Google is silently blocking RCS messages on rooted Android phones and custom ROMs
androidauthority.com
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.
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RCS is just stupid. When I was still building phones a decade ago we had some operators ask for it - but after reading the standards decided to just ignore it and hope it passes. Pretty much everybody did that, until google got interested - presumably because they figured it'd be a good way to get control of messaging on a lower level. As that's exactly what RCS is: control of messaging, and ideally the option to charge for it, just like SMS and MMS before that.
What's really bizarre is that Google had the chance to be a dominant player in messaging when they made Hangouts the default SMS client on Android. Instead, they backpedaled and let Hangouts wither into obscurity. I'm mostly glad they screwed that up, but also puzzled.
Hangouts was the best thing going for a while there. Of course they had to goog it up.
I would go so far as to say Google Chat today is better than Google RCS.
Hangouts/Google Talk was great when they had federation and allowed 3rd party clients. After they locked that it went to shit.
I miss the golden age when we had AIM, ICQ, or GoogleTalk, etc all on the client of our choosing.