If you're on Android, the Textra app handles most of the emojis on messages without needing RCS. Sadly it still doesn't work with reactions to images yet.
Quik, an open source SMS app on FDroid, handles this already without needing a specific OSes RCS.
Unless there is something fundamental thats wrong with Quik and its development, I dont see why one would be excited about another vendor specific solution. Quik works on any degoogled android, not just Graphene.
I might try Quik again at some point, but to be honest I don't care enough about sms messaging apps to go beyond the default one usually. I think I remember I stopped using Quik because at least at the time it didn't have link previews, which is a hell of a lot more convenient to me than emoji react buttons.
The parsed and properly displayed reactions are a QUIK feature, but it does not mean RCS is being used. You can try to install e.g. Fossify Messages and you will see the "A reacted to B" messages again.
Also, this reaction parsing does not work for all languages.
Ah ok, so its not RCS support but rather working around the OS not suporting RCS. Did some reading yesterday and now understand that RCS needs some low level system support to work.
I tried to switch over a group of friends and got rebuffed because one of them really likes Whatsapp's transcription feature. Signal doesn't offer it. Nobody else cared.
I have thought this for years. Everyone slimes on Americans for using iMessage and asks who no WhatsApp? Same reason I’m not on facebook, don’t use a meta quest, and don’t use instagram.
Yeah, thats the main issue with imessage (and it still is) and if your switching from IOS to android, you have to start over on all of your messages unless if you figure out a way to back them up.
It's not a good solution, but from a meme in c/selfhosting i learned that through the price of a used mac mini (about $120 at that time) you can selfhost iMessage on mac, and selfhost a 3rd party free software called Bluebubbles, which, as far as i can tell, uses Google and Cloudflare services to convey the iMessages to your Android phone.
I'm sure it is a privacy nightmare. But the shunning for not having iMessage from my own family was getting to me, real or imagined.
You are self hosting iMessage -- you have a machine you own (mac mini) running the iMessage application 24-7, so you can access it on your own client (Android phone).
It's self hosting a proprietary service with some middleware to access it on the device of your choosing.
I’ve never had a problem starting over. Used to custom ROM hope back in the day and start with a fresh Android release on the cyanogenmod nightly releases.
There is nothing in my iMessage that I would be sad to lose moving to Android.
WhatsApp does not commit the sin of not having cross platform support at all, it is genuinely the most pratical and easy to use proprietary IM solution besides the network effect
Your contacts weren't always on WhatsApp, stop using it and if they want to talk to you enough they'll join a better platform. Maybe just keep sending them links every day about how trash WhatsApp and Meta are until they get the point lmao
Already did that, and after two years I'm back on WhatsApp. Everytime you do something at least a bit social it will be a WhatsApp group, you can refuse of course, but believe me, unless it's really close friends no one is going to put the extra effort to reach you.
While I agree with you that Meta must die, saying that Telegram is any way better than WhatsApp is, I'm sorry to say, either delusion or extreme ignorance.
It's not encrypted. At all. The company has full access to everything on it.
It's also russian and actively used to spy on users by the russian FSB (FBI equivalent, kind of).
To be more accurate: Telegram is totally unecrypted by default, unless one chooses to enter a "secret chat", in which case you use its proprietary encryption. As such its better suited for public group chats and not for anything that needs to critical privacy, but to say it has zero encryption options is not correct.
As for "Russian", while its CEO was born in Russia, and made his cash to initially fund it from the Russian social media VK, he has lived outside of Russia for a decade now, and Telegram is head quartered in the United Arab Emirates, with servers installed globally.
It is, and he has, but if you're following what's going on in the RUvsUA war, you can see that the authorities are absolutely using Telegram to identify dissenters and leaks.
Hate to be supporting Telegram but I recall there also being some sort of Ukrainian Telegram bot meant to be used by Russian soldiers to safely give up and be taken to the other side, using the "share location" button. IDK how that's meant to work now that you need Tor tunnels to browse fucking Telegram in Russia, though. Phone roaming or something? Point is, both sides are trying to use it for their advantage.
Quite literally how my wife puts it. She's been using Graphene on a Pixel 9 Pro XL for a few months now. Even with the hurdles of moving to an entirely different platform and the weirdness that comes with the extra security (not playing nice with some services), she vastly prefers it over her previous Apple stuff, to the point she wants me to wipe MacOS off of her iMac and install Linux.
This has been available since forever, though. Cyanogenmod/LineageOS was the biggest. Oneplus followed along and I love my OP15, though that's coming to a bitter end
My pixel 7 broke but am still getting a OP15 becasue I can't stand google shit anymore, even paid an $150 for it. I figure the hardware isnt going to get better and OP15 is probably the best its gonna get for a few years anyways.
Insane that google can sell such an inferior product for the same or greater price.
So sad that OP15 wont get a reboot. These phones are the last bit of the pre-surveillance era.
Cyanogenmod and LineageOS have always felt like hacks upon hacks and always had something broken. While I have my gripes with GOS it's truly the first time since I have had a custom ROM that just works through and through.
Having used both extensively, what? I've seen very little difference between the two, and if anything Lineage has become more refined and stable compared to Cyanogen over the years.
The CM theme manager alone was leagues better than anything Lineage is doing these days. CM enabled things like 720p recording on Nexus One, before the stock camera. Hacked in multitouch on devices that didn't properly support it. Features like the camera flashlight we take for granted today. The notification shade quick menus. Hell the majority of the android UI/UX was pioneered on Cyanogenmod, it's actually insane how much customizability and custom features that were available. Then it got gobbled up by AOSP and/or PixelOS and dumbed down for end users. Remember touchwiz? There's a reason Cyanogen got picked up by Samsung. Their android builds are actually good now. To the point that I prefer a lot of their UX flows over stock. If you told me that in 2013 I would have laughed in your face.
