I just want working RCS messaging

2025-11-191:41317312wt.gd

I’m in over a month now with non-working RCS on my iPhone 15 Pro. Apple blames the carriers, the carriers tell me it’s not them (mostly T-Mobile since I have good contacts there). They tell me they…

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November 18, 2025

I’m in over a month now with non-working RCS on my iPhone 15 Pro. Apple blames the carriers, the carriers tell me it’s not them (mostly T-Mobile since I have good contacts there). They tell me they can’t really do anything about iPhones not working on RCS, go back to Apple. This is what it looks like:

My background #

I’m OS agnostic as much as possible, I daily both Android and iOS devices and previously used BlackBerry 10 and Harmattan (Nokia N9’s OS). If Windows Phone was still around I’d probably still be running that as well. If it’s possible to gather information on how all this works under the hood, I can and do. The OnePlus Android devices I’m running are my own LineageOS builds.

Previous history fixing MMS failures for Carriers/Vendors #

I’m also happy to blame carriers and vendors: I previously brought and helped resolve an issue with Verizon Wireless on LineageOS phones due to how MMS messaging works. Here’s my initial submission, their developer LuK found a better way to go about it, but it at least started the ball rolling: https://review.lineageos.org/c/LineageOS/android_device_oneplus_sm8250-common/+/333379

In short: When you received a picture message on Verizon in the past their network would notify your device that a new message arrived. When the device went to grab and download the image, it sends something similar to browser User Agent, called a UAProf. This is a link to a file that describes what the phone can handle, so a smartphone gets a high resolution image and a featurephone gets a lower resolution one. Verizon’s management sucks and decommissioned the domain that hosts all the UAProfs for their devices. Of note, Verizon is uniquely affected by this issue, T-Mobile doesn’t care what UAProf a device advertises, it’s not required on their network. I haven’t done enough testing with AT&T to answer whether it’s an issue for them.

MMS Failure Demonstrations #

This is a former link to a Verizon UAProf for a Samsung device: http://uaprof.vtext.com/sam/i515/i515.xml

Notice it doesn’t load? Apple/Blackberry and basically any non-Android manufacturers didn’t trust carriers to host these files. Some manager at Verizon decided to kill the vtext service and also fucked over any MMS users on their network not using an iPhone.

Here’s Apple’s: https://www.apple.com/mms/uaprof.rdf.
And here’s Blackberry’s: https://www.blackberry.com/go/mobile/profiles/uaprof/9700/5.0.0.rdf

I’m getting off-topic though, I just wanted to post some context that this is not my first rodeo with fixing these kinds of issues. Carriers are incompetent with this sort of interoperability and they gave up on running their own RCS servers to let Google do it through something called Google Jibe, I’ll talk about that soon.

Google breaking RCS on LineageOS #

Starting around the end of 2023, Google started to maliciously break RCS for custom Android OS’s. I say maliciously because it was a silent failure, RCS reported as working, but messages wouldn’t go through, and incoming messages would fail to receive. Google could have remained silent about it and rumors probably would have swirled: Perhaps it was a technical issue or the custom ROM developers’ faults?

No, Google intentionally broke it.

They straight up admitted to blocking it: https://www.androidauthority.com/google-silently-blocking-rcs-rooted-android-phones-custom-roms-3421652/ and it wasn’t until months later that they even showed a notification that it was disabled on affected devices. I really hope some lawyer or regulator reading this will get to extract their pound of blood because Google loves to boast about doing 911 over RCS: https://blog.google/products/messages/google-messages-rcs-911-emergency/

Eventually for my own devices I would spoof to the fingerprint of Google PIxel devices to be able to use RCS. It has mostly continued to work since then, but it begs the question: If I could reliably work around the blocking, then what excuse do you have about it being to prevent spam? Since those spammers will just use the same methods I’ve used, which are hardly secret. It just aims to hurt users that want some control of their device.

Apple launches RCS #

At some point Apple was dragged kicking and screaming into RCS interoperability. I actually have some sympathy here because MMS was really a terrible protocol that nobody should have adopted and Apple was dragged into supporting that years after the original iPhone launch in iOS 3. Regardless, with iOS 18, Apple brought in baseline RCS (version 2.4) support. It is hoped that they will update it sometime in the iOS 26 series to include E2E encryption.

My iPhone Background, Start of RCS Issues #

RCS always worked on my phone in iOS 18 until the past month when I upgraded to iOS 26. I should note that unlike Android, I do not modify iOS device in any way, basically I expect it should ‘just work’. The only unusual thing I run is Mullvad’s DNS to act as an adblocker, but so does my family and their iDevices don’t have RCS issues.

I am a dual-sim user on T-Mobile and US Mobile (usually on the AT&T network). With iOS 26 both lines have been stuck on “Waiting for activation…”. If I transfer the lines off to any other iPhone, the lines activate in seconds. I additionally took a Verizon Wireless line from my Mom’s 14 Pro Max and it also displayed the same issue. My girlfriend has a 14 Pro Max and a SE3, both can activate my RCS lines when I transfer them over.

Troubleshooting Steps I Did #

I’ve done an absolutely exhaustive level of testing to see if these lines would activate on my phone, there’s probably more than this but this is what I could think of:

