I don’t know anyone with an Android phone, so I don’t need to turn on RCS. I would rather learn how to send smoke signals than use Facebook Whatsapp.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
RCS Messaging in iOS 18: What iPhone Users Need to Know
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
You keep saying that, please provide a single carrier that charges for RCS. It requires your data connection and goes against your data allowance, it‘s not charged per message sent (at least not a single contract in my country charges for it, nor do any in the US or other countries according to people I‘ve asked).
They are doing the bare minimum. They‘ve opted for UP 2.4, which at the time of them starting their work on RCS in Messages was already several years dated (2.6 was the current one back then). We‘re now at 2.7 as of June (adds reactions and inline replies as major features).
It goes over data so it‘s like iMessage and WhatsApp: consumes your data allowance and not per message, like basic SMS is in many countries.
RCS uses SSL encryption as of… forever. So it is encrypted in transit. It‘s not at all unencrypted.
People have to stop saying it‘s not encrypted. (it‘s not natively end-to-end encrypted, but it‘s still in transit).
You’re in the US, so you likely have unlimited data, but, EVERY chance they get, they’re going to send that data based message over Wifi.
The carriers, being owned by the government, don’t want to offer encryption to their citizens via the government owned carriers. All three of them on the leadership board of the GSMA because it’s in their interests to be.
Oh you want encryption both ways? That will be another $39.95 a month please.
Hold on I got to make a voice phone call.
So all this at what cost?
Three letter agencies love this.
Hold on I got to make a voice phone call.
So all this at what cost?
Three letter agencies love this.
WhatsApp isn't even allowed in China. That's 1/6 of the world's population. iMessage is allowed in China last I checked, but most people there use WeChat. And when they leave China or communicate with people outside China, they still use WeChat... or SMS or RCS or sometimes iMessage.
The US didn’t NEED a standard, there were several in existence that were cross-platform. RCS is just another data bound system like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram. The only difference is that some folks that didn’t like dealing with one huge American company can now deal with… another huge American company! Don’t go outside your where you have data, though, because RCS, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram all work the same when there’s no data.
I have one question about this RCS thing: does it require the phone provider's cooperation?
Do the americans want to bring us back to paying per message in the name of having the right coloured bubbles?
And you think the likes of Verizon or Sprint or whatever sells you cell phone service in the US isn't spying on you and selling anything you send via SMS?
Psst... Sprint merged into Tmobile in 2020, it's gone. No we aren't going back to paying per message, why would you think that? Finally, even with Apple's adoption of RCS bubble colors are not going to change. Yes RCS requires the phone carriers to implement it, the large carriers in the US have already set it up, smaller carriers will eventually catch up.
“Any carrier that provides its users with non-unlimited data plans” That’s not just one carrier, it’s all of the big ones in the US and a good number of them around the world, too. Are there carriers in your country that ONLY offer unlimited data?
OR, is your assumption that EVERY person with a smartphone today has unlimited data? I mean, that’s one way to see the world, but the carriers wouldn’t offer limited data plans if there was NO ONE using them.
The US didn’t NEED a standard, there were several in existence that were cross-platform. RCS is just another data bound system like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram. The only difference is that some folks that didn’t like dealing with one huge American company can now deal with… another huge American company! Don’t go outside your where you have data, though, because RCS, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram all work the same when there’s no data.
I wasn't aware of a standard which replaced SMS that the carriers were working on, but the point remains the same if you just want to insert whatever other standard was being worked on. Providing something that works out of the box without having to install a 3rd party app or sign up for a service is what's important. RCS as a standard doesn't mean you have to work with an American company as long as your phone carrier implements it. But I guess everyone is ok working with Meta/Facebook for Whatsapp. Also I was under the impression that RCS would work over WiFi, can someone correct me if I'm wrong?
All carriers offer unlimited data here. What‘s capped is how much of it is at full speed and not throttled down to a crawl (which is still enough for OTT messengers to transfer texts, like WhatsApp or iMessage).
Not sure if the link works but 16.3 is all about the technical specification. It‘s all TLS/SSL endpoints, you‘d know if you actually bothered looking at what traffic RCS generates (or searched for longer than 10s, the link above took me 15s to grab with 1 Google search and the official UP2.6 pdf).
Not even RCS replaces SMS, nothing does. RCS works with WiFi, just like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, WeChat, etc. My point was that it wasn’t a “need” as much as it was, for a certain group of people, simply a want to not use a Meta product. For those individuals that actually needed higher fidelity messaging between two mobile devices with different operating systems? They were able to readily find that solution in Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram, ummm, Signal, Telegram, I mean, take your pick. They didn’t let downloading an app stop them from acquiring the functionality they desired. That’s why WhatsApp marketshare in the US is considerable and growing every year.