I daily drove Lineage for 2 years and honestly couldn't name a single feature it provided me other than root access and failing Google's play integrity checks + breaking my tap to pay.
It kind of sounds like you looked up a wikipedia article about Cyanogenmod looking for any claimed feature to try to make it sound like it's better. Neverminding how dubious and revisionist your claims are (apps were doing camera flashlight long before Cyan, and using any of them was a bad idea because they'd burn the light out, for instance).
None of that matters, because what it comes down to is that Cyanogenmod doesn't exist anymore. It was abandoned, and at least Lineage is something I can use now. It's one of the few options still around that allows me some relative piece of mind knowing my devices are free of spyware, and it continues getting ported to more devices than pretty much any other Android based system.
Also, I have a Samsung phone. Their UX sucks, way too bloated and messy.
These are literally just features that I used and went out of my way to seek out lmao. I still have my Nexus One and the camera LED is still working. Glad you think my 15 year old memories are encyclopedic though
Cyanogen had nothing to do with why Samsung's interface improved and why OneUI is good now. He was at Samsung for less than two years and it was during the TouchWiz era. He left Samsung and almost immediately trashed TouchWiz on the S4. I loved CyanogenMod, but OneUI (and Samsung Experience before it) was forced by the competition's Android skins getting better, not custom ROMs. So, I agree with everything else you said though.
you do realise that rcs only works on unrooted stock google-certified android with a locked bootloader? that't the whole reason grapheneos is making their own FOSS implementation
I don't even understand how dropping sms support improved security, was it the code required for making it work (I know sms is fairly little on android and remember mms is a pain in the ass) or just because "confusion" about having insecure and secure communications right next to each other?
Signal is pretty great and I use it at least a little myself, but it's not necessarily perfect. The big elephant that's always been in the room is its dependence on one backend and the fact they're based in the US.
Different threat models call for different approaches, and every option has tradeoffs.
Because people stick with the default. There was a time people I know would try different messaging apps but after hangouts got canceled nobody wants to bother.
Because Signal 1) doesn't ship as default, and 2) requires a login process.
You've already lost the majority of the general public with the former. On top of that, the Venn diagram of "people who go through with logging in" and "people who already know about Signal" has significant overlap.
You see, the problem is that whatsapp came very early, when it released it wasn't shit and it provided free messages which in many european countries wasn't a thing yet, everyone hopped on it and used it as main communication platform, this created a big ass network effect that is nearly unescapeable, even today i can't escape from it because i am the only idiot who uses Signal and Matrix and no one wants to leave whatsapp because they already have an account and all their contacts
I use Signal via Molly and as @[email protected] points out, there's friction in getting users to on to it. But also the UX isn't even as good as WhatsApp let alone Telegram.
Telegram's UI fucking blows. I use Telegram on occasion, but only to follow a handful of software projects that inexplicably only distribute release notes via Telegram 🫥
Signal's UI is exactly as one would expect. Open it and you have a list of chats. Tap a chat and it opens. Done.
Telegram has been winning awards for their UI since inception. WhatsApp has basically mimicked it. Signal has gone in its own direction which suits 40 year old geeks who use Lemmy, but the actual masses…
Come on, can we at least pretend to have the self-awareness to know what we like isn't conducive to how the masses use these apps.
It's like how people on Reddit use to try and say that front facing cameras were useless and so they want small phones without them. 😮💨
I'm honestly confused as to what UI differences people care about between Signal, Telegram, and Whatsapp. All three have a list of chats as the main view, with a search field or button, and a chat screen with prior messages on top and an input field at the bottom.
I do not pretend to be a UX designer and would appreciate an explanation.
That's a legitimate concern. However, the Android tablet market is a fraction of a slice of the pie. Meanwhile, iPads are the defacto "standard tablet". Even my little kids just call their Kindles "iPads". I don't even bother correcting them, because honestly who fucking cares? At this point, "iPad" just means "tablet".
For those who got too excited by the title: read the original messages from the GrapheneOS. RCS de-facto is not an open technology, there's a massive amount of work and multiple steps are needed to get anywhere near the proper independent implementation. It's gonna be amazing if the GrapheneOS team pulls it off, but don't get too excited about the release dates and its availability for other systems (e.g. Linux).
To be honest, I'd rather they use the effort elsewhere (as a very happy gOS user). The number of people on gOS who wouldn't prefer Signal (without phone number rego) / Threema etc. is probably vanishingly small, but that takes going up against the incumbents with heavy resistance.
There's only so many irons you can keep in the fire. That said, gOS devs (sans drama) are freaking awesome, and seems to keep growing in number, if they can pull it off it will be a true coup.
That's true on one hand, but on the other there are also family and friends with who we still want/need to communicate via the "normies" protocols, and it's better to do it without explicit spyware on your phone (aka Play Services or Whatsapp). So yeah, it's an absolutely ungrateful work what they're doing, but huge thanks to them for that.
The chronophobia induced by realising 'those damn kids texting all day' has become 'old fashioned SMS' is more than I expected. I remember when that shit was 10p a go!
I agree, it was a huge bummer that they removed it. Their reasoning didn't quite make sense for me.
