Re:Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next...
by JohnFen on Thursday November 16, 2023 @04:27PM
(#38295790)
That's interesting! I wonder why the phone didn't automatically deregister when I disabled RCS, or why there wasn't at least an informative popup telling me this was necessary.
Re:Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next...
by kelnos on Thursday November 16, 2023 @10:47PM
(#38299269)
That's the dumb thing. When you disable RCS on your phone, why doesn't the phone just send that same API call that gets called when you visit that web page and deregister?
(Ditto for Apple, if that's still an issue over there with iMessage as well.)
https://messages.google.com/disable-chat
This is similar to Apple's iMessage deregistration page.[1]
Google has been funneling RCS messages through its own servers to bypass wireless carriers, which were slow or unwilling to directly support RCS.[2] Unfortunately, this has centralized RCS communications through Google and allowed Google to make end-to-end encryption available to RCS users as a proprietary extension that Google never contributed back to the RCS Universal Profile specification.[3]
For RCS on Android to be decentralized again, your wireless carrier would need to support RCS on the network level and Android would also need to implement RCS in a way that does not require interaction with Google servers.
[1] https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/
[2] https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/302020-google-will-bypass...
[3] https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/11/16/apples-flavor-of-...