Oh man. It's not just Apple. I've had months of RCS not working on GrapheneOS, and have no idea who to blame. The first time it stopped working, I fixed it by switching carriers (AT&T -> T-Mobile). Maybe I'll try switching back! Or maybe I'll switch back to an iPhone and give in to iMessage. :(
My sister had an issue with RCS not working on her Samsung. It turned out she had a SIM card too old for AT&T to support RCS on it and some Samsung related software issues related to their SMS apps and Google’s SMS apps conflicting. A fresh SIM and a couple software tweaks netted her RCS.
I’d assume this isn’t the issue here but RCS seems to be a bit fickle.
I had random people adding me to groups to send spam to my phone even before RCS.
In fact, I don't think I've ever received spam through RCS, but I have through MMS and even more so through SMS. Looking back at all the spam texts I've received in the past several months, every single instance was SMS/MMS. Not a single time of RCS.
RCS issue on iPhone, reminds me of an old movie qupte... "Lex, this is Detroit. You think the cops are gonna waste city-dollars on a stolen Swedish car?"
I was in a working RCS chat with two Android users. One of them switched to iOS and it’s been sheer chaos ever since. The conversation splits and rejoins, messages randomly choose which copy to appear in, my view is full of little daily notes that I added and removed the switcher from the conversation (of course I didn’t), old titles for the group are resurrected and then disappear…and the Mac client has a few of its own quirky ways of destroying the same chat.
I have an iphone, previously had an android. I had trouble with RCS chats and then did the "Don't have your previous device" part here, https://messages.google.com/disable-chat. And since then things have been pretty good for me.
i Have no idea what RCS is but i know i disabled it on my iphone because it basically always makes my phone fall back to SMS when i have even the slightest lapse in network connectivity.
I have sympathy with the technical and debugging plight but genuinely why are people still dealing with this, SMS/RCS is to the US what fax machines are to Japan. You can only put so much lipstick on a pig. Any bog standard IP based messenger has had none of these issues and all of the features that RCS is supposed to fix for a decade.
I don’t fully get what he thinks the issue is and how it relates to Google Jibe (which apparently is the RCS-as-a-service platform the US carriers use).
Has Jibe somehow blacklisted his phone? In that case, Apple might technically be right — it’s a carrier issue, but with all major carriers, since he says they’re all using Jibe on the backend.
Anyway, I doubt he’d sound crazy, as he puts it, to the Apple Store people making this case. They might even be sympathetic, but this is probably the best he’ll get, since Apple’s whole protocol is to get you on one centrally preauthorized track or another to having a working phone.
It looks like they're using US Mobile (which resells T-Mobile as "Death Star"). IIRC US Mobile has some big gaps, I wouldn't be surprised if RCS if one of them. With their rebadged Verizon service you don't even get Visual Voicemail
That’s what I thought too. The author appears to have tried every obvious debugging step, except for switching away from US Mobile.
I’ve been using US Mobile myself for a little over a year, and I remember a period of about 2-3 months where most carriers had implemented RCS for iOS on their services, but US Mobile had not, so I couldn’t use RCS for a while. I don’t know what they had to implement to get RCS working on iOS, but it’s possible that their implementation does not work with iOS 26.
Most of my friends here in Sweden use Signal. But on the rare occasions that we had to switch back to messages lately, for example when Signal was down, I noticed RCS has been working flawlessly.
It's quite the nice surprise because it's a technology you heard about years ago and now suddenly it crops up in daily life. We all gave up on it years ago too and used other IM apps like Signal, Briar or SimpleX.
You where all on android I presume?
Since RCS does not work on iPhone in sweden.
NONE of the carriers have support for it, they support it for android but not ios.
I've seen this same behaviour with IOS messaging ten years ago; I would travel between countries with roaming enabled and every time I changed countries and turned on my iPhone, iMessage would be waiting for activation.
Once spent 5 hours on the phone with an iMessage developer in Ireland helping them debug the issue.
At that time, we didn't have eSIM so I ended up with an Android phone for roaming and my iPhone for home country.
Many months later I got an update from Apple. It was something to do with activation. iOS used to send a hidden SMS to a server in the UK and sometimes while roaming it would time out.
RCS has been a royal pain for me on Android, too. Partially my fault since I'm using non-default ROMs (LineageOS on my Fairphone 4, which I then replaced with GrapheneOS on my Pixel 9a), but also mostly Google's fault for taking as janky of an approach as possible when it comes to its Messages app (which seems to be the only actively-maintained Android SMS app with RCS support, because of course it is).
The Graphene folks have at least been making progress on getting it working (my understanding is that Messages expects special permissions from Android and Play Services that GrapheneOS has to specifically whitelist without blowing massive holes in the Google Play sandbox, and without those permissions it fails to verify the phone number for certain carriers — T-Mobile included, in my case). Hopefully whatever fix they come up with works for the long haul; it was really annoying to have RCS working fine for all of two weeks only for it to immediately start failing again when the required RCS endpoint switched from Google's Jibe instance to whatever T-Mobile is allegedly maintaining themselves.
The year is 2076. An independent panel of experts has finally confirmed Sam Altman achieved AGI, for real this time. Quantum computers are factorizing numbers left and right. Cold nuclear fusion got so cold that we have to warm it up a little. Americans are still trying to communicate over something called "SMS", a text message protocol from 1993, but nobody knows why.
Man, I remember a few years ago when I was in a place without good Internet reception, but good enough phone reception. Wanted to send a SMS instead of a WhatsApp message and only noticed hours later that my phone switched to RCS without fallback and my "SMS" didn't go out because of the missing internet connection.