I think a huge selling point was that it wasn't one more app to message with, you could just replace your SMS app and if your contacts also had Signal, your messages would be encrypted. Very simple proposition.
AFAIK this is SMS... Well, they are using RCS to hijack it. So you start SMS conversation and if both parties have it enabled or will switch to their protocol. Kind of what iMessage does.
Yeah, I keep RCS disabled on my phone and preferably would replace it with another app, but didn't know a good alternative.
GOS will code a proprietary client, like Whatsapp? I doubt…
It's E2E with 3 ends, the 3rd one being Meta, like Whatsapp?
There is no doc available, like Whatsapp?
The server is as closed as one can be like Whatsapp?
Frankly, if one actor gets in RCS and gives me confidence it's going to be secure and respect our privacy as much as can be, it's GOS.
RCS might be below some other standards, but phone messaging is still a thing. GOS is not about idealistic massive adoption of Signal, it's about what's needed in the day-to-day life, but with privacy and security.
Isn't that a possible reason why my my e/OS/ phone can't send text messages, nor call, some numbers. (In France, where many people use meta shit like whatsapp and facebook messenger, and won't be interested in another messenging app like signal, delta chat, etc)
iMessage came LOOOOONNNNG before RCS. Once Apple had a large base of iPhone users, they rolled out iMessage. And it only works on Apple hardware. But because it's the default and the general public is relatively.....err....dumb..... nobody really understood the difference until recently.
You're correct. EU users didn't adopt, or at least continue to utilize, SMS based messaging like users in the US did. This is not a problem for anyone using web based messaging like the ones you mentioned.
I'm quite surprised by the reaction this comment has received, are Americans genuinely still using SMS? Don't they need to have group chats, send pictures, transfer files, make audio and video calls, or make use of encryption?
Yes we mainly use SMS and then if both users are on compatible devices they'll switch to RCS or some other protocol. But most of my texts including spam messages are just plain SMS.
I don't know for sure but my guess is that a lot of US users thought you were wrong because they don't know that SMS / MMS is essentially dead in the EU. It's still the primary text based communication method in the US.
MMS supports all the things you mentioned (albeit in a shittier way) except encryption. RCS adds a new layer that is more like Signal in that it supports encryption and emojis and a few other things but it is controlled by Google and there are no open source alternatives currently.
Does MMS support all that? From my brief research it basically just sends an SMS with a link to the media to be downloaded by your WAP browser, so while a client could implement group chats etc I'm not aware that it's actually built in. Not that I can check, my network doesn't even seem to support MMS anymore!
Genuinely nobody I know has sent an SMS message for at least a decade, who are you still sending SMS to in this day and age when internet-based messengers exist?
Ever heard of older people or just less techy ones? Guess not. I always find it weird when people get on some high horse about sms or any other tech topic. By the way you talk, one would think you literally think hundreds of millions or more people don't use a texting capability built-in to their phone. But you clearly don't think that. You apparently just have a need to "other" people who do use it.
Ps. You live in a world where people still use fax machines, checks, floppy disks, and AOL over dialup. People use old tech. It's not that crazy and much of it has to do with older people not liking change.
Look, I'm not trying to be a smartarse here, I'm genuinely interested in different ways people use technology. I am telling you that every person I know, regardless of age, defaults to using WhatsApp for communications; even my elderly relatives.
Ok, perhaps I misjudged you. For me, even younger people typically don't use other messengers besides sms. I've only ever successfully gotten like 5 people to install signal. The other most popular messengers in the us, Facebook messenger and Whatsapp, are probably much worse for privacy than sms, due to meta ownership.
Yeah I've got about half of my friends and family using Signal, but when even a single one refuses then the whole group chat ends up staying in WhatsApp. WhatsApp does at least seem better than Facebook messenger though, as it allegedly implements the Signal protocol so should still be E2E encrypted. "Allegedly", because it's closed source and run by the trustworthy philanthropists as Facebook who I'm sure are data mining as much as they can from it, but I think people would have found out if it was a total lie. Still better than SMS though which may as well be public.
Where in the world are you? I speak for the UK when I talk about WhatsApp being the de-facto messenger. How do people do group chats or send files if they're still using SMS?
I have and I'm not sure I get your point. I have an ability to understand how other people use technology. Which is aided by travel, not hindered by it.
I am suprised that it took this long to find someone that mentions how RCS will need to fight the network effect of pre existing IM apps thanks to no one using SMS in 2026 (for good reason, it is genuinely garbage and unsafe)
They require certain features that most phones don't have in order to be willing to support them. They want phones with GrapheneOS to be impossible to break into even by sophisticated methods such as Cellbrite so it defeats the purpose if it can be circumvented by methods that don't involve the OS.
My current daily driver is an HMD Skyline and it's been great thus far and repairability is good but it isn't listed anywhere as being supported by alternative OSs.
It's supposed to be out next year but only the highest end devices will be supported because GrapheneOS requires certain security features in the firmware and hardware that Pixel 11, the lower end Motorola devices, and the other brands don't/won't have.
Seems like Pixel 11 has the hardware but they turned the Arm Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) off in firmware for 'performance' reasons. gOS has been able to turn it back on, but the jury's still out on whether they'll support it as I understand it.
I looked at Motorola's current devices to get a sense and it's pretty sad. My plan of sticking with my used 1TB 9 Pro (non XL) holds. Honestly I need to look at phone insurance because I want to ride this thing out the full 7 years of support.
Only phones that can have the bootloader relocked by Graphene will be supported. New Motorola phones are coming but they will be expensive. Get a Pixel (not 11).
