I guess it depends on how you define “worse”. With RCS, you have SMS fallback, so anyone with a phone number can get your message when you send it. There’s a lot of value in that. Even with dedicated IM services having more features, if everyone I know can’t agree on one of those, I dont want to have 5 messaging apps on my phone and have to check them all every day. Very few people that I know even use one of those, and those people are all using different ones.
It’s great for Europeans where WhatsApp is ubiquitous, but here in the US, I don’t know a single person who uses WhatsApp. I’d someone asked me to use it, I would just tell them to text me because I don’t want to use a product owned by Facebook.
The closest thing we have here that most people use is Discord, but the older people I know can’t figure it out.
It will randomly fail for a day or two at a time, where all my messages will silently fail to send, without any notification that they failed, and then I check the app hours later and see they need to be resent as SMS.
This isn’t really the fault of the protocol itself, but it’s infuriating and stops me from recommending it.
Can add too, until it can send in almost any wireless situation like SMS can, it isn’t worth bothering with. SMS can send on LTE even when a phone doesn’t have a data connection available to the userspace. (Bars but no G icon.) It can send on 2G or above practically instantly. (Although once T-Mobile turns off 2G next year, less of a concern in the US.) SMS is just a raw simple control channel message. RCS is, as others mentioned, just another over-the-top messenger with all the network stack overhead, and a buggy one.
One can fire off an emergency SMS on the side of a mountain with barely usable signal that won’t even work for a voice call. RCS would fail in such an environment.
MMS, of course, requires a carrier APN data connection to work, and is a bit slower and more finicky. RCS would definitely be an improvement there.
Mainly that Google essentially owns it now. It’s got cool features, but it’s reliant on too much bullshit. That’s extra true once you factor in that there are services that do the same things, better. Even signal is better, feature wise.
If we’re supposed to have some third party company with their nose in our communications, there’s better options than Google. It isn’t like they’ve gotten perfect reliability down, they have plenty of lost messages, outages, etc. So, why the fuck bother?
It does suck that Google gave themselves a monopoly on it on Android. But I personally find it much better than Signal as far as features go. I think Signal tries too hard to be secure at the expense of features. My old phone broke and I lost all my messages. Nothing I can do to get them back. Luckily I only used it when my parents were out of the country, but if I had old messages and photos from a friend that passed, I would have been heartbroken. Signal was basically dead to me after I realized that sometimes I can lose messages.
I still have my texts from when my wife and I started dating almost 15 years ago.
What do you not like about it? It seems like a huge improvement over SMS/MMS to me.
Google messages (the only real implementation) still sucks at automatic failover when a data connection is unavailable.
Google Messages RCS is basically flip a coin on delivery if you don’t have consistent data for your phone.
deleted by creator
Probably because it is worst than any dedicated IM service like whatsapp, telegram, etc
I guess it depends on how you define “worse”. With RCS, you have SMS fallback, so anyone with a phone number can get your message when you send it. There’s a lot of value in that. Even with dedicated IM services having more features, if everyone I know can’t agree on one of those, I dont want to have 5 messaging apps on my phone and have to check them all every day. Very few people that I know even use one of those, and those people are all using different ones.
It’s great for Europeans where WhatsApp is ubiquitous, but here in the US, I don’t know a single person who uses WhatsApp. I’d someone asked me to use it, I would just tell them to text me because I don’t want to use a product owned by Facebook.
The closest thing we have here that most people use is Discord, but the older people I know can’t figure it out.
Removed by mod
Until your phone dings literally several times per minute, then you’ll deactivate them real quick.
spoiler alert: They won’t.
And that’s fine, because no one uses it here. So they wouldn’t be messaging anyone.
It will randomly fail for a day or two at a time, where all my messages will silently fail to send, without any notification that they failed, and then I check the app hours later and see they need to be resent as SMS.
This isn’t really the fault of the protocol itself, but it’s infuriating and stops me from recommending it.
Can add too, until it can send in almost any wireless situation like SMS can, it isn’t worth bothering with. SMS can send on LTE even when a phone doesn’t have a data connection available to the userspace. (Bars but no G icon.) It can send on 2G or above practically instantly. (Although once T-Mobile turns off 2G next year, less of a concern in the US.) SMS is just a raw simple control channel message. RCS is, as others mentioned, just another over-the-top messenger with all the network stack overhead, and a buggy one.
One can fire off an emergency SMS on the side of a mountain with barely usable signal that won’t even work for a voice call. RCS would fail in such an environment.
MMS, of course, requires a carrier APN data connection to work, and is a bit slower and more finicky. RCS would definitely be an improvement there.
Removed by mod
Mainly that Google essentially owns it now. It’s got cool features, but it’s reliant on too much bullshit. That’s extra true once you factor in that there are services that do the same things, better. Even signal is better, feature wise.
If we’re supposed to have some third party company with their nose in our communications, there’s better options than Google. It isn’t like they’ve gotten perfect reliability down, they have plenty of lost messages, outages, etc. So, why the fuck bother?
It does suck that Google gave themselves a monopoly on it on Android. But I personally find it much better than Signal as far as features go. I think Signal tries too hard to be secure at the expense of features. My old phone broke and I lost all my messages. Nothing I can do to get them back. Luckily I only used it when my parents were out of the country, but if I had old messages and photos from a friend that passed, I would have been heartbroken. Signal was basically dead to me after I realized that sometimes I can lose messages.
I still have my texts from when my wife and I started dating almost 15 years ago.