Americans wanting to use WhatsApp have to deal with Meta. Americans wanting to use RCS have to deal with Google. That’s an unalterable fact because no US carrier is supporting RCS natively.
16.3.3 Encryption
The User Network Interface transactions should be always encrypted to prevent eavesdropping of the user’s personal communication in the various access and transit networks. RCS makes use of the common encryption protocols, i.e. Transport Layer Security and IPsec. Clients conforming to the profile defined in this document shall support the encryption for all signalling and media traffic technologies described in this document.
For a large group of people, it's a need. As I already mentioned, if you're dealing with people from China, WhatsApp isn't even an option, because it's banned in China.
Learn something new every day! That’s good info to have not only for me but anyone else that comes by this thread.
It‘s really sad if one actually bothers looking at the history of RCS. The original vision was actually well thought out until it got turned into yet another OTT messenger like WhatsApp and co.
But then again, I‘ll die on this hill: RCS is still a massive step up from SMS/MMS and I‘m glad Apple finally adds support for it.
That’s actually great! However, I assure you that the number of people on unlimited plans around the world is not 100%. And, if those people aren’t on Wifi and have been sending audio messages and large images back and forth all month, they’re likely to have a surprise at the end of the month (especially as this is only a part of the data usage, they’d still be surfing the web, downloading apps, etc.).
I think the far greater cost trap is people accidentally reverting to SMS/MMS, which (at least here) has far greater fees attached to. Barely anyone offers free MMS anymore, most revert to charging for SMS after a certain amount and loads of them charge you right away for sending an MMS across borders. Having an international RCS chat downgrade to SMS/MMS would be catastrophic for me in terms of charges, so I hope downgrading doesn‘t automatically happen for group chats.
Data is data, it doesn‘t care if it goes across a border.
I was excited early about RCS and watched in amazement as the US carriers just fumbled all over themselves trying to turn it into the worst product ever offered by US carriers. From what’s been mentioned about SSL, it’s at least, at that lowest level, functionally different from SMS (the other features like read receipts is more like fluff) but it COULD have been sooooooooooo much more.
I gotta seriously disagree here, it was definitely a "need." We all keep going back to the same premise, at least for US users, that installing a 3rd party app is a viable solution, it is NOT. I have literally hundreds of contacts, business associates, family, friends, acquaintances, and yes I do have a higher need than SMS provides for most of those. Now you tell me how easy would it be to contact all of them, ask them to all download a specific messaging app, trust that app because a lot of people are turned off by Meta/Facebook, then ask them to monitor and use that app to communicate with me. Now compound that, as you said, with dozens of different messaging apps. That is EXACTLY why we need an out of the box solution which EVERY consumer gets, at least in the US, when they purchase their phone notwithstanding the MVNOs who haven't implemented RCS yet but eventually will.
I'm not sure what point you are making about an American company. Apple are using the GSMA spec of RCS. Is the issue that the interface with the carriers is the Google fork of RCS? Is there less trust for Google than let's say Verizon who has some major issues with selling consumer information? I don't see what the big deal is, if you are a super spy and have to covertly message then I don't think you are going to be using RCS, otherwise I'm ok with Google knowing my wife needs a gallon of milk and Haagen Dazs *IF* that's even what happens. If I need the security I will and do use Signal, but even they have their issues from what I understand (ie: look up some of the CVS vulnerabilities), minor at best but still not 100%.
That's always been my issue, all this blame when 1) the carriers let RCS die because they couldn't figure out how to make money from it, and 2) Apple offered iMessage to the carriers and they turned it down, again because they couldn't make money from it. And if you want to take it a step further where were governmental regulatory agencies overseeing the carriers and why didn't they mandate RCS be implemented?
HOLY CRAP, I didn’t think of that. I would hope they would delay delivery of the RCS messages until you got to Wifi or cellular data rather than send you a series of costly out of order MMS messages, but, yeah, the carriers have a way of always setting up the system such that they prey on folks that aren’t paying close enough attention.
How could the GSMA carriers been looking at WhatsApp in developing the idea for RCS when the RCS project initially started in 2008 and WhatsApp in 2009?
It‘s Apple deciding to fallback to SMS/MMS, not carriers. Apple can introduce toggles for auto-SMS fallbacks just as the UP spec mandates.