That's just one of the things required for graphene, there are a lot of hardware security features that are also required. Only Pixels (not Pixel 11) have these so far, but the Motorola phones will change that of course.
As of now, for clarification, Pixels 6-10 series, Tablet and Fold are supported by GrapheneOS. The new Motorola phones releasing next year will also support GrapheneOS.
A big hurdle with RCS was carrier adoption, at least in Asia.
I wonder about two things:
Would Graphene team’s implementation be usable on other devices that are less fortunate to be supported by the OS?
Would this be a drop-in replacement or would Graphene team need to work with carriers so that their implementation actually work?
On a tangential note, I would really like to read an in-depth analysis of how RCS had such a botched up implementation, which it has still to recover from almost a decade later.
The adoption is nowhere close to what it should have been, and instead it is now more associated with spam than actual communication. The Wikipedia entry does cover a lot of aspects, but it doesn’t explain how it went wrong.
biggest hurdle after that is that it still sucks ass compared to e2ee IM apps, and no one uses SMS nowadays anyway, so we barely benefit from pre existing SMS users that would be able to seemslessly swap to RCS because SMS users don't really exist, it basically has to face against the network effect of Whatsapp, Facebook messager, iMessage and WeChat, just like Signal has too [face the network effect] while being less secure than Signal and having less features
I think a source of confusion in this thread is that people in North America actually use SMS to communicate with other people, and in most of the rest of the world, that's uncommon. I haven't received an SMS from a human on my European phone number in over two years, and the last one was someone verifying my Signal safety number.
There's a dominant messaging app in most other regions which everyone uses unless they're a luddite or a free software absolutist. Whatsapp is the most common, but others are dominant in certain regions.
I switched away from e/OS for this very reason. As much as I hate SMS based communications it just isn't practical to ditch them completely in the US. It's simply too widespread.
SMS/MMS was working but only with individual conversations. Any group messages would fail. RCS is supposed to fall back on MMS when some recipients can't use RCS but something about the handshake was broken and it never would do that. I spent two months trying to sort it out and I never could.
Im having this very same problem on e/OS. Just moving everyone over to Delta chat cause i got tired of trying differernt apps, and trying to work out that same issue with SMS not working properlly.
I've had my GV number as my primary for ~16 years. I've been on grapheneos for about a year now. Maybe I should actually pull the trigger and migrate my number to my provider and finally get RCS. All the better if GrapheneOS provides native support.
Some carriers do, some never did, and some did but gave up. In the end if they want wide deliverability they'll have to connect to Google's hubs (servers).
It is annoying that Google doesn't provide an API for RCS as they do for SMS and MMS.
You say that until you cant even text your family or friends because every messaging application requires RCS. In the US, almost everyone is using RCS or we are using Windows with Microsoft Teams because of work. We dont use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, etc, unless its about traveling out of the country. Apple and Google really want SMS and MMS to kick the bucket but if GOS can pull this through, Im 100% for it.
Besides, almost everyone in the US has WhatsApp for their Latino friends. And if they manage not to have Latino friends, they're almost in certainly a racist pos
What the hell does having Latino friends have anything to do with what type of messaging services they use? Your completely missing the point or your just trying to start drama.
Next thing they have to do is add support for realme, huawei and doogee phones or any phone running a certain version of google or having certain specs and letting users take the chance on installation and bricking. Rather than pixel phones only because this is shit not being able to use graphene.
Unlikely because they have very strict hardware requirements for security reasons. So far only Pixel phones had the required hardware. Motorola is planning to release some GrapheneOS phones in 2027, but they will be very expensive.
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As a basic sms user, is RCS the reason my conversations now sometimes get flooded with messages like, "so-and-so loved this"?
Yup
If you're on Android, the Textra app handles most of the emojis on messages without needing RCS. Sadly it still doesn't work with reactions to images yet.
Looks like scamware, only available on Play Store, and it doesn't look like it's open-source. I wouldn't go near that.
Why? You aren't confortable with a random guy developing an app having access to your conversations or to your 2FA codes from your bank?
TBF I used it for a couple of years, tho I don't anymore. It's a good app. Didn't get robbed or murdered.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! I've been busy, ok?!? Now if you could stop moving, I can't aim!!
Textra was the go-to SMS app for quite a while in the enthusiast community. I don't know what happened to it in the last few years though.
Textra claims Google is the reason they don't have RCS support, something along the lines of locked out of the protocol?
RCS is not an open protocol. Never was. Otherwise every other SMS app would have already implemented it.
As a rule, I don't use proprietary software unless I have to. So from my perspective it may as well not exist.
Ok
iMessages does that when it falls back to SMS.
Google Messages works around it by manually parsing the message and adding the emoji to the message like iMessage does.
So Apple caused the problem, and only Google Messages accommodates for it afaik.
In a proper RCS chat that won't happen as Apple and Google will send the reactions natively.
I wish we could simply get everyone to switch to text-based messaging systems that don't suck.
I miss when Jabber was more common.
Quik, an open source SMS app on FDroid, handles this already without needing a specific OSes RCS.
Unless there is something fundamental thats wrong with Quik and its development, I dont see why one would be excited about another vendor specific solution. Quik works on any degoogled android, not just Graphene.
I might try Quik again at some point, but to be honest I don't care enough about sms messaging apps to go beyond the default one usually. I think I remember I stopped using Quik because at least at the time it didn't have link previews, which is a hell of a lot more convenient to me than emoji react buttons.
