this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
41 points (100.0% liked)

Free and Open Source Software

17931 readers
110 users here now

If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Was curious if there were FOSS solutions since I really would like to avoid using anything Google related

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I'm not sure there exist any.

Last time I checked, this was actually the biggest criticism Google recieved. They were pushing RCS on Apple, yet keeping it proprietarily only available on Google Messages.

Maybe it has changed. I don't know.

Latest update I heard was that they made it ON by default in Google Messages.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s a GSMA protocol. OnePlus apparently supports it without the Google app, I’m sure there are at least some others (Samsung?)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Doesn't it not support encryption across providers? And it's still IP-based. If you're gonna use an IP-based protocol, you might as well use Signal.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Eh? RCS is an open standard. Yes, you're basically required to use Google's RCS endpoints at this point unless you want to host your own, but it's far superior to SMS. Apple made their own proprietary version in iMessage instead, so you have iPhones on iMessage and every other phone in the world on RCS.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's like... both iPhone and Android are vender-locked.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

No, Apple can begin supporting RCS and play nice with other phones (not just Android) using a modern, encrypted, and open messaging platform. But they choose to fall back to SMS intentionally in order to market their devices as superior.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Still the same story today.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

the one that made me laugh recently was when they tried to paint alternatives to rcs as antiquated.

rcs doesn’t even support end-to-end encryption, something even imessage does.

an open, industry standard that everyone supports would be awesome, but rcs simply isn’t it. rcs was designed to make telecom companies happy, not to be an actually good messaging protocol.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Google's extension of RCS does do e2ee, which raises the question of "what happens to security when you talk to a non-Google user"..

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Not quite sure about the On by default aspect; on my non-Google phone running stock android, it keeps asking me to enable RCS.

I keep clicking no because there's a lot of ads pushed through RCS. This is annoying on top of the usual telemarketing stuff you might get due to phone numbers being sold.