Rebooted/Toggled Airplane Mode/Toggled RCS
Resetting Network Settings
Removed all my VPN profiles and apps. (Mullvad/Orbot/Mullvad’s DNS profile/my server’s wireguard profile)
Deactivated one of my lines and tried reactivating RCS.
Disabling 5G and trying to activate RCS.
Reissuing both eSIM’s from the carriers.
Toggling iMessage.
Resetting All settings 9 Resetting everything on device.
- Restoring from iTunes backup
- Restoring from iCloud backup (literally activated a trial to be able to do this)
- Tested resetting with and without eSIM.
Recovering device (recovery mode, setting up as new device)
- Both with and without eSIM’s on device.
Disabling RCS and waiting days before attempting to reactivate.
Updating my e911 addresses, disabling/renabling wifi calling. Testing on Wifi.
Reissuing just T-Mobile eSIM but to the other IMEI on the phone that it’s normally not on.
Deleting the numbers out numerous times in Carrier settings (I have no idea what this does but it does make the signal reconnect).
Testing sending messages from devices that work with RCS to this device in hopes it upgrades.
Testing the iOS beta releases.
I brought up the Gentoo Linux packages for libimobiledevice so I could run idevicesyslog and dump hundreds of megabytes of live logs in hopes of being able to see what the phone is failing on: (the packages) https://github.com/joecool1029/joecool-overlay/tree/master/app-pda
- This is a small T-Mobile related excerpt of what looks like the problem could be. Specifically, UserInteractionRequired.xml. I don’t know what interaction is needed and why Apple’s software isn’t presenting more information, but this is the best I could do from digging through a ton of redacted logs: Nov 9 15:54:14.294398 CommCenter[101] <Debug>: #D supportsHOVirtualInterfaces: ret = false Nov 9 15:54:14.294406 CommCenter[101] <Notice>: #I --> switch: true, bundle_support: false, entitlement_support: true, enabled_by_default: true, disabled_by_profile: false, is_store_demo_device: false Nov 9 15:54:14.294415 CommCenter[101] <Debug>: #D supportsHOVirtualInterfaces: ret = false Nov 9 15:54:14.294424 CommCenter[101] <Notice>: #I --> encryption_supported: false, push_supported: false, push_enabled: false, private_relay_supported: false, msisdn_source: (empty) Nov 9 15:54:14.294432 CommCenter[101] <Debug>: #D supportsHOVirtualInterfaces: ret = false Nov 9 15:54:14.294440 CommCenter[101] <Notice>: #I --> Changed: (nothing) Nov 9 15:54:14.294448 CommCenter[101] <Debug>: #D supportsHOVirtualInterfaces: ret = false Nov 9 15:54:14.294455 CommCenter[101] <Notice>: #I Ims registration interface: kUnknown --> kCellular Nov 9 15:54:14.294463 CommCenter[101] <Debug>: #D supportsHOVirtualInterfaces: ret = false Nov 9 15:54:14.294471 CommCenter[101] <Notice>: #I Lazuli model not allowed: [provisioning style: kUsingToken, sms online: false, msisdn OK: true] Nov 9 15:54:14.294479 CommCenter[101] <Debug>: #D supportsHOVirtualInterfaces: ret = false Nov 9 15:54:14.294487 CommCenter[101] <Notice>: #I Provisioning not possible Nov 9 15:54:14.294494 CommCenter[101] <Debug>: #D supportsHOVirtualInterfaces: ret = false Nov 9 15:54:14.294505 CommCenter[101] <Notice>: #I Infinite validity of UserInteractionRequired.xml xml Nov 9 15:54:14.294514 CommCenter[101] <Notice>: #I [config.rcs.mnc260.mcc310.jibecloud.net] Declaring IMS not ready. Unexpired : UserInteractionRequired.xml Nov 9 15:54:14.294522 CommCenter[101] <Debug>: #D supportsHOVirtualInterfaces: ret = false Nov 9 15:54:14.294529 CommCenter[101] <Notice>: #I Nudge not required: Allowed Nov 9 15:54:14.294537 CommCenter[101] <Debug>: #D supportsHOVirtualInterfaces: ret = false Nov 9 15:54:14.294546 CommCenter[101] <Notice>: #I Evaluate recheckEntitlementForRCS. Ent:Allowed, Switch toggled:false, CB recheck:false Nov 9 15:54:14.294554 CommCenter[101] <Debug>: #D supportsHOVirtualInterfaces: ret = false Nov 9 15:54:14.294561 CommCenter[101] <Notice>: #I Entitlement result: [RCS support: kSupported, user eligibile: kEligible, token-support: true] Nov 9 15:54:14.294569 CommCenter[101] <Debug>: #D supportsHOVirtualInterfaces: ret = false Nov 9 15:54:14.294577 CommCenter[101] <Notice>: #I Evaluated provisioning style: kUsingToken Nov 9 15:54:14.294584 CommCenter[101] <Debug>: #D supportsHOVirtualInterfaces: ret = false Nov 9 15:54:14.294592 CommCenter[101] <Notice>: #I Retrieving feature switch state Nov 9 15:54:14.294600 CommCenter[101] <Debug>: #D supportsHOVirtualInterfaces: ret = false Nov 9 15:54:14.294608 CommCenter(CoreServices)[101] <Debug>: Starting database access (depth 0, options: 1) Nov 9 15:54:14.294616 CommCenter[101] <Debug>: #D supportsHOVirtualInterfaces: ret = false Nov 9 15:54:14.294624 CommCenter(CoreServices)[101] <Debug>: BindingEvaluator::CreateWithBundleInfo(ID=<private>, name=<private>, CC=????, vers=(null)) Nov 9 15:54:14.294633 CommCenter[101] <Debug>: #D supportsHOVirtualInterfaces: ret = false Nov 9 15:54:14.294641 CommCenter(CoreServices)[101] <Debug>: Truncating a list of bindings to max 1 known-good ones. Nov 9 15:54:14.294648 CommCenter[101] <Debug>: #D supportsHOVirtualInterfaces: ret = false Nov 9 15:54:14.294656 CommCenter(CoreServices)[101] <Debug>: Truncating a list of bindings to max 1 known-good ones.

So this last entry probably tells us where to look. The carrier (T-Mobile here) is provisioned for RCS, it’s receiving this interaction required file with infinite validity. So long as that’s in place, it fails to activate. (This is a guess, but it’s certainly more information than the KB articles give on Apple’s sites).

Apple does not provide their employees with correct information on troubleshooting this issue. They do not empower them to properly troubleshoot the issue. #

The standard instruction given to them is: “Do not take accountability, blame the carrier.”

So then I come in and say I have failures with all 3 major carriers and categorically refuse to accept that explanation, when I know my lines work just fine on other iDevices.

The Apple Store initially blamed software, this would be reasonable except we’ve reloaded the state of my phone 3 times now (once from iTunes, and twice now from iCloud, tomorrow will be the 4th time). I gave them permission to wipe any setting and recover the phone, but I go a step further and request they transfer my T-Mobile eSIM to another store device preferably in the 15 Pro line. They cannot do this because of user privacy reasons. This is a dealbreaker from troubleshooting, I am not made of money and I do not have any additional 15 pro devices to test with, it’s already crazy enough I have multiple carriers at the ready to test, 2 14 Pro Max’s and a SE3.

Google Jibe #

I think this is where we need information. As I said before, the carriers in the US gave up running their own RCS infrastructure and Apple’s employees aren’t really trained about this situation. With the exception of my own knowledge and the logs I pulled from the phone, Jibe was not mentioned once in the 3 phone calls and the multiple hours onsite in Apple Store today.

