Comment by chaosharmonic
5 days ago
> So the issue with RCS is that google just this last year made the move from their internal implementation of E2EE for RCS to the standard implementation based on MLS (now that the standard impl is actually viable).
> They did this quietly in the background and most people didn't notice but in doing so they released new system/OS level services and started relying on those. And notably they did this rollout staggered such that only some people got it and some didn't which made everything way more confusing.
> From this point on now that RCS is more or less all "standard" stuff now you shouldn't see any major breakages. The only situation where you might see one would be when android inevitably opens up RCS outside of the google services walled garden but even then you should be able to continue relying on the google services version until the non-google version is stable.
Is there anywhere public that there are writeups or roadmaps about this? I'm particularly curious about whether there will ever be an API for third-party clients.
What's left in terms of meaningful technical barriers, that would prevent this all from being baked into Android instead of requiring Play Services?
Tbh I have no idea. I kept up with it on the GrapheneOS discord and I think GOS put out bluesky/mastodon posts about it at one point.
> What's left in terms of meaningful technical barriers, that would prevent this all from being baked into Android instead of requiring Play Services?
Well now I think the last major barrier is cleared (which was E2EE being nonstandard). Currently the on-device infra is very google-oriented but there is support for non-google-jibe RCS but it still requires google, etc to explicitly opt-in apps to get access to the APIs on device.
A big part of this IMHO is google refusing to give up their moat but they may finally get it into AOSP at some point.
If they don't at this point I think the only way it'll happen is if the EU forces their hand (which they hopefully will do).
> What's left in terms of meaningful technical barriers, that would prevent this all from being baked into Android instead of requiring Play Services?
The short version: no open source RCS libraries exist.
The implementation in AOSP is out of date/dead.
AOSP fully supports everything needed for RCS. AOSP doesn't provide any actively developed messaging app so an app with RCS support needs to come from elsewhere. AOSP never provided an RCS messaging app. AOSP only provides a sample SMS/MMS app for testing purposes which is intended to be replaced. GrapheneOS is well into the process of replacing it including replacing nearly the whole user interface in our development branch followed by improving the under the hood code. It's not an RCS app and never was but we plan to eventually make our own RCS implementation instead of only providing fully functional compatibility with Google Messages.
oh nice is there a tracking issue for this somewhere? I've taken a peek at the issues in the org on github but i didn't see one off the bat (mainly because there's a ton of other SMS related issues that pop up from history)
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