In the last post I described how WhatsApp is bad and suggested to use RCS instead. And while it is true that RCS is really cool, it has many problems and a lot of them exist just because we don’t consider it enough in the modern days of instant messaging apps.
So, if you take SMS and Instant Messaging and put them together, you get RCS. It has the perks of being able to send high resolution media, having group chats that actually work, getting read receips and typing indicators and sending messages via IP just like your favourite messaging app; and at the same time it’s an open protocol that should be cross-compatible, just like SMS.
At this point you might just think “Well, at this point why don’t you use normal instant messaging apps just like 80% of the world does?”, the simple answer is: they suck; now, I’m not entirely against them, but as I have already said before things can get pretty bad when people totally ignore alternatives, even when they’re standard like SMS. Now that you know what RCS is, let’s start with the problems like…
Just like SMS, RCS isn’t really a service by itself, it’s just a protocol. Normally it should’ve been implemented by carriers, just like it’s counterpart, but it’s basically ignored by pretty much every carrier (the only carrier in Italy that has RCS is Vodafone Italia, and don’t expect that in your country the situation would be better), so the only alternative is Jibe.
Now, I’m not asking to carriers to implement RCS (in fact, I prefer to use third-party implementations) but I want to have other open-source implementations so that even “FOSS enthusiasts” can use it.
The only clients available that I know about are Google Messages, Samsung Messages, the Windows 10 Mobile Client and maybe a Huawei one???
I hate the fact that there aren’t many other third-party clients just like SMS has, and probably no one did because, guess what, people just prefer to use IM apps.
Let’s take Google Messages as an example: end-to-end encryption, message reactions and recently inline replies; all of these features work only on Google Messages and I’m surprised that even Samsung Messages doesn’t support those at all; I know that all of these features were all implemented to Google Messages only, but it’s very strange that all of this isn’t even standard.
Until messaging apps remain the first choice for the vast majority of people, probably nobody will really work on RCS as it will be useless for them because very few people will actually use it. But I think that if people will consider these open protocols over IM apps, people could really consider to work on RCS stuff :3.