Google Makes All RCS Messages Encrypted; Check out the Details! Google Makes All RCS Messages Encrypted; Check out the Details! | Beebom
What are your views on this development?
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RCS is still a proprietary vendor/carrier walled garden that should be avoided and die a death worse than SMS.
Not to mention the Qualcomm stack on Android is a bunch of native code in the system telephony stack, the absolute best place to process arbitrary content from strangers.
My DivestOS has purposely removed RCS support for years for these reasons: Scripts/Common/Deblob.sh · master · DivestOS Mobile / DivestOS-Build · GitLab
Go use a real messenger that is independent of such proprietary (carrier) ilk: Messengers - DivestOS Mobile
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What do you mean by Qualcomm stack? Isn’t that separated through confined hardware abstraction layers?
As long as there is no free & open source RCS app and it’s just a Google proprietary protocol like now (de facto) I will not use it. Sticking to Signal for 1:1 chats, Element for public chatrooms, and Whatsapp as a backup for people that don’t have Signal.
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I thought only Google Pixel did that.
Now when Apple is bringing RCS to iPhone, could the RCS be suitable for communication with people who don’t use secure & private messengers (e.g. Signal).
Though I don’t know how it works on de-googled phones, as SkewedZeppelin mentioned, it’s removed from DivestOS. And there’s still no clients in f-droid
There won’t be clients in F-Droid, because only Google-approved clients can use RCS in the first place; and it won’t provide secure messaging between Apple and Google devices unless Apple and Google co-create a real E2EE standard at some point in the future that they both adopt, because Google’s E2EE is proprietary.
Given Google’s statement…
We welcome Apple’s participation in our ongoing work with GSMA to evolve RCS and make messaging more equitable and secure, and look forward to working with them to implement this on iOS in a way that works well for everyone.
…I suspect this will actually happen at some point, but it will still only protect the message content itself, and RCS will still be a mostly-Google-controlled privacy mess due to its complete lack of metadata protection among other factors (like how most carriers just use Google’s central server instead of doing it themselves). It won’t ever be an alternative to the privacy/security features Signal provides.
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Ok, I tried Google Messages app on LineageOS (without microG), and it doesn’t work. I could send SMS, but have no option to change settings (doesn’t react), it asks me for google account, probably for FCS in the background, so I deleted it. So no RCS for me, not that I care much
@crossroads
RCS on Android has an app and system side, if you’re on an older device supported by Lineage it may lack the latter, either because stock never had it or because it was dropped as incompatible in newer versions.
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