Are there any apps that support RCS that aren’t made by Google or a crappy cellular provider (ie: bloatware Verizon apps)?
I appreciate the features RCS has, but I’d love to get that without sending it all to Google with a “trust us” approach to backdoor keys. The documentation I looked at indicated that anyone could setup an app to support RCS and communicate with Google’s RCS users, but I can’t find any apps that actually do that.
Also would love to be able to message from multiple devices using RCS, which Google has working in their web app.
nope.
As far as I understand it, there is an API but as with all APIs you need a key/license/magic number to use it.
So far, Google has allowed access to Samsung, a carrier version and no one else.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but to my understanding of how RCS works, the messages would still go through Google and their servers. With that said, this would probably be more privacy friendly than straight up using the Google Messages app, since it’d have less Google telemetry and data collection, but still not ideal or truly private since it’d still be Google’s platform you’re using to message at the end of the day.
messages would still go through Google and their servers
As I understand it, there is nothing Google-specific in the standard. At the moment, Google is the main (only?) provider of RCS services to mobile networks though so data is highly likely to go through Google servers. However, that’s not mandated by the standard, it’s just a consequence of the current state of the market.
RCS is all about controlling the messaging market — just like every other messaging network out there. Every implementation is proprietary and locked behind the implementer’s servers.
If you want something open source you want Signal. There are also other messaging solutions that you can self-host.
Big tech will never give you open access to their networks because that’s against the whole point.
SMS is the odd one out because it doesn’t require servers, and the reason it’s so open and universally supported is because back in the day the governments of France and Germany forced carriers to do it that way, and once it got popular it spread.
Signal is two things, a protocol to use over something else, and a proprietary service.
Matrix is an example of a total solution.
Signal is great, but it was unclear if I would be able to self-host my own Signal server if I wanted to support the public network and provide redundancy to my local LAN and connected networks.
Every time I look at Matrix it looks really cool and sounds great. But each time I try to setup a client or actually use it, nothing works, apps crash, and I can’t actually use the dang thing. I tried setting up my own server, even tried using a public server with the Element web-app and still nothing worked, couldn’t join rooms, etc.
Love the idea, haven’t seen a decent implementation yet. Honestly kinda wish there was PGP for sms or something like that. I couldn’t care less if the transport is insecure, as long as I can trust that only the intended recipient and myself can read/modify my messages.
Signal is great, but it was unclear if I would be able to self-host my own Signal server if I wanted to support the public network and provide redundancy to my local LAN and connected networks.
You can’t. Signal’s server is closed source. Only the clients are open.
I just discovered Signal open source the server. Please kindly disregard what I said. I had the old news in my mind (maybe).
Matrix doesn’t have forward secrecy, and signal is not proprietary, it’s free and open source,
And Matrix does not fall back to SMS (unless someone implements such a Matrix client).
It would also be silly to try to get everyone you know to use YOUR Matrix client, or one compatible with it.
SMS is also super low level, it’s like the equivalent of ping. The GSM protocol already had a way to send small packets of data to phones for diagnostic/control purposes and someone figured you could also cram small text messages in there and thus SMS was born. It was really created as a way to monitize functionality that already needed to exist on the network for technical reasons. Back in the early days of GSM text messaging plans were a big money maker for the carriers because it cost them almost nothing to send SMS across the network but they charged customers by the message.
