alt Hacker NewsRCS was DOA from day one as far as I'm concerned. The carriers being involved in any capacity deeper than providing dumb pipes alone was enough to make it pointless, but no E2E in the base spec makes it extra pointless. They may as well have just extended SMS to be more capable, because that's what they've effectively created.
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RCS was DOA from day one as far as I'm concerned.
Agreed. Google used a standard that virtually nobody (except some carriers) cared about to get a foot in the door for better interoperability with iPhones, to try to solve an issue that is mostly US-only (green bubble anxiety),
In most of the rest of the world nobody gives a shit about RCS since we have adopted other messengers (than iMessage or SMS/MMS) ages ago, most of which are already end-to-end encrypted.
I understand why GrapheneOS has to spend time on this (the US is a large user base), but it's sad nonetheless.
The RCS spec has encryption in its documentation. I think the current spec version is 4.0?
I don't know much about RCS other than that carriers need to be involved, but there's a way to not involve them, which Google did for a while using some kind of compat-service (jibe or something?), and then they stopped doing it.
Never seen RCS working on any carrier ever since. I don't understand why Google couldn't just continue doing what it was doing. Why require carriers?
RCS is an extension of SMS and has quite literally been "SMS but more capable" from the start. The protocol on the wire looks a lot like MMS over LTE. Registration and communication mostly happens over SIP and RTP like in the latest MMS specs.
The early versions of RCS were barely implemented. Android and iOS didn't bother including clients, carriers didn't bother hosting servers because the spec was optional, and third party applications made by carriers were launched and then died because carriers couldn't explain to customers why their app was better than WhatsApp e.a. for those in the market for alternative messengers.
I think it's safe to say that RCS would've died a quiet death had Google not used it as a basis for their own Hangouts alternative built into their SMS client.
When RCS was first (soft) launched back in 2008, E2EE messaging practically didn't exist. Google slapped E2EE on top when they hosted their own iMessage alternative to bring it into the modern era but the base spec was still "what if MMS wasn't so outdated and restricted".