560
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
560 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
59080 readers
3541 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
No but also yes.
The spec itself is open, but implementations that are in the wild aren't. Google's implementation is proprietary, for example.
On Android, Google has went out of their way to make other RCS implementations virtually impossible to implement. Samsung, for example, had to enter an agreement with Google to use their implementation, otherwise they'd have no RCS.
As of now, the easiest way to implement RCS outside of using Google's proprietary implementation is to create your own OS and RCS implementation for it.
This is kind of true but misses the fact that RCS was intended to be a carrier standard, and carriers weren't going to fucking do it.
So after almost a decade of carriers docking around, Google fires a shot across the bow and just implements their own version, using their jive backend as a "bypass" of sorts. But like any closed platform, it only works with the same clients.
They can't open up their server without some basic agreements so they try to get Samsung inboard. That is a mess of red tape. So they roll out RCS to all messenger clients on newer Android builds and stupidly call it chats or something. When they separately run a product called Google chat.
Anyways, that's how we got here. Each company needs to have a RCS relay server now because carriers couldn't be assed to do their fucking jobs, and now the Apple RCS server will pass your messages to the Google RCS server using a standard... So dumb.
Its still superior to SMS and is now at least baked into every new android device and on by default, but since it is not using actual radio waves SMS is still going to be possible in areas where data isn't. So SMS will continue to limp along and exist, because fuck carriers.