I have no business relationship with Google Jibe, and there’s no way for me to interact with or contact them. Their documentation is probably here but I can’t read it, since I’m not a carrier partner: https://docs.jibemobile.com/ Apple knows there’s a ‘carrier’ issue, but in reality, RCS is run through Google Jibe in the US and this was never once disclosed to me. I never brought it up until this blog post, I cannot go into a store and say “I have been using opensource tools to analyze the logs from this phone and think it’s a failure with Jibe”. Do you get how crazy this sounds?

What Apple’s Going To Do Tomorrow #

Since they hit a wall and I refuse to continue to entertain the “go bug T-Mobile/US Mobile” direction, Apple is swapping the board in my phone. Of course they didn’t have the parts in the store to do it, so I have to wait to drive back tomorrow for them to do it. This will have new IMEI numbers and given the experience I’ve had with these lines activating on 3 other iDevices, it should probably work. The only way it wouldn’t is if this was a generational issue, but they have not given me a way to test this. They adamantly tell me: “We are doing you the favor as a courtesy, we don’t believe this is our problem.” I know they are trained to say this but it’s terrible customer service. I shelled out for Applecare+, if it might be the phone just swap it and analyze it back at Apple HQ, I’ve done enough testing now to know it’s something with just this specific device. I referred people to use iPhones because in general they do not often have these issues and the customer support was good. The board swap solution they are offering only wastes my time/fuel and punts the problem down the road. Since we never actually looked at the logs I might hit it again, other users might be affected.

I’d rather Apple actually fix the problem #

I use opensource software not because it’s inherently better, but rather because I can at least triage, understand, and fix problems. Give me a radar Apple. I’m a rare dual-SIM user in the US with a Google Jibe RCS failure. Where did it fail? Dig into my logs and tell me: Is it because I hop between primary data carriers (because the whole reason I have dual-carrier is better service coverage). I don’t spend a lot of time on WiFI, I run my house on mobile carriers. The only thing I know is I didn’t change my configuration from iOS 18 to iOS 26, but things stopped working and there’s no way for me to downgrade to 18 because you stopped signing it!

Kudos

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Comments

By Groxx 2025-11-197:506 reply

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.

By jeroenhd 2025-11-198:432 reply

> And you can't even implement it yourself because it requires special permissions on Android

That depends on your carrier, which is even worse. There are several ways to activate RCS for a phone number, as this standard is meant for carriers rather than app developers, and the carrier gets to choose which one they want.

I think the reference implementation died around the time carriers shut down their RCS servers because nobody was using them. https://github.com/Hirohumi/rust-rcs-client seems to be the most reason open RCS client at the moment (with an Android demo app).

The real need and opportunity for an RCS messenger is on the LineageOS/custom ROM scene, where these permissions are available (you can sign the ROM yourself, after all).

As for the Google stuff, RCS being routed through Google is an anomaly that will hopefully be fixed as carriers add support to it so native Android <-> iOS messaging isn't completely terrible. Progress has been slow outside of countries that still use SMS (like the USA) but eventually we'll be back to normal carrier-based carrier message exchange once things calm down a bit.

On the Android side of things, I don't expect things to change soon, as most of the restricted fields were at one point available to developers and were mostly used to stalk users across installs without their knowledge for tracking and "telemetry" purposes. A country where people actually use SMS/RCS will have to crack down on Google's lack of an RCS API.

By Groxx 2025-11-1913:101 reply

The problem with all these problems is that it makes RCS noticeably worse in both normal use and for your privacy than a regular web chat via some other system. And I do not see a path for it that escapes that.

I'm very happy that they're essentially using MLS, that's a real benefit[1]. But other chat apps can (and some do) do that too, without actively driving every single carrier globally to give Google all of your messaging activity. We're better off having diversity.

This all could reverse course and become acceptable, but I don't see how it would happen in practice. It seems much more likely that everyone will just give up and say "yeah that didn't work".

1: Though without alternate impls they can just silently MITM it and how would you know? RCS users: have you ever verified your messaging keys out of band? Do you know how? I can't find it in Messages. The "Universal Profile https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/technologies/netwo..." for RCS that describes a ton of things compliant apps have to do (many of which Google Messages does not seem to do, as far as I can tell) has no instructions at all to show users their keys or provide a common way to verify them (as far as I can tell). Client diversity provides a way to detect some attacks here, but there is currently almost no client diversity, and instead it seems to be shrinking towards just Google Messages, using Google's servers.

By Groxx 2025-11-1916:10

As a follow-up, since I can't edit any more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45980788

^ They are correct, the MLS / E2EE part of RCS is quite new and not yet implemented ~anywhere. So it gets no points until widespread, and this is now a decade after RCS's introduction. I think we can expect it to take a long time yet, if at all.

By WhyNotHugo 2025-11-1914:331 reply

> eventually we'll be back to normal carrier-based carrier message

Why would you want to go into this closed model, where you’ll likely be charged per-account? How is this any better than XMPP, email, or any other IM protocol out there?

By Nextgrid 2025-11-1914:552 reply

Because it's a universal lowest-common-denominator and generally included in the plan you pay anyway for data access.

Should you use it for day-to-day messaging? No. But having it for emergencies is nice - if anything, just to bootstrap an alternative, secure channel.

By WhyNotHugo 2025-11-2210:48

> generally included in the plan you pay anyway for data access.

Er, what? The main reason why most of the world moved from SMS to internet-based messaging is because SMS was far more expensive.

> having it for emergencies is nice

In what kind of emergency could SMS be useful?

> just to bootstrap an alternative, secure channel.

But you need to exchange SMS numbers to do that. You might just as well exchange emails, XMPP, or whatever other protocol your going to use later and skip SMS entirely.

By Telaneo 2025-11-1919:062 reply

Then why not use SMS?

By decimalenough 2025-11-1919:202 reply

Because SMS is horribly limited. 140 chars per message* (less if chars are not plain vanilla ASCII), no support for attachments, group messages, reliable delivery receipts, emoji reactions, etc etc.

* There's a terrible hack called concatenated SMS that strings together multiple messages to build one longer message under the hood, but if any of those parts go missing along the way, the whole thing gets dropped on the floor.

By Telaneo 2025-11-1919:33

For the proposed use case, you don't need those things, except maybe the 140 character thing, but I've never found that limiting, since phones stitch them together nowadays (and have for the past 15 years?).

