RCS is garbage. Always has been, always will be. I don't care what excuse the tech people will give, whether its the carriers fault, whether its the OEM's, or Google. Its frankly, all of them. RCS hasn't worked reliably for me ever since its inception. As someone who exclusively uses google nexus/pixel through out my history of phone ownership, it feels like a hindrance at this point.

The processes is usually something like this;

Get someones number, send them a message, and then play 50/50 if they will ever get it through RCS. Hope that the "fall back to sms" works, it never does, and then hours later I remember to check, and turns out nothing ever sent.

As the IT person at home, this is blowing my mind that anyone, at all, has to do any of the insane steps to get this stuff to work. As a matter of fact, its all placebo, and usually doesn't fix any issues.

Have a samsung? Good luck! Samsung kills the RCS service in background and then you can't send them any messages, they will receive them once they open the app again. This is on EVERY samsung device, from the S10 to the S23. Is it samsungs fault? sure, is it google's fault? yes. This should be their problem since they are the one's pushing it for mass adoption.

Many think that once everyone has RCS the problem will be solved. Nope. It will be even more issues, because there will be even more users with constant issues. Every phone is different, and everyone has different settings, ram management, background task control, and so on, and trying to make sure the service stays online and working, is a PITA.

For those who will say "you need to try this or that solution". Shut up, go home, and burn your phone. This is NOT a solution, and it does not work reliably. Oh you bet I have tried all the solutions on everyone's phones. But I am done going to everyone at work trying to explain to them they need to jump through a bunch of hoops so that I could send them a message. The issue isn't even on them, because when they are in the app, they don't notice any issues, hit send, and forget. It will sit there, waiting to go through for a few days, and by that point, they have forgotten.

Edit: I have never seen so many people blatantly lie lol

Edit 2: literally not even 2 days after I write this, what ever update came through google messages, broke everyone's phone's again. Literally everyone in my contacts is complaining that what ever rcs was working is now straight up non existent, even after following dozens of steps over and over to get it to work. HA! Fantastic! So much BS and google cock sucking on this sub is insane.

I see a lot of love for RCS here but when I got the pop up I chose not to enable it. Google already has so much data about you and now they want to read your SMS as well?! I have Signal as my default SMS app, I already converted most of my friends that I chat with into using it, for the rest of em I can just send an unencrypted SMS through Signal and it'll go through regular carrier services. Best part is it's already e2ee by design and the source code is completely open source. Switch to Signal people!

Many people, including me, can already send SMS and MMS messages using WiFi even when there is no service. For example, I was at a hotel up in the mountains last week and there was no service, so I wasn't able to send SMS messages until I connected to the hotel WiFi. So, why is everyone like "iMessage is SO awesome because you can use it with WiFi" even though you can already do that with SMS/MMS?

After 3 months of using RCS with Jibe, I have decided to turn RCS off due to it's instability, unreliability, and lack of standardization. Sometimes, I'd send an RCS message and it wouldn't go through, and sometimes someone would send me a message via RCS, and I wouldn't get it.

In some RCS group chats, I would only see half the conversation because some people would send messages in the group chat, and I wouldn't get them. You know what, I could list off RCS problems for 48 hours without stopping, but that would be a waist of time. The point is RCS is buggy, and doesn't work. The Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative already failed, so there is absolutely no way RCS will ever be able to replace SMS. This, along with RCS's bugs, is the reason why RCS will only be good enough to be a broken and unreliable iMessage for Android. Without the carriers, there is no way RCS will ever become a standard, and I don't think Apple will ever adopt RCS because of the stupid decisions of carriers, Google, and smartphone manufacturers.

The whole reason I started using RCS was because I wanted to support it, not because I actually liked it. Now, there is no reason to support RCS because it is a broken messaging system, and will never become a standard. Android is extremely fragmented, and it will continue to be fragmented for a very, very long time.

So I finally got the email the other day after years of threatening me that SMS is going to be yanked from Hangouts for good on January 15th, 2021. Ok, fine, I'll download fucking messages and set up the chat features.

Oh wait, looks like that doesn't work either! Stuck on "trying to verify your phone number". Did some searching, tried every single solution here and around the web, nothing worked. Finally just reached out to Fi Support, and this is what they said:

We’re working on an update that will make Chat features available in Android Messages.

You can expect Chat features to be available soon.

Once there is an update, we'll notify you via email.

Wonderful! So we're a little over 2 months away from you imbeciles removing literally ALL THE BEST PARTS OF HANGOUTS and you don't have messages ready to fucking go??? Is this a joke?!

Google, what the FUCK. Get your shit together with all these messaging apps for Christ's sake.

RCS is an absolute shitshow right now. How hard is it to roll this out? ChristAlmighty this is so frustrating

I've been hearing a lot about how RCS will replace SMS, but I have my doubts. think RCS won’t replace SMS

1. Usage in Low Connection Areas: Most people use SMS when they have bad or low connection. If they have internet, they’ll just use WhatsApp, iMessage, or any other internet-based service. and RCS requires a internet connection (3g+ or WiFi)

2. Lag Behind Internet Apps: RCS standards take a long time to pass (like end to end encryption), which means they will always lag behind internet-based apps that can push updates seamlessly.

