You can use Signal between Android and.iOS, i know this as I (android user) use it all the time to msg contacts using Signal on their iphone, don’t use RCS ffs.

The people I know with ios still haven’t figured it out.

It’s nice that Androids can finally send me high quality images and participate in group chats without as much jank. Still not as good as an iMessage group but a lot more bearable.

They should’ve worked to use xmpp or matrix as their replacement for SMS, but they chose an alternative that let’s corpos run servers and not anyone else.

Fucking garbage technology.

Alternarive to SMS maybe. No alternative to chat apps, because carrier-controlled.

A good rule of thumb is : does any of the participant maintain the backend?

If not then you are dependent on at least a 3rd party. If that 3rd party is not entirely open, meaning at least

• standards for the protocol,
• open source for the backend and frontend,
• alternative clients,
• alternative backends,
• both can be actually used (not just in theory because the protocol has been published)

then basically you should consider that this 3rd party owns your group, there is no expectation of privacy in it, it can be closed in an instant, messages can be modified without you knowing it, etc.

TL;DR: bad.

AFAIK there’s no free as in freedom implementation and only works with propriety apps and I read google messages refuses to use RCS on rooted/unofficial systems. So that’s a big no.

Another big problem is, people who don’t have mobile internet and unknowingly have it enabled (aka most people who still use SMS) won’t get the message until they connect to WiFi or some time passes.

I don’t think I can use it on my phone since it’s too old…

The protocol is cool, the implementation becoming proprietary and enshittified is a bummer.

i thought it was stupid before, and I still do

Last I checked, there is still no way for developers to use RCS on Android, so it’s a non-starter for me. I do not and will not limit myself to first-party apps.

Please correct me if I’m wrong. If there’s an open-source RCS-compatible messaging app out there, I’d love to try it.

I can’t use it between Android and iOS because I don’t have Google Play Services and RCS requires Google Play Services and Google Messenger on Android to work. No third party app can use it.

RCS is even less secure than SMS though — it’s unencrypted and by design, Google, Apple and the carriers all have to be able to inspect the content. And the way it’s designed makes it really difficult to have an open E2E encryption standard. So as a result, Google<->Google is encrypted, Apple<->Apple is encrypted, but combine even one device not of the same type in a group chat and it has to be unencrypted.

The carrier has to support it which is a red flag for me since they have to archive metadata and the contents.

This’ll be a hot take but anything based on Signal’s protocol (including WhatsApp) is better than RCS in all ways.

Doesn’t work properly on Graphene OS most of the time