It's that time of year again, folks. As the tech world has sights set on the latest Apple event that is producing the new iPhone 16 as we speak, we all know we'll be seeing slightly improved phones, some impressive specs, and a few 'innovative" or "magic" new features from Apple. For me, however, the...
RCS is the wrong one to use, since it is not an open enough standard for there to be a single FOSS RCS app on Android. Something like Matrix or the Signal protocol would be better.
Seriously? Matrix and signal already exists… So you can use them today instead of RCS to your heart’s desire.
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I think they mean it more as it’s not only gonna be Google but Apple who are going to be shoving RCS down their throats wether they want it or not by shipping it as default.
On the other hand, the era when corporations cared even the tiniest bit for open standards in instant messaging was gone long ago. Now all instant messaging is a complete mess, we users have to deal with a myriad of apps and protocols that in the end are doing the same thing for the sake of “privacy”, and RCS will not fix that. Nor Signal, truth be told.
I yearn the glory days of multi-protocol IM apps like Pidgin and Trident on Android (though +IM seems to still be a thing) - when you could use whatever you wanted without “missing features” or risking to be banned.
“Shoving RCS down their throats” is like saying they’re “shoving phone calls down their throats” or “shoving SMS down their throats”.
As for the mess of chat apps, we’ve had apps like Pidgin before and with Beeper Mini we will have them again. Beeper Mini started out as a way to get iMessage on Android, but their plan has always been to mirror Beeper in that they want to collect different chat protocols in one single app.
Barring that, the EU’s DMA is forcing the most important chat apps to interoperate at the very least, though full support (including calling and such) isn’t mandatory until somewhere in 2027.
Yeah, no. Pretty bad argument.
When you buy a phone you know it will have calls and SMS - it’s what you bought the phone in the first place. You bought them because of that. RCS is still just a fancy alternative.
And you’re missing the point again - a company doing a multi IM service app, like Beeper Mini, is not the same that a group of volunteers doing a multi service IM app, like Pidgin. They’re still going to be closed source and they will not guarantee to give support for platforms people need. Beeper mini on desktop? Beeper mini on Linux/BSD? Forget it.
For you. I have relatives with iPhones I don’t talk to frequently but when we get together and somebody takes a group photo it’s annoying. Being able to just text a decent resolution photo without people needing to download an app is a win.
I’ll continue to use Signal with friends and family I talk to regularly.
This right here. I have to have my mom send videos of the grandkids to my work iPhone because my personal Android received them heavily pixelated and compressed.
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Hundreds?!?! Ok, just name one hundred.
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If Apple implemented the Matrix or Signal protocol it would still work the same way for you, while not forcing other Android users to use on Google or Samsung’s proprietary apps, those being the only options for RCS.
Huh? No it wouldn’t. If Apple implemented the Signal protocol they would still have to publish an iMessage app to the Play Store for Android users.
Call Google’s messaging app proprietary all you want but at least their implementation of RCS is E2E encrypted.
If it used the Signal protocol any app that used that protocol which is open, could interact with it, that is the point. Whereas RCS is a closed protocol, just one that happens to also be interoperable with Google Messages, but not any other third party apps that people might want to make.
To be honest, I’m a bit surprised that on Lemmy people are so against open standards and FOSS apps.
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That’s not how it works. Other apps (ironically including Google’s RCS implementation) use the Signal Protocol. Simply using it doesn’t magically make your app interoperable with every other app that uses it. And Apple would be the last company to go out of their way to make it work.
Nobody here is against open standards or FOSS apps. I am actually lucky/privileged enough to be able to write open source code for a living.
You seem to not understand the reality of the situation and that use case other than yours exist.
The standard is fine: https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/wp-content/uploads/RCC.71-v2.6-1.pdf
This isn’t an Apple standard or a Google standard, it’s a telecoms standard. It’s made for everything from IoT to flip phones to tablets to smart cars.
Nobody has bothered to build an app for it, though. Well, carriers have, but nobody uses their carrier’s messaging app.
RCS is an open standard, but Google’s implementation of it isn’t AFAIK. That’s why there exist no 3rd party RCS client outside of those praised by Google.
Google’s implementation is just a bunch of weird text sent over texts. It’s using the standard as a transport for their own extensions.
That doesn’t mean other apps can’t communicate with Google’s client. You can’t use Google’s special sauce like encryption (without reverse engineering the details) but you could very well use your own.
What developers want when they say they want Google to open RCS is for Google to take the RCS code out of their messages app and put it into a standard API, the way SMS and MMS work, so developers don’t need to go through the trouble of implementing RCS and basically be able to use the existing code without changes. That’s a nice idea, but I don’t think it’ll happen any day soon. Google generally doesn’t contribute their closed source stuff back into open source Android. There is one type of RCS authentication that requires interacting with the SIM card, which only privileged (system) apps can do. All other forms of authentication can be implemented by any app. With multiple SIMs, you could even use different apps for different services. However, they’d need to actually implement the RCS spec, which everyone is hoping to avoid.
iPhones will be able to message Android phones without Google lifting a finger. Flipphones will be able to do it too. Things like video calling, sending money, and stickers can all work, because that stuff works over standard RCS. The lack of encryption is a pain (though I doubt it’d take long for someone to reverse that) but it’s not something existing cross platform texting solutions offer.
Google Messages is the Microsoft Wordpad of text editing. Pieces of it are open, most of it is composed of public APIs, and it’s no more than a very specific implementation of existing standards.
Are those carrier apps FOSS? Are they on F-Droid? How do you install them? If not, it’s not really any better.
Just because no open source developers have bothered to implement a standard doesn’t mean the standard is closed. Anyone with interest could set up an RCS server, connect an RCS app (by manually specifying the base URL or by hosting a private 4G network) and start hosting their own RCS infrastructure, though you’d probably face difficulty trying to connect your open source network to the big ISPs.
OpenIMSS is working towards a fully open source LTE (and up) network that also sports RCS support. The voice/video calling features are already supported by opensips. I believe OpenIMSS and the underlying base software is run through docker. It’s a rather niche piece of software, as you have to be an MVNO or a carrier to connect to the public RCS network. Nothing prevents the open source community from running their own network, though; that’s how Matrix and XMPP work, after all.
As for RCS clients, https://github.com/Hirohumi/RustyRcs seems to fit the bill, though I haven’t run it myself to see how complete it is. There’s no pre-built APK but if you have Android Studio and Rust on your machine you should be able to get it running in no time.