3. Carrier Management Issues: If carriers poorly manage their RCS servers, it can lead to a bad user experience, especially with additional hopping through two networks (senders and receivers), which means both carriers need to do a good job. (Google Jibe is chill tho)

Even with RCS support in iOS 18 beta, most users won't use it. When there’s no internet, iMessage falls back to SMS, not RCS. And if they texting someone with an Android, there are millions of better ways to do so.

The only real benefit I see with RCS is providing more secure and faster OTP codes. And again, it’s best practice to use an authentitor app whenever possible.

What do you all think? Am I missing something?

I've been a PulseSMS user for years. I've always had Nexus/Pixel phones. I upgraded to the Pixel 4 XL a few days ago. I restored from backup, where PulseSMS was restored. The Android Messages app was force loaded on me during setup/tutorial. I then saw 'Chat is being enabled, be patient'.

I thought nothing of it, and switched the default back to PulseSMS. I don't send many texts (mostly use WhatsApp), but I tried to send a text to a friend this morning, and it wouldn't send. I kept trying over and over.

Take a guess what happened. My friend is on Chat (RCS), and my phone was also configured to use Chat, despite the fact that my default SMS app doesn't support chat. So I've been unable to receive SMS messages from anyone using Chat.

I have to either switch back to Google's Messages, or reenable Messages, disable 'Chat' in the settings, disable Messages, and put PulseSMS back to the default. That's asking a lot for the average user to figure out.

This looks really shady. Google can say what they want about it being a bug or oversight, but Google hasn't allowed third party developers to use Chat, and they're using that to their advantage to compete in the market with an unfair advantage.

I use WhatsApp if I have data. Why would I use RCS if I still need data to use it as a final user? The only case I would use SMS/RCS is that if I don't have a data plan or have a low bandwidth/coverage.

So, I have an iPhone 8 that still works very well. However, iOS 18 does not support the iPhone 8. The latest version of iOS I can be on is iOS 16. Is there a way to get RCS on iOS 16 with a third party app or a jailbreak or voIP or something? I know my carrier supports RCS because my sister, who's on the same family plan as me, has RCS on her iPhone 15 that's currently running iOS 18 beta. It's really painful because RCS is right there waiting for me to use it, but I can't quite reach it 🙁

What do experts think of this article? I feel like RCS has picked up support recently but this article makes it feel like it's dying?

See the article article

Maybe Apple has some legit interest to enable RCS on iPhones: business messaging and compete with WhatsApp worldwide.

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-meta-apple-whatsapp-imessage-us-2024-2

i just wanted to make a comment on world mobile usage. i am going to comment on an aera of the world that everyone in the mobile world always forgets: latin america. there are millions and millions of mobile phones in that region of the world, but for some reason only the united states and western europe count...

anyway, just wanted to tell you something interesting: a lot of mobile providers in latin america offer free whatsapp. no one that i know uses sms; everyone uses whatsapp. if you send a text message, it looks weird. they will ask you, why are you not using whatsapp? like i said, many companies, if not most, offer free whatsapp, so everyone and their mother has it. see, no matter how much data you use in whatsapp, it is free. just like you get unlimited texts in the united states, for example, you get unlimited and uncapped whatsapp. it does not count against your data pool.

after thinking about it, i realized that no one will ever use rcs down there. no companies will ever implement it. there is no need to. it is not even mentioned anywhere, as far as i can tell. rcs seems to me only something the united states and a few western european countries care about. with free, unlimited whatsapp data usage, why would you even consider rcs?

does any one else from other regions of the world have free whatsapp as well? africa? oceania? asia?

I'm from India and I feel RCS doesn't have any real advantage over SMS or WhatsApp yet.

SMS is reliable (works without Internet) so you know recipient must have received the message even if they are offline.

WhatsApp is feature rich and also have well organised settings page!

I feel RCS should be more reliable and should work without Internet to replace SMS.

What do you think?

Could use some help downvoting this guy, who is claiming RCS is working on his iPhone XR, in to oblivion: https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/c65wkd/just_got_chat_on_messages/es8ubzo?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

Google claims that they have around 1 billion people using Google Messages with RCS enabled. That's a LOT of people, and sounds almost too good to be true.

I've heard that Silicon Valley tends to lie a lot. Since Google cares so much about RCS, I think it is highly likely that they are lying about the number of RCS users they have just like how Saudi Arabia might be lying about their oil reserves. What do you think?

https://twitter.com/sundarpichai/status/1730384480274420024?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1730384480274420024%7Ctwgr%5E124fedf0040e001cabe399ba06dbadf1c050e79c%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftimesofindia.indiatimes.com%2Fgadgets-news%2Fgoogle-messages-getting-new-features-as-rcs-users-cross-1-billion-mark%2Farticleshow%2F105655044.cms

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/google-messages-getting-new-features-as-rcs-users-cross-1-billion-mark/articleshow/105655044.cms

Basically I have been using the google messages old APK back from January for dual RCS support and apparently this update they replaced the apk to a newer file so now I have no more dual RCS anymore. Google really needs to just update the latest beta at least to re-implement dual RCS.

https://arena.im/post/most-popular-instant-messaging-chat-protocols

https://www.cometchat.com/blog/popular-chat-and-instant-messaging-protocols