Sure, RCS has those functions, but half of them are broken 60% of the time, and you don't need those anyway for bootstraping into wherever you actually want to talk, and for short messaging.

RCS brings nothing to the table if all you need is to tell mum she needs to come pick you up. On the contrary, it might fail you because it tried and failed to send that message over a 4G connection you barely have, rather than sending it as an SMS and then actually arriving. And you're never going to use it for group messages, attachments or with emojis unless its an actual service you intend to use for serious purposes, which is exactly what the comment I was responding to said you weren't going to use RCS for anyway.

I disabled RCS (and iMessage back when I had an iPhone) for exactly these reasons, but still use SMS as a fallback with people I don't actually know and never intend to talk to again, and see no reason to upgrade to RCS even if it wasn't broken, since for my use cases, the extra feature set isn't needed. If I need more fancy features, its for use with people I actually know, and thus people I can get in touch with on not-SMS.

By bxrt 2025-11-1922:101 reply

It doesn't change your point, but SMS is limited to 160 chars per message. Twitter was originally limited to 140.

By decimalenough 2025-11-1923:16

If we're being pedantic, it's 140 bytes, which can be 160 7-bit chars (ASCII), 140 8-bit chars (ISO 8859-x) or 70 2-byte chars (UTF-16).

By Nextgrid 2025-11-1923:572 reply

Mostly because my understanding is that RCS is meant to be a drop-in replacement for SMS and if you’re on a device that supports it (or your carrier-specific configuration of RCS) you don’t actually have a choice and your “SMS” is actually RCS and you must use it and hope it works.

By Telaneo 2025-11-200:51

Given that there's a 'Disable RCS' toggle (and a 'Resend as SMS' toggle for that matter) that seems to re-enable SMS and eliminate the RCS weirdness, this doesn't really seem to be true. I guess it could be in the future when carriers disable whatever path SMSes are currently going through, leaving you only with RCS that might still be borked.

By Groxx 2025-11-2018:14

I'm not entirely sure what you're claiming here, but broadly speaking no, this is not correct.

RCS is, by spec and in practice, intended to fall back to sms/mms if it doesn't work for some reason (e.g. you're roaming and not connected to your carrier. or have opted out. or they're having an outage. or...).

And there's an opt-out (partly because it kinda requires syncing your contacts to the RCS servers... technically only for "online presence" and for any individual you contact to check their RCS status (which is completely reasonable) but do you know where that presence toggle is in Google Messages? I don't).

The fallback is not really automatic or anything, RCS's feature-set is gigantic and allows senders to have far more control over the message's presentation (https://developers.google.com/business-communications/rcs-bu... currently has visual examples of this). It's rather clearly a "built for businesses" system, at least in part. But "RCS might not be available" is very much a core expectation for the stacks as a whole - the world is a big place, and there are many old phones and out of date apps, even if every carrier gets on board. (this is very likely one of the reasons why everyone's just piling into Google's stuff)

If they ever get things working, they might try to force it everywhere, but that's probably like a decade or three away at a minimum. Accurately predicting industry and legal trends on that kind of horizon is basically impossible. They might be planning on it (I have no evidence either way), but achieving is an entirely different matter.

By dangus 2025-11-1910:253 reply

My novice read of it is that Google made the mistake of trying to hand off the management burden to carriers, since they felt that the way to make something universal like SMS/MMS is to include carrier support.

But that obviously didn’t work because there are hundreds (thousands?) of cellular carriers around the world and they are the wrong people to manage such a thing.

So they basically are steering it back to “Google’s shitty iMessage.”

The universal thing isn’t the carrier anymore, the universal thing is the Internet that runs on top of it, which is perhaps why just about everyone outside the US tends to use messaging apps like WhatsApp/Signal/WeChat/etc.

By pjc50 2025-11-1914:362 reply

It turns out that the only thing worse than the platform monopolist was the old phone carries monopolies.

> just about everyone outside the US tends to use messaging apps like WhatsApp/Signal/WeChat/etc.

This is The Way. Well, several ways, since you inevitably end up a bit fragmented, but usually a country will settle on one, usually WhatsApp. Further east Telegram is also popular.

By nozzlegear 2025-11-2015:12

> but usually a country will settle on one

Isn't it fair to say the US has settled on iMessage and, to a lesser extent, RCS/SMS?

By SebastianKra 2025-11-1918:181 reply

...and then WhatsApp starts to send ads in push-notifications that you can't turn off. And you either have to live with it, or be a massive black hole in your friends communities.

I don't know if RCS is the way, but monopolistic messaging apps definitely aren't.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/474179/how-do-i-di...

By philsnow 2025-11-1919:471 reply

> and then WhatsApp starts to send ads in push-notifications that you can't turn off

*that you can't filter.

Every time an app begs me to enable notifications, I give it the side-eye because I immediately assume it's going to include notifications that I don't want to see, which are essentially ads for some app feature / some part of their walled garden.

I want to be able to filter notifications at the OS level. That could be by a substring search on the content of the notification, or by a unique-per-call-site (in the code) identifier included in the API the app uses to surface a notification (though I suspect most apps would just re-use the same identifier everywhere because the developers don't want me to be able to filter their ads).

By SebastianKra 2025-11-200:13

My point was that such services will always enshittify.

With RCS, you have at least multiple providers and the ability to switch without being socially exiled.

By rstuart4133 2025-11-200:25

> My novice read of it is that Google made the mistake of trying to hand off the management burden to carriers, since they felt that the way to make something universal like SMS/MMS is to include carrier support.

I'm not sure who you are calling "carriers", but it sounds like the people who own a mobile network. They buy gear off a supplier like Nokia / Huawei, contract them to install and maintain it, then make their money back over time by selling the bandwidth to consumers and hopefully a "free" phone as well.

They aren't the engineering power houses the telco's of old were, like AT&T. Rather they are reverse - a marketing powerhouse, duking it out with other marketing power houses. Their technical know how is close to 0. In fact on the retail support side, it might even be negative. When I deal with them, I come away with the impression would have trouble fixing a propelling pencil. If Google thought they could manage a massively parallel e2e messaging stack, they were deluding themselves.

