That’s great Google. Since you made such a big stink about Apple supporting RCS that means you will let other apps on Android to use RCS, right?
Right!?!??
Best we can do is silently block your messages if you fail Play Integrity.
Once a month like clockwork -_-
RCS? No.
Whatever they replace RCS with next month? Yes.
I doubt they would be that benevolent.
Don’t worry, that will be replaced a couple months later by 3 separate protocols that each cover about half of what you want and combined get to 80% of what you can do today.
… if we are lucky
They need to rebrand RCS as something else. Messages is still synonymous with sms with android users, especially older devices and yes, older users.
Its actually enabled by default in new devices. Problem is, RCS requires internet, and not everyone has unlimited data.
RCS only works when its connected to the internet. Not everyone has unlimited data, and the 128 kb throttled data after using up the fast data is slow as molasses that sites would fail to load and it’s likely a reason why messaging would just revert back to SMS/MMS. (And some people don’t even have the “unlimited 128 kb/s” after their fast data runs out)
They need to make RCS not require internet. Or carriers need to stop being greedy and just not count RCS data usage as actual data usage. (The data use is so insignificant it should not cause congestion anyways)
Or you can just disable RCS and solve the issue for yourself
So then explain why everyone in the rest of the world uses Whatsapp and not SMS. You’re telling me they’ve all had unlimited data for the last 10 years?
When you use an app like Whatsapp, if you try to send a message witbout internet, it gets queued until you get internet.
With RCS, if it fails, it doesn’t get queued, it automatically falls back to SMS/MMS, which is how they got those stats.
I mean, I’d say a majority of messages send on 3rd party platforms in developing countries are probably “sent” while offline, but only actually gets delivered when they are on wifi.
If this were RCS, they would’ve just get converted to become SMS/MMS, which is how those statistics came to be. RCS that gets downgraded will never count as using RCS.
128 Kb/s? Where do you live?
This is common in the US when you run out of paid high speed data for your cell phone plan. They throttle your speeds to 128kbps so you technically have “unlimited data at 3G speeds” but it’s basically barely usable.
In the US, its a common thing.
Before, it’s actually just X GB data, you run out, you have nothing.
Then later it became “Unlimited, X GB of 4G/5G Data*” with a huge asterisk
Then in the fine print:
*After X GB is exceeded, speeds is reduced to 128 KB/s
Which is just a fancy way of saying: X GB Real data, after that we’re just trolling you with the unusable slow as molasses “data” and trying to get you to buy more data.
This is because these are the older, cheap plans. Like these plans could be anywhere from $15 to $30, per month. The real unlimited plans are not gonna be cheap.
Right now, I pay like $60 /month to have unlimited data + unlimited hotspot at reasonable speeds (like 15-25 Mbits up/down if its not congested) I do have wifi at home, but that’s a family network that don’t trust (long story, but I have trust issues with family)
I have Straight Talk with unlimited everything for $45/mo.
Well, on my end, idgaf. As long as Google’s dick is in the pie, I ain’t fucking with it. It’s bad enough they’re into everything already, I have no interest in adding to it by being limited to their one app that allows rcs.
RCS isn’t good enough. There is only one app that it works on. Sometimes, no… often it just doesn’t work. I’m currently starring at a thread that used to work, but now I can’t send messages too. I made it! Everyone had rcs.
Fuck the whole thing.
Half the time it works for me (Android talking to apples), and the other half of the time the encryption, reactions, etc just don’t work. It’s frustrating.
Yeah that’s the thing that people who want this don’t realize. Is that you are forced to use Google Messages with Google Jibe for RCS. But it’s really picky about the hardware it runs on Android wise. It won’t even let me send RCS messages on GrapheneOS which is a custom rom that forces you to have a unrooted version of Android. So to me this is monopolistic and terrible behavior on Google’s part. Where they force carriers and now Apple to pay billions of dollars just to message Android users with end to end encryption. But like it doesn’t run on my phone because you need a stock up to date version of Android that isn’t too out of date either or else it also won’t run. Nor does it run on my Android 11 flip phone because it’s too out of date and has been blocklisted by Google as a whole. Honestly if Google just opened up Jibe to third party apps I would use it. But with the forced AI integration that you can barely turn off among other things. I’ll probably stick to textra and switch away from using a smartphone as a whole when carriers in the United States demand that your phone support it in order to use it on their network.
The largest carrier in Sweden, Telia, still don’t support RCS ):
In my network circle, only a few 50+ year olds still use SMS. Either everyone is on my Nextcloud instance, Delta Chat or Signal. Or of they have iphones they use imessages between themselves.
RCS won’t allow users to turn off certain things like read receipts. That’s problematic for some. I personally like them but I know people who don’t who I have unfortunately had to inform that they have to turn off RCS altogether to get rid of them even though there’s a setting to turn off read receipts.
What?
We tested this extensively. On Android we all have the setting to turn off read receipts. It’s broken. It does not turn off read receipts for us. Our phones run the gamut from pixel 9 pro/+ to a pixel 5. To get read receipts to go away we had to turn off RCS completely.
They’re referring to iOS devices, the Read Receipts toggle on iOS is for iMessage not RCS.
I personally left RCS off until Apple addresses this.
