It makes group messaging work a lot better, too. Previously, group chats with a mixture of ios and android users were really buggy leading to iPhone users significantly preferring group chats with all ios, which led to some social exclusion for android users in the US, leading to market dominance for iPhones. Now, with RCS, you can make a functional group chat across platforms and you don't have to convince anybody to install something new.
That's one of the reasons we care about it for GrapheneOS. It also provides end-to-end encryption between Android and iOS via Messaging Layer Security (MLS) which is clearly very important for us. GrapheneOS users needing to use Google Messages to get E2EE with Google Messages and iOS users who haven't been convinced to use Signal instead is not ideal. We do have Google Messages working via sandboxed Google Play but want to replace it.
RCS provides properly working group chats and end-to-end encryption with iOS and GMS Android users without having to succeed at convincing people to use Signal instead.
It makes group messaging work a lot better, too. Previously, group chats with a mixture of ios and android users were really buggy leading to iPhone users significantly preferring group chats with all ios, which led to some social exclusion for android users in the US, leading to market dominance for iPhones. Now, with RCS, you can make a functional group chat across platforms and you don't have to convince anybody to install something new.
That's one of the reasons we care about it for GrapheneOS. It also provides end-to-end encryption between Android and iOS via Messaging Layer Security (MLS) which is clearly very important for us. GrapheneOS users needing to use Google Messages to get E2EE with Google Messages and iOS users who haven't been convinced to use Signal instead is not ideal. We do have Google Messages working via sandboxed Google Play but want to replace it.
Well that is if that user uses Google messages. I certainly don't even have it installed.
If you have a smartphone from the last 5 years, you have to have done something unusual to it to not have an SMS app that also does RCS.
RCS provides properly working group chats and end-to-end encryption with iOS and GMS Android users without having to succeed at convincing people to use Signal instead.