This is the real reason Huawei was banned by the West. It wasn't just that it meant they were using Chinese make the gear, with opaque Chinese firmware, although I guess that was bad enough. It was that if the telco's bought Huawei, Huawei ran it for them. "Ran" means hands on, 24 hours a day, with in Huawei engineers deployed around the country keeping it ticking. Having a Chinese company running your countries mobile phone infrastructure was an impossible swallow.

By projektfu 2025-11-1914:201 reply

Every time I have gotten a SIM card in a country south of the US-Mexico border, the carrier spams the text messaging. But nobody else uses it.

In the US we don't reliably use WhatsApp, iMessage is locked down, and Signal, etc., are just for tech bros or political hacks. Yet, everyone wants to text instead of call, so we are in this world where we need to make RCS work, and they are just not putting in the effort.

By dangus 2025-11-1915:212 reply

You might be surprised at how many “normies” are getting on board with Signal.

The user base pales in comparison to WhatsApp but it did double in the last couple of years.

By projektfu 2025-11-1923:51

https://xkcd.com/1102/

What I mean is that in Mexico, Brazil, and many other countries, WhatsApp is the de facto messaging standard. Businesses expect you to have it, restaurant ordering is integrated with it, etc.

In the US, we don't have anything except SMS/RCS.

By Spooky23 2025-11-1915:58

If you’re not a nerd, signal is like a batlight for people doing stupid shit.

By binkHN 2025-11-1914:57

Yeah. I'm as frustrated as you are. I had an app in the app store even with all the restrictions around SMS, but there's simply no way to integrate with RCS, so this is basically Google's iMessage.

By aki237 2025-11-1915:081 reply

+1. I was a strong proponent of RCS earlier. Don't care about Green/Blue bubble nonsense. But Google (an Ad company) started abusing RCS to send garbage ads my way. And there is no way to block that as well except for disabling RCS. I feel this is a loophole Google can abuse where local regulations ban vendors for sending promotional messages.

Whatever it is, Google of all org should not be at the Helm of this.

And the amount of moral policing they did to apple. Disgusting assholes. I hate Apple for a lot of reasons. iMessage is definitely not one of them.

By fidotron 2025-11-1916:252 reply

The only Google product that people will not ultimately regret adopting is golang, and even that is debatable.

By joecool1029 2025-11-1919:39

I know this is a niche complaint but I hate packaging golang things. On Gentoo contributors are stuck hosting giant dependency tarballs since you need the modules to build a package and we sandbox networking while building.

By kenhwang 2025-11-1920:05

I definitely think people will regret adopting Golang in time. It's this generation's Java, except without an smooth off-ramp in Kotlin/Scala and even less of the benefits.

By ljlolel 2025-11-198:221 reply

Then in practice it’s just Whatsapp owned by Meta

By mfru 2025-11-198:253 reply

Signal exists.

Whoever knows how to download WhatsApp, knows how to download Signal.

By abenga 2025-11-1914:22

In some countries, Whatsapp is pretty much the de facto town square. Friend groups, family groups, event planning, customer support for businesses (though now it's just talking to shitty AI bots), all on WhatsApp. You can't beat the network effects any more. One understands why Meta paid 19b for it.

By atoav 2025-11-198:58

Our IT department has found a way. Want to get some credentials sent to you (usually just for new accounts)? They send it only via Signal as a out of band method.

This turned Signal into the defacto default in our org.

By gsa 2025-11-199:053 reply

Signal does some things well, but lacks far behind other apps in UX. It doesn't do cloud backups either, which keeps me from recommending it to less technical folks.

By abraham 2025-11-1911:412 reply

Signal recently introduced cloud backups. https://signal.org/blog/introducing-secure-backups/

By Nextgrid 2025-11-1915:021 reply

Only in the Beta Android app for now... Signal is around for what, a decade now? And they still can't (or rather, refuse to) do the basic "copy the SQLite DB file to a folder". Edit: and even this beta feature is some bullshit proprietary thing with their own cloud and subscription rather than simply "let me export the DB file and stick it in a cloud provider of my choice".

Last time I had to reinstall my phone I ended up finding an implementation of their phone-to-phone transfer protocol to emulate a "new" device I'm transferring to just to get a dump of the data (I'd share, but don't want them to close this option, since clearly the lack of export option is very much intentional).

Then I deleted Signal and begrudgingly moved to WhatsApp (in addition to iMessage which I've already been using).

By abraham 2025-11-1915:121 reply

Signal has had a backup to a file you can do any you want to for years.

By newscracker 2025-11-1916:47

Never on iOS or any other Apple platform. Signal is designed not to be able to backup to iCloud either. The only option iOS users have had over the last few years is to do a device to device transfer where both phones are expected to be in physical proximity and it takes hours to transfer the data. Lost phone has meant losing all chats.

WhatsApp, which is infamous by association with Meta, backs up to Google Drive or wherever.

By gsa 2025-11-1912:141 reply

Looks like the needle has moved, but reading the blog it's a recent development and only available in the beta version of the Android app.

By abraham 2025-11-1914:01

They've probably expanded support since the initial announcement

By encom 2025-11-1916:491 reply

My biggest problem with Signal is their desktop app is awful. Telegram, for all its faults, has an excellent desktop app.

I hate writing on a phone - anything longer than a few words I use my computer for.

By joecool1029 2025-11-1919:08

> Telegram, for all its faults, has an excellent desktop app.

Their developers are also very responsive to PR's, I have a couple GCC build fixes in it.

I really soured on Signal early with when running BB10, they would not let us fork and use/distribute websocket builds to get around not having google play services on available on that platform: https://github.com/libresignal/libresignal/issues/37#issueco...

I'm still a little sour on it now because there's still no way to transfer the identity since they refuse itunes/icloud backup, refuse any way to export a key, and I have to look at hideous corporate memphis icons every time I set up Signal new again on iOS (at least Android doesn't have the last thing).

I mentioned before, but I use mautrix-signal to be able to have a unified (except for telegram) messenger on desktop with nheko or element via matrix. It works really well.

By andrepd 2025-11-1911:17

> It doesn't do cloud backups either,

Yes it does.

By decimalenough 2025-11-1923:20

> 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.

By floppyd 2025-11-196:404 reply

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.

By bergfest 2025-11-197:012 reply

A task force of former nuclear fusion scientists has been established to fix bluetooth audio quality for once and forever.

By marcosdumay 2025-11-1916:22

Invalidate every patent that is older than the maximum lifetime allowed by law, and you'll see it magically fix itself up.

