It had the potential to be a great replacement if it just worked™ like SMS/MMS (well, MMS was also quite fickle back in the days), given it's so brittle across devices even on the same OS, with little means of troubleshooting by end-users and even less from non-tech savvy users, it's kinda dead in the water.
I understand what RCS is and I don't understand why it matters.
Everything about the concept of a phone number is confusing to me. It's a string of digits that if someone guesses, they can activate the most active notification your phone has (ringing), at any time, no matter if you know them or not. Better yet, depending on your notification and MMS app settings, they might be able to make a dick pic appear on your lock screen on a whim - big spammers of this seem to get marked by the carriers and apps pretty quickly, but for a more targeted one off, still easy.
As opposed to tcp/IP based chat apps that basically require a bilateral human-initiated handshake before someone can message you...
I do receive occasional spam on WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal. Besides the operator spam (try our shiny new AI feature!)
Tying and account to a phone number is a privacy nightmare.
I guess Facebook/Meta does it for easier social graph extraction/profiling, while Signal tried to hand of verification to precent spam.
But for the sake of this argument, we may just assume all of them are evil.
It really isn't. SMS did not support adding random mobile numbers to a group chat and blasting them with spam. Someone needs to either fix RCS properly for current day use-cases or it just needs to go away.
piva00|3 months ago
issafram|3 months ago
komali2|3 months ago
Everything about the concept of a phone number is confusing to me. It's a string of digits that if someone guesses, they can activate the most active notification your phone has (ringing), at any time, no matter if you know them or not. Better yet, depending on your notification and MMS app settings, they might be able to make a dick pic appear on your lock screen on a whim - big spammers of this seem to get marked by the carriers and apps pretty quickly, but for a more targeted one off, still easy.
As opposed to tcp/IP based chat apps that basically require a bilateral human-initiated handshake before someone can message you...
bashkiddie|3 months ago
Tying and account to a phone number is a privacy nightmare.
I guess Facebook/Meta does it for easier social graph extraction/profiling, while Signal tried to hand of verification to precent spam. But for the sake of this argument, we may just assume all of them are evil.
array_key_first|3 months ago
And there is one singular app which supports RCS.
In many ways, it's a regression from SMS. In that SMS is somewhat universal, and RCS is so specialized it's almost worthless.
issafram|3 months ago
TavsiE9s|3 months ago
vel0city|3 months ago
MMS did, which far predates RCS.