9 votes

Some US carriers are still missing RCS on iPhone: who’s to blame?

3 comments

  1. ButteredToast
    Link
    This is one of the reasons why I was never an advocate for RCS. The involvement of carriers doomed it from the start. Anything that treats carriers as anything more than dumb pipes is going to be...

    This is one of the reasons why I was never an advocate for RCS. The involvement of carriers doomed it from the start. Anything that treats carriers as anything more than dumb pipes is going to be hamstrung, because that’s just how carriers are.

    It not being E2E encrypted by default is also a problem. There was an opportunity to replace the notoriously insecure SMS/MMS with something meaningfully better, but because carriers stuck their fingers in the pie that didn’t happen and so now only Google’s implementation has that feature.

    22 votes
  2. JXM
    Link
    This article could easily have been two sentences (I rewrote it below to save everyone the click), but I guess you need a certain length to get those SEO rankings up.

    This article could easily have been two sentences (I rewrote it below to save everyone the click), but I guess you need a certain length to get those SEO rankings up.

    Two factors must be met to enable RCS: A carrier must obviously support RCS and the individual carrier bundle that tells the iPhone what capabilities a carrier has must include a flag indicating RCS support. We don’t know who is responsible for updating carrier bundles, so we are unsure who to blame.

    11 votes
  3. goose
    Link
    While I'm an Android user on Fi with RCS support, I regularly text with two iPhone users on Mint, who currently lack RCS support. I also want to port my iPhone using wife to my Fi plan, as we're...

    While I'm an Android user on Fi with RCS support, I regularly text with two iPhone users on Mint, who currently lack RCS support. I also want to port my iPhone using wife to my Fi plan, as we're planning a vacation in Europe this summer and I'd like her to have the same effortless intentional roaming I get to experience.

    I wish there was some more transparency around these carrier bundles, purely so I could better understand where the breakdown is. In any case, in the year 2025, it's a wonder why we're still having so much difficulty deploying the next generation of text messaging.

    5 votes