Aw helllllllll yeah 😎
Is there a reason we can't just all use Quik across the de-googled OSes? Vendor specific solutions only further the closed ecosystem problem.
https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.octoshrimpy.quik.fdroid/
https://github.com/quik-sms/quik
I don't see any mention that Quik works with RCS. Am I mistaken about this?
It does work with both iPhone and Android users from my testing. I ended up putting it on when I got tired of getting "person reacted to ".
Odd it isn't explicitly called out.
The parsed and properly displayed reactions are a QUIK feature, but it does not mean RCS is being used. You can try to install e.g. Fossify Messages and you will see the "A reacted to B" messages again.
Also, this reaction parsing does not work for all languages.
Ah ok, so its not RCS support but rather working around the OS not suporting RCS. Did some reading yesterday and now understand that RCS needs some low level system support to work.
While that is a good SMS app (in fact, it's the one I'm currently using), it does not support RKS.
QUIK handles bare SMS.
Oh shit. So, grapheneOS is reinventing the wheel, when we have one? Interesting.
We don't.
Dude, go read a book or something.
Honestly the best news I've seen in a while. It was RCS that drove me back to stock android. I'll be switching back to Graphene as soon as this lands.
Good. Everything Google touches needs to be forked.
Fork Google
We keep trying, but the courts are ok with monopolies.
They suddenly care about monopolies whenever a major competitor threatens to shift the balance of the market by providing alternatives...
fork it right out the ass
Goggle!
Lougle! If you get that reference lol
Go fork yourself
The number of Europeans in here acting like What's App, which might as well be Facebook Messenger, is some sort of high road is hilarious.
I work with a lot of European teams and they always make me use WhatsApp. I hate it.
Yeah I still don't get why people use or promote WhatsApp. If anything, use Signal or even Telegram
Nah, Signal or Threema
And Briar or Cwtch
The inertia is real.
I tried to switch over a group of friends and got rebuffed because one of them really likes Whatsapp's transcription feature. Signal doesn't offer it. Nobody else cared.
Telegram is worse than even Whatsapp, since it's not even pretending to be end to end encrypted.
The real choice is signal or threema.
Or something equally secure and also decentralized like Briar or Cwtch.
I have thought this for years. Everyone slimes on Americans for using iMessage and asks who no WhatsApp? Same reason I’m not on facebook, don’t use a meta quest, and don’t use instagram.
While Whatsapp is not great, the problem with iMessage is that it is (was?) locked exclusively to the apple platform
Yeah, thats the main issue with imessage (and it still is) and if your switching from IOS to android, you have to start over on all of your messages unless if you figure out a way to back them up.
It's not a good solution, but from a meme in c/selfhosting i learned that through the price of a used mac mini (about $120 at that time) you can selfhost iMessage on mac, and selfhost a 3rd party free software called Bluebubbles, which, as far as i can tell, uses Google and Cloudflare services to convey the iMessages to your Android phone.
I'm sure it is a privacy nightmare. But the shunning for not having iMessage from my own family was getting to me, real or imagined.
You're not self-hosting iMessage. It's just a bridge between your device and Apple's iMessage network.
You are self hosting iMessage -- you have a machine you own (mac mini) running the iMessage application 24-7, so you can access it on your own client (Android phone).
It's self hosting a proprietary service with some middleware to access it on the device of your choosing.
That is just so overly complicated, i would rather just start them over🤣🤣
I’ve never had a problem starting over. Used to custom ROM hope back in the day and start with a fresh Android release on the cyanogenmod nightly releases.
There is nothing in my iMessage that I would be sad to lose moving to Android.
What do you mean exactly start over? If you don't have iMessage, you can't talk to other people with iMessage.
Sure but if you want it to work wirhbpbine number you have to have a phone talk about every seven days.
WhatsApp does not commit the sin of not having cross platform support at all, it is genuinely the most pratical and easy to use proprietary IM solution besides the network effect
People will always trade privacy for ease of use.
You can't use Signal or Telegram because your contacts are on WhatsApp, but yes WhatsApp might as well be called Facebook Messenger
Your contacts weren't always on WhatsApp, stop using it and if they want to talk to you enough they'll join a better platform. Maybe just keep sending them links every day about how trash WhatsApp and Meta are until they get the point lmao
Already did that, and after two years I'm back on WhatsApp. Everytime you do something at least a bit social it will be a WhatsApp group, you can refuse of course, but believe me, unless it's really close friends no one is going to put the extra effort to reach you.
Telegram are you kidding me?? Telegram is a thousand times worse than WhatsApp pal
Not even close lol. The sooner we stop using meta shit the better.
While I agree with you that Meta must die, saying that Telegram is any way better than WhatsApp is, I'm sorry to say, either delusion or extreme ignorance.
It's not encrypted. At all. The company has full access to everything on it.
It's also russian and actively used to spy on users by the russian FSB (FBI equivalent, kind of).
To be more accurate: Telegram is totally unecrypted by default, unless one chooses to enter a "secret chat", in which case you use its proprietary encryption. As such its better suited for public group chats and not for anything that needs to critical privacy, but to say it has zero encryption options is not correct.
As for "Russian", while its CEO was born in Russia, and made his cash to initially fund it from the Russian social media VK, he has lived outside of Russia for a decade now, and Telegram is head quartered in the United Arab Emirates, with servers installed globally.
It is, and he has, but if you're following what's going on in the RUvsUA war, you can see that the authorities are absolutely using Telegram to identify dissenters and leaks.