By f1shy 2025-11-197:53

Come on! Get real!

By ronsor 2025-11-1917:353 reply

Every time the "backwards Americans are still using SMS!" snark comes up:

* 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.

By calyhre 2025-11-1918:401 reply

I don’t know a lot about the rest of Europe on this, but here in France it’s been more than a decade SMS are unlimited in mobile plans, and these plans are quite cheap.

We also have free roaming in the whole Europe.

By nitwit005 2025-11-1920:081 reply

Whatsapp came out 16 years ago. Yes, the main driver for adoption was avoiding fees. They still emphasize it being free to this day.

The adoption of messaging apps caused a lot of carriers to reduce or eliminate the SMS fees, as they saw the business was evaporating.

By jorvi 2025-11-1921:54

Carriers actually massively jacked up SMS fees, just not for consumers.

One of Signal's main cost centers is activation SMS messages. For many other small players it is a significant factor too.

By Zak 2025-11-1922:05

Ignoring pride, WhatsApp has major advantages over SMS/MMS, including high-quality media, group chats that actually work, free international messaging, video calls, and (unless they're lying) encryption.

I would be pleased if everyone who uses SMS with me switched to WhatsApp. I would be more pleased if they switched to Signal, but the UX benefits of either one are significant.

By nixosbestos 2025-11-1918:541 reply

Finding and eating roadkill is cheap too, free even. Free protein in this year? Yeah, I'd rather do that than use fucking SMS for anything.

By throw83947y 2025-11-1920:55

Dogs eat roadkill and poop. Dogs are very popular. You may have a point!

By captainkrtek 2025-11-197:232 reply

IPv6 is almost fully adopted, for reals

By binkHN 2025-11-1915:041 reply

I actually took this to heart and deployed it natively on multiple VLANs in my home. Then, even with the abundance of address space, Comcast pulled the ability to use IPv6 in this manner and I'm back to to using NAT on all my VLANs except for one. Progress.

By AceJohnny2 2025-11-1919:521 reply

> Comcast pulled the ability to use IPv6 in this manner

Can you expand on this?

It's been a while since I've explored IPv6, but I'm on Comcast and I recently switched from OpenWRT to an Ubiquiti router and was surprised that 1) it doesn't enable IPv6 by default and 2) It asks for configuration [2] that I'm not sure how to answer. I thought everything "just worked" with Router Advertisement.

[2] https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005868927-UniFi-Gat...

By binkHN 2025-11-1919:591 reply

In a nutshell, Comcast used to provide a /60 to residential customers and this could be subnetted into more than one LAN. Nowadays they only provide a single /64 and this can only be used for one subnet.

By ianburrell 2025-11-1921:271 reply

It sounds like your router can request a larger prefix length than /64 and Comcast will give up to a /60. That requires a router that knows how to do that.

That seems like reasonable approach when most people just need /64, and those who want more have to configure to get it.

By binkHN 2025-11-1921:30

Comcast USED to give up a /60 when requested; they now ignore the request and provide a /64.

By jofzar 2025-11-197:56

Woah let's calm down, we were talking about the future not some future sci-fi fantasy land.

By testartr 2025-11-197:27

the problem with SMS is not the year it was made. TCP is much older

By wrs 2025-11-195:432 reply

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.

By semi-extrinsic 2025-11-196:415 reply

FWIW, RCS group chat on Android being horribly broken is actually a feature if you have kids. I've spoken to many parents of girls in the 7 - 13 age group (and have two myself), and the amount of drama and bullying due to iMessage group chats is several orders of magnitude higher than what kids with Android experience.

I actually think iMessage group chats should have a minimum age limit, from a kids perspective they are no different than Snapchat et al.

By fastball 2025-11-196:523 reply

You think the messaging protocol itself is causing heightened bullying?

By semi-extrinsic 2025-11-197:473 reply

Not the protocol, the group chat UX. iMessage gives kids easy access to a place where they can create groups, name them, invite and kick out other kids at will, and send messages + audio/video. It's minimally different from Snap or Discord - except that those actually have parental controls, and there is no easy way to disable iMessage group chats.

The equivalent is simply lacking from Android due to RCS group chat being a broken mess.

By tom_alexander 2025-11-198:273 reply

> create groups, name them, invite and kick out other kids at will, and send messages + audio/video.

All of that has been (and still is) available on everyone's phones since the dawn of time except for "name them": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service

  - create group: send an MMS message to whoever you want in the "group". Now you have a group chat.
  - invite people: send a new MMS message including all past participants and the one additional participant.
  - kick them out: Send a new MMS message including all past participants except for the person you want to remove.
  - send messages + audio/video: MMS supports all of this.

By decimalenough 2025-11-1919:281 reply

Have you ever actually been in an MMS group chat?

MMS is the worst standard in telco and that's saying something. The spec is impossibly complex, so it's not properly supported by carriers or device manufacturers, and even basic cases like "send this photo" fail alarmingly regularly.

By joecool1029 2025-11-1919:50

Yeah, I really tried to cover a part of how it's so bad in my post. It's really something from a different time. There's a lot of the old WAP 1.0 kind of thinking where the carrier ran their own proxy to make the content consumable by the end device due to limitations at the time. If you don't fetch the content off the MMSC in time it expires. I know there's lots of RCS spam complaints, but the carriers ran email to MMS gateways that had abuse for years.

Verizon had the wackiest system with their vtext service where it really tried to customize more than the GSM carriers and they ran their own web portal. When they phased that out a few years ago it broke picture scaling for pretty much all non-iphone devices on their network. This is another big reason I wanted working RCS because if I send a picture to Android users on Verizon it ends up scaled down.

By DoctorOW 2025-11-1912:111 reply

   > kick them out: Send a new MMS message including all past participants except for the person you want to remove.

That's forming a new group. When I'm kicking people out of my group it's because I no longer want them to participate.

By tom_alexander 2025-11-1913:442 reply

It's the same thing. Just like how a "cash discount" is the same thing as a "credit card surcharge", the end result is the same regardless of how you word it. Simply stop using the first group. You can even be explicit by sending a message to the first group of "I'm forming a new group without Becky because she's a loser" or you can start the new group with a message "I started this new group without Becky because she's a loser" which has the added benefit of humiliating Becky as she keeps sending messages to a group that will not respond to her.