I disabled RCS that day and never enabled it again.
I can almost guarantee that the issue is a carrier issue, I use RCS on an iphone and it works out of the box, and I have all the things you listed for troubleshooting.
Yeah... I just started getting back into building sms/mms/rcs apps on Android and oh boy. It's much more of a mess than I expected, and much more "oh so it's basically just Google now, and they seem to be trying to lock it down further" than I expected (or hoped).
And you can't even implement it yourself because it requires special permissions on Android, which you can only get if you're a carrier/oem-blessed app. And the early "you'll be able to build other apps, there will be an API like this: https://github.com/android-rcs/rcsjta" promises (which would put it on par with sms/mms) never materialized, despite a reference implementation that did exactly that over a decade ago.
At this point I'm just totally against RCS and I'm intentionally turning it off. Why hand all of your messaging communications over to Google, when they've got such a consistent history of being hostile? We're much better off going back to telling people not to use sms (or mms or rcs) at all because it's insecure.
> Why hand all of your messaging communications over to Google, when they've got such a consistent history of being hostile?
The alternative is to hand all your communications to carriers, who have a consistent history of being incompetent, extortionate and bending over to authorities to disclose everything you've ever said at the drop of a hat. Exhibit A is SMS, which is totally unencrypted, plagued by bad actors, and a cesspool of spam and fraud.
In an ideal world you could choose who does your RCS, in the same way that you can pick your email provider, but the way it's baked into the telco ecosystem makes this basically impossible.
I've never heard of RCS until this day, and honestly... what's the point of it?
Why would you even touch your phones "vanilla" messaging app?
I know Americans go feral and will try to murder you if you don't use iMessage or whatever, but I never understood why.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 58.5 ms ] threadNo sir, this isnt crazy, the problem is that we're paying for a service that isnt accountable for their issues.
Thats crazy.
I’d assume this isn’t the issue here but RCS seems to be a bit fickle.
Turns out that random people can add you to groups, send spam and from what I can see you can do nothing to prevent it. I've disabled it.
So don't fret too much about not having it.
In fact, I don't think I've ever received spam through RCS, but I have through MMS and even more so through SMS. Looking back at all the spam texts I've received in the past several months, every single instance was SMS/MMS. Not a single time of RCS.
https://clip.cafe/detroit-rock-city-1999/we-must-get-the-cop...
Now, if iMessage was broken, apple would surely care.
Has Jibe somehow blacklisted his phone? In that case, Apple might technically be right — it’s a carrier issue, but with all major carriers, since he says they’re all using Jibe on the backend.
Anyway, I doubt he’d sound crazy, as he puts it, to the Apple Store people making this case. They might even be sympathetic, but this is probably the best he’ll get, since Apple’s whole protocol is to get you on one centrally preauthorized track or another to having a working phone.
So it is entirely plausible that they banned the device, I guess. (Or they could have banned the IMEI, as mentioned)
I’ve been using US Mobile myself for a little over a year, and I remember a period of about 2-3 months where most carriers had implemented RCS for iOS on their services, but US Mobile had not, so I couldn’t use RCS for a while. I don’t know what they had to implement to get RCS working on iOS, but it’s possible that their implementation does not work with iOS 26.
It's quite the nice surprise because it's a technology you heard about years ago and now suddenly it crops up in daily life. We all gave up on it years ago too and used other IM apps like Signal, Briar or SimpleX.
Once spent 5 hours on the phone with an iMessage developer in Ireland helping them debug the issue.
At that time, we didn't have eSIM so I ended up with an Android phone for roaming and my iPhone for home country.
Many months later I got an update from Apple. It was something to do with activation. iOS used to send a hidden SMS to a server in the UK and sometimes while roaming it would time out.
(I use GraphenOS and couldn't make it work for the life of me)
The Graphene folks have at least been making progress on getting it working (my understanding is that Messages expects special permissions from Android and Play Services that GrapheneOS has to specifically whitelist without blowing massive holes in the Google Play sandbox, and without those permissions it fails to verify the phone number for certain carriers — T-Mobile included, in my case). Hopefully whatever fix they come up with works for the long haul; it was really annoying to have RCS working fine for all of two weeks only for it to immediately start failing again when the required RCS endpoint switched from Google's Jibe instance to whatever T-Mobile is allegedly maintaining themselves.
* SMS is cheaper in America than in Europe where carriers gouge their customers for it.
* Usually this means the non-Americans are just using WhatsApp (owned by Meta/Zuckerberg) instead, which is hardly something to be proud of.
I disabled RCS that day and never enabled it again.
And you can't even implement it yourself because it requires special permissions on Android, which you can only get if you're a carrier/oem-blessed app. And the early "you'll be able to build other apps, there will be an API like this: https://github.com/android-rcs/rcsjta" promises (which would put it on par with sms/mms) never materialized, despite a reference implementation that did exactly that over a decade ago.
At this point I'm just totally against RCS and I'm intentionally turning it off. Why hand all of your messaging communications over to Google, when they've got such a consistent history of being hostile? We're much better off going back to telling people not to use sms (or mms or rcs) at all because it's insecure.
The alternative is to hand all your communications to carriers, who have a consistent history of being incompetent, extortionate and bending over to authorities to disclose everything you've ever said at the drop of a hat. Exhibit A is SMS, which is totally unencrypted, plagued by bad actors, and a cesspool of spam and fraud.
In an ideal world you could choose who does your RCS, in the same way that you can pick your email provider, but the way it's baked into the telco ecosystem makes this basically impossible.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMessages/comments/1be8gxk/fix...