Hate to be supporting Telegram but I recall there also being some sort of Ukrainian Telegram bot meant to be used by Russian soldiers to safely give up and be taken to the other side, using the "share location" button. IDK how that's meant to work now that you need Tor tunnels to browse fucking Telegram in Russia, though. Phone roaming or something? Point is, both sides are trying to use it for their advantage.
The number of Eastern Europeans pretending Viber is everything is insane
2 weeks now on Graphene. This is what a phone OS should be, simple, boring, juste the basics without a shit-ton of bloatware and spying crap.
Quite literally how my wife puts it. She's been using Graphene on a Pixel 9 Pro XL for a few months now. Even with the hurdles of moving to an entirely different platform and the weirdness that comes with the extra security (not playing nice with some services), she vastly prefers it over her previous Apple stuff, to the point she wants me to wipe MacOS off of her iMac and install Linux.
This has been available since forever, though. Cyanogenmod/LineageOS was the biggest. Oneplus followed along and I love my OP15, though that's coming to a bitter end
My pixel 7 broke but am still getting a OP15 becasue I can't stand google shit anymore, even paid an $150 for it. I figure the hardware isnt going to get better and OP15 is probably the best its gonna get for a few years anyways.
Insane that google can sell such an inferior product for the same or greater price.
So sad that OP15 wont get a reboot. These phones are the last bit of the pre-surveillance era.
I have high hopes for the new Motorola line. They also worked with Graphene to become even more compliant than Pixels.
Pixel 11 made itself less compliant than its predecessor so GrapheneOS won't support it.
Why would it? It just came out less than a year ago.
I meant a new release, like op16 or something.
Cyanogenmod and LineageOS have always felt like hacks upon hacks and always had something broken. While I have my gripes with GOS it's truly the first time since I have had a custom ROM that just works through and through.
Lineage pales in comparison to what cyanogenmod was
Having used both extensively, what? I've seen very little difference between the two, and if anything Lineage has become more refined and stable compared to Cyanogen over the years.
The CM theme manager alone was leagues better than anything Lineage is doing these days. CM enabled things like 720p recording on Nexus One, before the stock camera. Hacked in multitouch on devices that didn't properly support it. Features like the camera flashlight we take for granted today. The notification shade quick menus. Hell the majority of the android UI/UX was pioneered on Cyanogenmod, it's actually insane how much customizability and custom features that were available. Then it got gobbled up by AOSP and/or PixelOS and dumbed down for end users. Remember touchwiz? There's a reason Cyanogen got picked up by Samsung. Their android builds are actually good now. To the point that I prefer a lot of their UX flows over stock. If you told me that in 2013 I would have laughed in your face.
I daily drove Lineage for 2 years and honestly couldn't name a single feature it provided me other than root access and failing Google's play integrity checks + breaking my tap to pay.
It kind of sounds like you looked up a wikipedia article about Cyanogenmod looking for any claimed feature to try to make it sound like it's better. Neverminding how dubious and revisionist your claims are (apps were doing camera flashlight long before Cyan, and using any of them was a bad idea because they'd burn the light out, for instance).
None of that matters, because what it comes down to is that Cyanogenmod doesn't exist anymore. It was abandoned, and at least Lineage is something I can use now. It's one of the few options still around that allows me some relative piece of mind knowing my devices are free of spyware, and it continues getting ported to more devices than pretty much any other Android based system.
Also, I have a Samsung phone. Their UX sucks, way too bloated and messy.
These are literally just features that I used and went out of my way to seek out lmao. I still have my Nexus One and the camera LED is still working. Glad you think my 15 year old memories are encyclopedic though
Cyanogen had nothing to do with why Samsung's interface improved and why OneUI is good now. He was at Samsung for less than two years and it was during the TouchWiz era. He left Samsung and almost immediately trashed TouchWiz on the S4. I loved CyanogenMod, but OneUI (and Samsung Experience before it) was forced by the competition's Android skins getting better, not custom ROMs. So, I agree with everything else you said though.
Lineage was forked from the remains of CM. Without Lineage, CM would have died and faded from memory already.
Lol, lineage did nothing to stop that
Ok?
Sure. OxygenOS was also forked from Cyanogen, but OnePlus ended up adding their own UI and (opt-in) apps.
Where will you go after 1+?
I'm considering the new Motorola line, but I have no clue
I hope it's functionally installable on other versions of android
Nah, it would be insecure (still more secure than defaults and way too secure for most users)
I read installable and instable, I was like 🫠
I hope it can finally bring this piece of shit messaging protocol to Linux phones so my friends and family know when I read a message
Just move them to signal :)
i can barely get them to move off of telegram 🥀️
My immediate family is on signal, and has been for a while, my parents and my sibling are now on signal which is nice!
I have a few others I communicate with often I wish I could get them over because I hate using sms, even rcs.
You can always use Waydroid
https://waydro.id/
If you phone is X:
https://github.com/1999AZZAR/use-waydroid-on-x11#installing-a-nested-wayland-compositor
you do realise that rcs only works on unrooted stock google-certified android with a locked bootloader? that't the whole reason grapheneos is making their own FOSS implementation
Uh no? It literally works on GrapheneOS. https://grapheneos.org/usage#rcs
I think you're confusing this with Google Pay, which only works on Google-certified systems.
Graphene allows a locked bootloader. That's part of why it works.
https://github.com/mistrmochov/WaydroidSU
The waydroid devs said not to use way droid for anything security related. This is bad advice.
I'm not seeing that anywhere, got a link?