By carlgreene 2025-11-1917:531 reply

I don't know if you are purposefully being pedantic here, but they are very different things. Even as an adult who has been in several of these very active iMessage group chats with "mutual bullying", they are vastly different from any of the RCS/SMS groups I'm in due to some of the features in iMessage.

By tom_alexander 2025-11-1919:49

What are those features? I've never used iMessage but my ultimate point is that iMessage isn't enabling bullying, it just happens to be the platform these kids are currently using. The same bullying tactics have been possible since long before the iPhone existed.

So far semi-extrinsic provided a list of features they think is uniquely enabling bullying in iMessage but I've just established those features are actually commonly available to everyone, so what other features does iMessage have that uniquely makes it enable bullying compared to MMS?

By teach 2025-11-1919:001 reply

I don't have an iPhone but surely you see how the UX is very different between:

(a) create new group minus Becky and minus all previous messages, plus every participant has to migrate over (b) "admin" kicks Becky and no one else has to do anything and all the history and context is retained

By tom_alexander 2025-11-1919:41

> plus every participant has to migrate over

I've been in plenty of MMS group chats where we've had to create a new group to add or remove someone (for non-bullying reasons) and it has always gone smoothly without issue. SMS/MMS apps tend to sort your list of groups by most recently received message, so as soon as people stop using the first group it will naturally decay to the bottom of your list where no one looks.

> "admin" kicks Becky and no one else has to do anything

"admin" creates a new group chat, no one else has to consciously do anything because they're just selecting the group that has the most recent messages and therefore is at the top of their SMS/MMS app.

There is one difference here in that with SMS/MMS there is no "admin" so anyone can create new groups, but if you're going to start evicting people without buy-in from the group then the dissenters are just going to form their own groups anyway regardless of platform.

> all the history and context is retained

That is a fair point, you wouldn't maintain the history/context but how important is that for bullying? My ultimate point here is that fastball is correct in that the iMessage platform isn't enabling bullying, it is just the kids preferred platform. We have all been perfectly capable of the same bullying since long before the iPhone existed, and I don't think losing history/context when forming new groups changes that.

By theshrike79 2025-11-2013:31

I have owned a mobile phone since 1996-ish IIRC (Nokia 1610).

I have sent exactly zero MMS messages successfully. They've always failed on some stupid carrier setting being wrong. I've also "received" MMS image messages - that were links to a carrier portal because the image could not be delivered.

It's a shit standard that nobody bothered to implement properly =)

By c0balt 2025-11-198:161 reply

I'm surprised you seem to presume that WhatsApp, Discord etc. wouldn't immediately fill the gap.

At least in Berlin (School and Uni) my experience was that WhatsApp was far more prevalent already (due to more mixed Android/iOS environment likely).

By projektfu 2025-11-1914:301 reply

If all the "mean girls" are on iMessage, then being on Android is insulating.

By mring33621 2025-11-1915:18

yes. Android is "broke broke", so the cool kids won't use it

Src: my 12 yo daughter

By prmoustache 2025-11-1912:041 reply

how is that different than regular kids groups at school and/or in the playgrounds?

By saaaaaam 2025-11-1914:181 reply

It’s more insidious, and “always on”. The bullied have no respite from the bullies. As someone who was horribly bullied at school I can only imagine the horror kids face now. It’s not the technology per se, it’s the fact that society seems to think it’s not only ok but often expected for kids to have smartphones and all the digital footprint that goes along with them.

I was brought up in a household where we had very limited access to TV. As a teenager I thought this was terrible. As an adult I realise what a huge benefit it was to me. I am sure that the same goes for kids and smartphones and group chats. They are not necessary. No one is missing out.

By filoleg 2025-11-1917:05

> The bullied have no respite from the bullies

I feel like I am missing something important here.

The great-grandparent comment was talking about things like not being invited/kicked out of group chats, not being spammed/harassed through the messaging protocol in question.

Unless I am genuinely missing something important, I agree with the grandparent comment. How does not being invited to certain group chats is different from not being invited to "cool kids groups" at school/playgrounds? As in, how is it "always on"? Not being invited to a chat or being kicked out of a group chat isn't "always on".

By patja 2025-11-1917:021 reply

I have experience where my child with a working android phone was socially excluded by the girls with hand-me-down Apple products because she couldn't "text" with them. Most of them didn't even have working cell service, just iMessage over wifi.

By HDThoreaun 2025-11-1917:411 reply

SMS is legitimately a trash protocol. I don’t text people without iMessage either. Either they get signal or we don’t communicate.

By mrguyorama 2025-11-1918:223 reply

You know this is because apple intentionally makes their SMS shitty right?

I was able to send full fat (640x480 at the time) videos to people over SMS in 2008 using a flip phone. I was able to do group chats and share photos and all sorts of nice things.

I could do all that in android land as well over SMS with other android users, before RCS.

It's only when my iPhone having family members attempt to send me multimedia texts that things don't freaking work. My dad's new wife tried to send me pictures of their wedding and Apple reduced them to a hundred pixels because fuck you.

By HDThoreaun 2025-11-1918:25

Partly yes its apples fault. Im too bought into their ecosystem to switch though. Either way my biggest problem with SMS is the 5+ second delay that I always seem to have. Impossible to have a conversation like that.

By jandrewrogers 2025-11-1922:15

SMS is shitty because it is unreliable and always has been because the carriers proxy it. It delivers late or not at all at rate beyond what is usable for anything important.

Some of this blame can be placed on carriers but they don’t care.

By acdha 2025-11-200:11

SMS is terrible because it’s always been terrible, and carriers didn’t care. You can blame Apple for not making iMessage open but it’s just absurd to claim that SMS was ever good to an audience of people who’ve used it. RCS isn’t perfect but it fixed so many problems which SMS had back before the iPhone even launched.

By immibis 2025-11-197:122 reply

Messaging protocol features determine social aspects. Harder to bully someone in a group chat if there isn't a group chat.

By prmoustache 2025-11-1912:111 reply

Kids in most european countries use whatsapp even though they are under the minimum age.

Ban an app, another appear. Ban all apps and they would join any of the services that provide a web frontend. Kids in the late 90's/early 2000 were using IRC when ICQ and MSN messenger didn't support group chat, usually from a web client before they were introduced to mirc and other irc clients.

Bottom line: they would find a way.

