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Google Messages will help you shame your friends into finally turning on RCS (APK teardown)
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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Android
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"Better then ever" is a bold claim. I switched to GrapheneOS and guess what it stopped working. Why? Because Google decided not to make it work on custom OS's anymore like a year ago.
To my understanding there is NO real technical reason for this. If I can have Signal work cross platform (a real secure messenger) then RCS can as well.
There is no technical reason. The carriers/cellular industry gave up on their efforts to push RCS and let Google own it all for the most part, and with it, everyone lost openness.
It's also why Samsung Messages is on a slow burn EOL. The Samsung/Google partnership had Google encourage Samsung to drop their RCS support and just push Google's app, after Google decided to sunset the openness of the messaging API. Third-party SMS apps will all slowly die. Probably also partly why Signal dropped SMS support. It was around the same time.
Android's weird changes are nothing but badness, and will likely get worse. Hopefully the open OS community can start focusing more energy behind alternative mobile OSes that aren't dependent on a corporation.
The problem is inertia
Market share matters
In the context of basic communications, market share really shouldn't. Phone calls are a standard, SMS is a standard, MMS is a standard. RCS should equally be a standard, along with IMS video calling that has been in the 3GPP spec since Rel99 (that's 1999). Flip phones in the early aughts could do video calls (in Europe) way before FaceTime was a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye. Every phone right now could do out of box voice call/video call/text/picture messaging regardless of platform, if the cellular standard bodies would grow a pair.
Problem is, companies like Apple and Google became huge, unregulated, and monocultured.
How we humans allowed something as basic as communication to be put behind walled gardens is just a failure of humanity.
There are ways to make it work on graphene, but yes - it doesn't work out of the box.