Search their github issues for "security"
Everything they make is open source, so even if they don't officially support it, someone else will probably fork it and upload it somewhere.
I'm sure it will install, but if it needs some system level thing it won't actually work. It depends how they implement it.
Literally everyone should just use Signal. I really don't understand why we all don't.
I don't even understand how dropping sms support improved security, was it the code required for making it work (I know sms is fairly little on android and remember mms is a pain in the ass) or just because "confusion" about having insecure and secure communications right next to each other?
The latter. I think it was a huge mistake. Now the phone numbers just worsen privacy.
Because Signal requires a phone number.
But so does SMS, so signal is just a straight upgrade as an alternative.
Signal is pretty great and I use it at least a little myself, but it's not necessarily perfect. The big elephant that's always been in the room is its dependence on one backend and the fact they're based in the US.
Different threat models call for different approaches, and every option has tradeoffs.
Because people stick with the default. There was a time people I know would try different messaging apps but after hangouts got canceled nobody wants to bother.
Still a corp and you can't host it right? Wouldn't it be better if everyone used Matrix for all communication
Because Signal 1) doesn't ship as default, and 2) requires a login process.
You've already lost the majority of the general public with the former. On top of that, the Venn diagram of "people who go through with logging in" and "people who already know about Signal" has significant overlap.
But the same is true for WhatsApp…
You see, the problem is that whatsapp came very early, when it released it wasn't shit and it provided free messages which in many european countries wasn't a thing yet, everyone hopped on it and used it as main communication platform, this created a big ass network effect that is nearly unescapeable, even today i can't escape from it because i am the only idiot who uses Signal and Matrix and no one wants to leave whatsapp because they already have an account and all their contacts
Was true (except for trustworthy encryption). Then network effects took over and peer pressure did the work.
It could happen again in a good way this time, but the resistance will be stiff.
Used to shill XMPP but everyone should use Tox at this point ngl.
downside: Sharing IDs is annoying (QR code if you are on mobile? idk haven't tried)
updownsides:
Because signal dropped SMS support.
I use Signal via Molly and as @[email protected] points out, there's friction in getting users to on to it. But also the UX isn't even as good as WhatsApp let alone Telegram.
Telegram's UI fucking blows. I use Telegram on occasion, but only to follow a handful of software projects that inexplicably only distribute release notes via Telegram 🫥
Signal's UI is exactly as one would expect. Open it and you have a list of chats. Tap a chat and it opens. Done.
Telegram has been winning awards for their UI since inception. WhatsApp has basically mimicked it. Signal has gone in its own direction which suits 40 year old geeks who use Lemmy, but the actual masses…
Come on, can we at least pretend to have the self-awareness to know what we like isn't conducive to how the masses use these apps.
It's like how people on Reddit use to try and say that front facing cameras were useless and so they want small phones without them. 😮💨
I'm honestly confused as to what UI differences people care about between Signal, Telegram, and Whatsapp. All three have a list of chats as the main view, with a search field or button, and a chat screen with prior messages on top and an input field at the bottom.
I do not pretend to be a UX designer and would appreciate an explanation.
what ui? there is a namelist, a call icon, a message icon. what in the hell do you need?
one thing missing is support for Android Tablets, its pissing my GF off on her Samsung Tablet and yet it works for my mother on her ipad ffs
That's a legitimate concern. However, the Android tablet market is a fraction of a slice of the pie. Meanwhile, iPads are the defacto "standard tablet". Even my little kids just call their Kindles "iPads". I don't even bother correcting them, because honestly who fucking cares? At this point, "iPad" just means "tablet".
I used signal offical app and honestly it has a good UI and UX, what does it lack? What seems bad? I don't understand
For those who got too excited by the title: read the original messages from the GrapheneOS. RCS de-facto is not an open technology, there's a massive amount of work and multiple steps are needed to get anywhere near the proper independent implementation. It's gonna be amazing if the GrapheneOS team pulls it off, but don't get too excited about the release dates and its availability for other systems (e.g. Linux).
To be honest, I'd rather they use the effort elsewhere (as a very happy gOS user). The number of people on gOS who wouldn't prefer Signal (without phone number rego) / Threema etc. is probably vanishingly small, but that takes going up against the incumbents with heavy resistance.
There's only so many irons you can keep in the fire. That said, gOS devs (sans drama) are freaking awesome, and seems to keep growing in number, if they can pull it off it will be a true coup.
That's true on one hand, but on the other there are also family and friends with who we still want/need to communicate via the "normies" protocols, and it's better to do it without explicit spyware on your phone (aka Play Services or Whatsapp). So yeah, it's an absolutely ungrateful work what they're doing, but huge thanks to them for that.
Excellent! Since Signal removed SMS support there's no trusted app supporting old SMS and encrypted messaging on one UI
SMS is not to be trusted because it is plain text and full of vulnerabilities.
I know. But I still need it whether I want it or not.
I have a limited data plan, so the only way I can communicate when I'm not on WiFi is by good ol' fashioned text and call.
If you're only sending text messages (no voice memos, stickers, photos or videos), you're data plan should never be an issue when using Signal.
Data plan: if you use 1MiB by accident (even if it's your phone doing stuff by itself when "mobile data" is set to "off"), you have to pay for an entire 2GiB "emergency" pack.
Oh you're using a prepaid SIM?
I'm not willingly using any SIM anymore.
