TL;DR
- Users who have rooted their phone, have their bootloader unlocked or are using some custom ROMs report that their RCS messages are not being sent, even though RCS shows them as connected.
- The Google Messages app does not show any error messages when blocking RCS messages of these users and does not send the messages out as SMS or MMS either.
- Google famously campaigned for Apple to include RCS messaging in iMessage but is now blocking it for certain Android users.
So I read that the RCS Apple wants to implement isn’t exactly the RCS Google is using.
My hope is that once Apple starts using (a hopefully open standard) RCS, then everyone will switch to that and everyone everywhere can communicate securely.
That’s not how Apple works at all. They have had iMessage for a long while now and refuse to open up the technology. They want to monopolize the communications so that they can keep controlling it.
My guess is they are just trying to sabotage any attempts at an open standard.
Sadly, you make a good point. They will probably develop their own RCS servers and let others connect to that.
I would be surprised if that happened. As we learned in the Apple v. Epic case (we all suspected before hand but was confirmed) Apple has kept I message closed so that parents wouldn’t “buy cheaper android phones for their kids”.
The strategy that has a proven track record, like the currently wildly popular BlackBerry Messenger.
We can do it right now without the need to please phone operator, device manufacturer and OS developer to add support for a protocol that does not even have E2EE standardized yet.