It's that time of year again, folks. As the tech world has sights set on the latest Apple event that is producing the new iPhone 16 as we speak, we all know we'll be seeing slightly improved phones, some impressive specs, and a few 'innovative" or "magic" new features from Apple. For me, however, the...
SMS can’t do group texting. It can’t do images, video, or anything other than a short message (140 to 180 characters depending on your language).
MMS followed SMS and it can do group texting. However, attachment sizes are laughably small, leading to 160p videos being compressed to hell to make it across the tiny video size limits.
MMS also used to cost more in some places. My carrier simply shut it down a couple of years ago because nobody was using it (I live in a WhatsApp country).
RCS is the official next generation of SMS/MMS, made by the people who define standards like 3G/4G/5G. Basically MMS 2.0. Very few carrière launched RCS services when they rolled out 4G, even fewer phones had RCS clients, so you ended up with needing to download your carrier’s (inferior) messaging app to maybe exchange RCS messages with other people if they also downloaded their carrier’s apps.
SMS still works and has always worked.
Isn’t RCS fully controlled by Google now, with encryption only if the messages first go through Google’s servers so they can scrape their sweet sweet advertising keywords?
It doesn’t really matter what server you use for encryption. The key exchange still happens through Google’s servers if you use Google’s app, but there’s nothing for them to scrape there. RCS is a federated network of carrier services so any server can carry your encrypted messages, though you’ll only be able to use a few servers in practice (your carrier’s server and Google’s, as Google opened theirs up to just about anyone). Also, messages are end-to-end encrypted by default so there’s nothing for Google to scrape.
The RCS spec is maintained by the GSMA, specifically this working group within it. That’s a collective of over 1200 companies. Google is probably part of GSMA, but so is everyone else who does anything with mobile networking.