By immibis 2025-11-1915:28

Yes. That's also part of the technical experience that also changes the resulting social landscape. I used to think "what's the point of banning something if people can get it anyway" but after seeing how cannabis became hyper-commercialized in the USA, I see that both the ban and evasion are just part of the game. (Which nobody should get prison for)

By fastball 2025-11-198:131 reply

There are dozens of ways to have a group chat. iMessage is not enabling this in any meaningful way.

By Zak 2025-11-1916:52

There are, but if kids are using iMessage for it and not using other things even though they could, not having iMessage can serve to insulate a kid from it.

Parental controls may prevent some of the kids from installing third-party messaging apps, or maybe they're just unwilling to. There are a weird number of adults in my social circle who I can't convince to do so, though I'd imagine kids to be a little more flexible.

By testartr 2025-11-197:262 reply

on Android they will just experience social exclusion

By semi-extrinsic 2025-11-197:501 reply

"Missing out because my parents are lame" is a minor social stigma that kids will (should!) experience in many situations anyways. The benefits significantly outweigh the drawbacks.

By crazygringo 2025-11-1915:061 reply

Minor?

Friendships are importance for psychological health and development.

When you're excluded from the primary means of communications with potential friends, and can never find out where and when they are meeting to get together, it's not "minor".

By Rohansi 2025-11-1920:411 reply

So you buy your kid an iPhone to be friends with green bubble bullies on iMessage? They're probably not the best potential friends anyway.

By crazygringo 2025-11-1921:251 reply

Guess what, it's also common to buy kids clothing that lets them fit in, a haircut that lets them fit in, and let them watch the movies and TV shows other kids are watching so they can fit in. Kids want to fit in, in order to make friends, and it's healthy to make that easier than put arbitrary obstacles in their way.

And who's talking about bullies? When most of your kids' potential friends communicate using iMessage, it seems pretty presumptuous of you to say that they're all "not the best potential friends anyways." Actually, they might turn out to be great friends, because people are complex, and their messaging preference isn't determinative of their entire personality, or much of it at all.

By Rohansi 2025-11-205:481 reply

Wanting to fit in is normal but unfortunately not everyone can afford to. There are a good amount of people out there who shame others for using Android ("green bubbles") because they treat their iPhone as a status symbol. If anything the arbitrary obstacles are put up by Apple and the people who choose to exclusively use iMessage because every other messaging service works on any device.

By crazygringo 2025-11-2013:431 reply

Used iPhones are cheap. Kids don't need to be treating their phone as a status symbol. iMessage just genuinely works better. Blame Apple all you want, but don't make your kid suffer socially for it.

By Rohansi 2025-11-2019:171 reply

> Used iPhones are cheap Not everyone wants to buy used.

> Kids don't need to be treating their phone as a status symbol. Nobody needs to treat anything as a status symbol but they do. You see it all the time with different brand names, including Apple. It could even happen with different/older models.

> Blame Apple all you want, but don't make your kid suffer socially for it. Buying your kid an Android phone should not make them suffer socially. It's just as capable of running quality messaging apps minus the arbitrary exclusivity of iMessage. I wouldn't want my kid using iMessage even if they had an iPhone just because it will exclude other kids for no good reason.

By crazygringo 2025-11-2021:381 reply

Buying your kid an Android phone shouldn't make them suffer socially, in a just world.

But in the real world, if it does, then buy them the damn phone. Used, if that's the only way to afford it and that's what they want.

Don't make your kid suffer because of your stance on a corporation. That's just being mean to your kid. Go ahead and use Android yourself if you want, but don't do that to your kid if they're having trouble making friends and Android is a reason. That's just cruel.

By Rohansi 2025-11-2022:241 reply

This kind of thinking is wild to me. Apple is only enabling this behavior. It's the kids themselves who are excluding others by only using iMessage and shaming other kids for their green bubbles.

Nobody wants their kids to be bullied so I understand. But even worse than that I wouldn't want my own kid to be a bully. Kids are going to be a lot more likely to bully others if they befriend others who are bullying.

By crazygringo 2025-11-213:471 reply

I think you're exaggerating or misunderstanding this.

It's not bullying or shaming by most kids. It's just, including SMS in an iMessage group chat is a terrible user experience. It's genuinely super annoying and breaks all the time. To the kids, the Android kid basically just has a broken phone. The kid won't get added to group chats because it doesn't really work.

If you give your kid an iPhone it's not going to turn him into a bully. That's absurd. It's just going to let him be included in the group chats where friendships grow and plans get made.

Don't make a poor kid suffer when there's no reason for it. Their suffering is not going to make Apple disable iMessage.

By Rohansi 2025-11-214:551 reply

Look up green bubble bullying - it's a real thing.

> The kid won't get added to group chats because it doesn't really work.

Yes, but exclusion is a form of bullying. Apple is enabling it by making iMessage only work on Apple devices. There are many other messaging apps that are far better than SMS and are inclusive. It's better to encourage everyone to use one of those.

> Don't make a poor kid suffer when there's no reason for it.

It's quite literally the poor kids who suffer from things like this. It's not just fancy phones that they miss out on. Could be clothing brands, games, toys, etc. being used by kids to exclude others. Buying into everything is not a solution.

By crazygringo 2025-11-2113:23

I didn't say bullying doesn't exist -- I'm saying it's not the case with most kids.

> It's better to encourage everyone to use one of those.

But if you can't succeed at this (and you won't), then don't make your poor kid suffer. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

> Buying into everything is not a solution.

No, but buying a few important things goes a long way. A cool pair of shoes isn't functional, but sharing the same communications platform is. And you can buy a lower-end used iPhone on eBay for next to nothing.

I have a parent who thought they were fighting a lot of these battles and on the "right side", and I was miserable because of it. Don't do this to your kid. Making friends is hard enough without a parent putting even more obstacles in the way.

By catgirlinspace 2025-11-197:40

iPhone users can also experience this if unlucky :D

By snowwrestler 2025-11-1915:28

I don’t think this is a messaging technology problem. So I don’t see how broken technology should be perceived as a solution or silver lining.

By dangus 2025-11-1910:40

This seems to be a disingenuous comparison. With RCS it’s supposed to work but it’s broken, which is your “parental control.”

But I don’t think either platform lets you control messaging group chat functionality this way. They just offer approved contacts and complete disable as your options to control messaging.

I also think your “amount of drama” might be badly measured simply because the majority of kids in the US use iOS.

87% of teens have an iPhone.

https://www.pipersandler.com/teens

By joshcartme 2025-11-1918:55

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.