I am perfectly fine with Apple not rushing to implement RCS. It may be a business decision for their part but any chance that the messages information will go through Google's servers is a full no go for me and is not a valid alternative in my opinion.
Even if it is encrypted (which seems to not be guaranteed anyways), it still gives Google data I don't care for them to have.
If you do use iPhone then you could selectively choose not to RCS texts contacts that you know use a Google RCS implementation.
If RCS goes through my carrier it is up to my carrier if it's Google's implementation or not? Meaning Google's servers or not?
If the person I am talking too is on an Android phone I would also assume the same, that the text is likely going through Google's servers at some point.
Needing to know whether or not a specific contact is using Google's RCS implementation seems like quite the hassle when "Google" is the flaw for RCS in my opinion.
If I am misunderstanding, I would love to be corrected.
The E2EE on RCS is an extension to the protocol developed by Google. I don't know who has implemented it other than Google. So if a user is on a carrier that does their own RCS impl (many carriers piggyback off of Google's so they don't have to deal with it), they may not have E2EE.
> Do all RCS messages go through Google's servers?
If your carrier isn't using Google's implementation, and you're messaging someone on a carrier also not using Google's implementation, then it won't go through Google's servers. Otherwise, it will. In theory, this won't matter, assuming the E2EE is implemented correctly and securely. I don't know if an audit has been done, though.
There's also the case where one person is on a carrier using Google's impl, and the other is on a carrier that is not, and that carrier has not implemented E2EE. Then the message will go through Google's servers, and Google will be able to read it.
This is how I understand it, anyway; I don't intimately know the details of the protocol, so this might not be 100% correct.