Any FOSS alternatives for Google Messages that support RCS?

Was curious if there were FOSS solutions since I really would like to avoid using anything Google related

11 comments

I'm not sure there exist any.
Last time I checked, this was actually the biggest criticism Google recieved. They were pushing RCS on Apple, yet keeping it proprietarily only available on Google Messages.
Maybe it has changed. I don't know.
Latest update I heard was that they made it ON by default in Google Messages.
- It’s a GSMA protocol. OnePlus apparently supports it without the Google app, I’m sure there are at least some others (Samsung?)
  
  Doesn't it not support encryption across providers? And it's still IP-based. If you're gonna use an IP-based protocol, you might as well use Signal.
- Eh? RCS is an open standard. Yes, you're basically required to use Google's RCS endpoints at this point unless you want to host your own, but it's far superior to SMS. Apple made their own proprietary version in iMessage instead, so you have iPhones on iMessage and every other phone in the world on RCS.
  
  That's like... both iPhone and Android are vender-locked.
  
  No, Apple can begin supporting RCS and play nice with other phones (not just Android) using a modern, encrypted, and open messaging platform. But they choose to fall back to SMS intentionally in order to market their devices as superior.
- the one that made me laugh recently was when they tried to paint alternatives to rcs as antiquated.
  rcs doesn’t even support end-to-end encryption, something even imessage does.
  an open, industry standard that everyone supports would be awesome, but rcs simply isn’t it. rcs was designed to make telecom companies happy, not to be an actually good messaging protocol.
  
  Google's extension of RCS does do e2ee, which raises the question of "what happens to security when you talk to a non-Google user"..
- Still the same story today.
- Not quite sure about the On by default aspect; on my non-Google phone running stock android, it keeps asking me to enable RCS.
  I keep clicking no because there's a lot of ads pushed through RCS. This is annoying on top of the usual telemarketing stuff you might get due to phone numbers being sold.

11 comments