IM apps like Signal, Briar or SimpleX.
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.
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
Too bad. You get AI instead.
Honestly, all I want is reliable RCS messaging that just works—no extra setup, no bugs, just smooth texting like it should be.
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.
would have been nice to include what RCS is, never heard of it. Appearantly it's the successor of MMS, basically.
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.
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.
Have you tried a Visible Trial to see if RCS activates there?
Just use Signal
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
my cheapo plan gives unlimited sms but not free data, so id rather just turn rcs off instead.
Thanks RCS for showcasing why design by committee doesn't work, and why dumb packet-switched networks won.
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-cop...
Now, if iMessage was broken, apple would surely care.