Google famously campaigned for Apple to "get the message" and use RCS, but now doesn't let rooted Android users use RCS.
TL;DR
Users who have rooted their phone, have their bootloader unlocked or are using some custom ROMs report that their RCS messages are not being sent, even though RCS shows them as connected.
The Google Messages app does not show any error messages when blocking RCS messages of these users and does not send the messages out as SMS or MMS either.
Google famously campaigned for Apple to include RCS messaging in iMessage but is now blocking it for certain Android users.
I knew it! I had the sneaking suspicion that this was the case. About a month ago I updated my phone to Android 14 (custom rom) and noticed I started having trouble with RCS after a couple days since the update. I knew I was going to lose the play integrity but whatever. RCS was nice but I will not bend... just pushing me a step further to de-googling my phone. Lol it's funny how they cry to Apple about supporting RCS but yet refuse to allow third party apps or phones that don't meet their requirements, pathetic. There should be an encrypted text communication standard that isn't controlled by one company who can lock you out because you don't have approved software, that is ridiculous. That being said, I wish Signal was still a SMS app.
I have a pixel, it defaults to RCS and those do not reliably deliver to my husband, who is on an android Samsung phone. I can't figure out what the big advantage of RCS is.
What is the benefit of RCS? Ever since it started using that system, I've constantly had to manually change over to SMS because RCS just stops functioning entirely causing messages sent by me to not be sent and messages sent to me don't get pushed to me until I turn RCS off. So from my perspective, RCS fuckin' sucks.
Any idea how long this has been going on? I have an unlocked bootloader but am running a standard upgrade version on my phone and it was never rooted. Some time in the last few months I started getting warnings that my texts weren't going through and was asked if I wanted to switch to SMS... yeah ok I'd never heard of RCS before so yes please use SMS for all of my messages, and everything worked fine.
So I read that the RCS Apple wants to implement isn't exactly the RCS Google is using.
My hope is that once Apple starts using (a hopefully open standard) RCS, then everyone will switch to that and everyone everywhere can communicate securely.
I'm on GrapheneOS. It just never verifies my number for RCS, so everything is just sent as SMS/MMS. Has been going on for a couple of months now. I have no idea why as it does not remotely harm them whatsoever, and hurts their adoption. I'm waiting for a non shitty RCS app to come out, hopefully one that's FOSS.
WhatsApp is the defacto messaging over data globally. If you live anywhere outside the Murican bubble, SMSs are not used for anything and iMessage isn't even a thing people with iCrap devices care about. Everyone, on every platform, uses WhatsApp. Governmental services, private companies, and all the people use WhatsApp.
The only text messages SMS I get nowadays are from Americans that don't understand anything else and American businesses that use them for 2FA which is super insecure and equally stupid.