Yes, privacy is nice and important. But the phone was made for communication. And when most people have access to RCS and use it, then I can’t really say no, and say you can chat with me on Signal or Matrix. Telegram is banned at my work…
i want to take part in the communication - and the kind of privacy I need for the daily communication is limited.
Reading the privacy statement of Telekom.de, it appears that RCS is running on there servers. Maybe with google software, that is not specified, but not on US Cloude Infrastructure. For me this is good enough for some texts and pics.
However, unfortunately, Google seems well present there too.
AFAIK Telekom is on Mavenir, but that might have changed.
Made an account just for this discussion. I would consider RCS support to be a big point against Jolla when considering switching over from regular android. It’s vastly improved my experience messaging my family over on iOS, and they’re not going to switch away from iMessage. Yes, there is less privacy, but I should have the ability to choose
Deutsche Telekom is full on google, doubling down on tech I’m here to escape from. They work with Palantir too.
P.S. I wish and hope Jolla doesn’t go for users, who don’t care about privacy. Once let in our ecosystems, they gonna wish more and more proprietary stuff, polluting our system by their spoiled convenience.
Again: this is not just about privacy, but that Google will not open their servers for SailfishOS. iOS only got an exception because of marketshare.
I just preordered the new Jolla Phone, but this could actually be a dealbreaker. Some of our national carriers do use Google-independent servers, so for contacts who only use either RCS or WhatsApp, being forced to use a Meta service instead of an open standard on my carrier’s (which is a local company) servers feels a bit counterproductive. SMS is out of the question, as MMS has been turned off by some carriers and SMS messages do have a cost on lots of carriers in every phone plan. And everyone downloading more private OTT messaging is just not realistic.
I do not know where you are from, at least here in germany many people do not really know what RCS is, it is called SMS all the time, and the carriers do not make any difference if it is technically SMS or RCS on the protocol level, it is all priced as SMS, and SMS is in most (or even all?) tarrifs completely free (as in: it is a flatrate and part of the basic fee)
Do your carriers also make a difference if you call using GSM, VoLTE or VoWIFI?
The old problem that RCS was never really promoted in Germany (and I guess a lot of other countries) in the last decade… A lot of people don’t even know about it. Nevertheless support for RCS is an industrial standard now to my mind…
RCS is not sms, it’s like iMessage (and WhatsApp, telegram etc).
Messages are going through the internet and they are not charged as sms.
You can message anyone you want on the planet through imessage and rcs even if you don’t even have a sim on that specific phone, no cell service etc, as long as there is some WiFi connection.
In case of RCS, if there is no SIM in the phone: how is the sender of the message identified, how is the recipient identified?
If I understand the German situation correctly RCS was given up by most providers after years of promotion without any outcome.
Through app/account IDs I assume.
There’s no way anyone gives up on WhatsApp in Germany as it’s deeply rooted in everyone’s mind.
I’ve seen people using iPhones for example and still using WhatsApp, completely ignoring and not caring about every build in feature.
I don’t know how, but in Germany I hear the word datenschutz every day from the same people that use all meta, google, apple, Microsoft etc.
So, i just checked on my work phone. Firstly, RCS is of course supported in Germany. My operator is o2. Status show green/connected and the account shows the mobile number.
Given that, the destination should also be the mobile number of someone else. The whole addressing must be similar to other such messengers thar use the phone number to identify “accounts”.
Tapping on that ID in the adroid rcs settings it tells that “RCS is offered by the mobile operator according to the agreed terms and conditions”.
So, it would be up to the operators to allow other clients than from Google or Apple? Would it be like the NFC and payments? Would it be like the E-wallet which will also only work with the Google or Apple software?
I don’t know what and how, but carriers do play a role here.
As an example Apple added RCS last year I think (can’t remember exactly when), but I know friends in different EU countries that got RCS a few months ago on their iPhones.
That leads me to believe that it doesn’t matter if hardware/software is there if carriers don’t allow/approve it.
As per my understanding, for sending /receiving RCS messages one needs :
If any of it is missing, the fallback is conversion to SMS/MMS.
Found this: https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/technologies/networks/rcs/universal-profile
“Operators are free to decide whether or not to implement RCS within their 4G networks. However, the 5G standards mandate the implementation of RCS in 5G networks and devices.”
No, it’s the data thing Kanthal said. RCS goes through data. These days SMS can be around 30cts/message in many carriers (although some offer them for free), and I don’t think there’s any carrier that offers MMS for free. Vodafone flat-out doesn’t offer non-RCS multimedia messaging now, and Telefónica (Movistar/O2) charges 1,21€ per message. I think the reason for this is, besides general greediness, interconnection prices that operators charge each other, but I’m not really sure.
It’s not that RCS is used “on purpose” a lot in Spain (WhatsApp is the think everyone thinks about when you say “message”) but I haven’t found any carrier that doesn’t support, and these days you basically can’t realistically use carrier messaging without RCS, which everyone with an Android or less than 7 year-old iPhone has, even if they don’t know. And carrier messaging is the only real alternative to using WhatsApp for absolutely everything. And there’s not even a native Sailfish app for WhatsApp.
MMS/SMS is, if not dead, close to dying.
I think that’s because the new specification requires E2EE End-to-End Encryption of RCS Messages, so it started working with Apple devices when that was implemented.
I don’t think adding RCS is a small task and it also need to be done in cooperation with GSMA just like apple did and i do think it will cost a lot of money.
In the US, SMS and MMS are widely used. There’s probably exceptions, but all the (non-data-only) consumer service plans I’ve shopped include unlimited messaging in the flat monthly fee.