The chronophobia induced by realising 'those damn kids texting all day' has become 'old fashioned SMS' is more than I expected. I remember when that shit was 10p a go!
however SMS doesn't need a data connection, just a mobile signal, so as an emergency backup type of communication it's great
That old behavior of Signal confused what was encrypted and what isn’t.
It really didn't. Blue messages encrypted, green not encrypted. There was nothing confusing there
I agree, it was a huge bummer that they removed it. Their reasoning didn't quite make sense for me.
I think a huge selling point was that it wasn't one more app to message with, you could just replace your SMS app and if your contacts also had Signal, your messages would be encrypted. Very simple proposition.
yooo! while i wait for mobile linux to be realistic for my device this is a win
This project seems to be promising for providing a true mobile Linux experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otMoX0-PYp8
Wow. I had not heard of this device until now! Seems to have a passionate team behind it. I will definitely be watching this one. Thanks for sharing!
What the fuck is RCS?
Ok so RCS is basically WhatsApp/Signal but Google(+Carriers) but retarded:
Huh? That's literally a Meta platform... Doesn't get much worse than that. I'd sooner just use SMS
AFAIK this is SMS... Well, they are using RCS to hijack it. So you start SMS conversation and if both parties have it enabled or will switch to their protocol. Kind of what iMessage does.
Yeah, I keep RCS disabled on my phone and preferably would replace it with another app, but didn't know a good alternative.
What's app is owned by Mark Zuckerberg and Meta.
What messaging service works without a data connection?
IPoAC?
3G is shut down and 2G will follow soon.
mobile data connection.
As opposed to wifi or the pigeons you linked.
Frankly, if one actor gets in RCS and gives me confidence it's going to be secure and respect our privacy as much as can be, it's GOS.
RCS might be below some other standards, but phone messaging is still a thing. GOS is not about idealistic massive adoption of Signal, it's about what's needed in the day-to-day life, but with privacy and security.
It's the next gen sms, with features to bring it closer to parity with popular messaging apps
while still being horrible
I think it's texts for people who don't use Signal or WhatsApp, so... nobody I have ever met, I guess
it's trying to extend the sms/mms system
Replace, not extend.
extend only, it will fallback to SMS, and guess what? who the fuck even uses SMS and MMS nowadays?
Isn't that a possible reason why my my
e/OS/phone can't send text messages, nor call, some numbers. (In France, where many people use meta shit like whatsapp and facebook messenger, and won't be interested in another messenging app like signal, delta chat, etc)it is as convenient for the users as sms/mms, unlike signal/telegram/whatsapp
It is literally a standardized communication protocol. That is what iMessage is
iMessage is anything but a standardized protocol with crossplatform support
what did you drink? are you ok?
Huh, I just assumed it was built on the protocol but I guess not lol
iMessage came LOOOOONNNNG before RCS. Once Apple had a large base of iPhone users, they rolled out iMessage. And it only works on Apple hardware. But because it's the default and the general public is relatively.....err....dumb..... nobody really understood the difference until recently.
You're correct. EU users didn't adopt, or at least continue to utilize, SMS based messaging like users in the US did. This is not a problem for anyone using web based messaging like the ones you mentioned.
I'm quite surprised by the reaction this comment has received, are Americans genuinely still using SMS? Don't they need to have group chats, send pictures, transfer files, make audio and video calls, or make use of encryption?
Yes we mainly use SMS and then if both users are on compatible devices they'll switch to RCS or some other protocol. But most of my texts including spam messages are just plain SMS.
For phone calls i make a phone call.
I don't know for sure but my guess is that a lot of US users thought you were wrong because they don't know that SMS / MMS is essentially dead in the EU. It's still the primary text based communication method in the US.
MMS supports all the things you mentioned (albeit in a shittier way) except encryption. RCS adds a new layer that is more like Signal in that it supports encryption and emojis and a few other things but it is controlled by Google and there are no open source alternatives currently.
Does MMS support all that? From my brief research it basically just sends an SMS with a link to the media to be downloaded by your WAP browser, so while a client could implement group chats etc I'm not aware that it's actually built in. Not that I can check, my network doesn't even seem to support MMS anymore!
Sounds like you haven't met anyone. Or more likely, it's everyone not-you who is weird.
Genuinely nobody I know has sent an SMS message for at least a decade, who are you still sending SMS to in this day and age when internet-based messengers exist?
Ever heard of older people or just less techy ones? Guess not. I always find it weird when people get on some high horse about sms or any other tech topic. By the way you talk, one would think you literally think hundreds of millions or more people don't use a texting capability built-in to their phone. But you clearly don't think that. You apparently just have a need to "other" people who do use it.
Ps. You live in a world where people still use fax machines, checks, floppy disks, and AOL over dialup. People use old tech. It's not that crazy and much of it has to do with older people not liking change.
Look, I'm not trying to be a smartarse here, I'm genuinely interested in different ways people use technology. I am telling you that every person I know, regardless of age, defaults to using WhatsApp for communications; even my elderly relatives.
Ok, perhaps I misjudged you. For me, even younger people typically don't use other messengers besides sms. I've only ever successfully gotten like 5 people to install signal. The other most popular messengers in the us, Facebook messenger and Whatsapp, are probably much worse for privacy than sms, due to meta ownership.
Yeah I've got about half of my friends and family using Signal, but when even a single one refuses then the whole group chat ends up staying in WhatsApp. WhatsApp does at least seem better than Facebook messenger though, as it allegedly implements the Signal protocol so should still be E2E encrypted. "Allegedly", because it's closed source and run by the trustworthy philanthropists as Facebook who I'm sure are data mining as much as they can from it, but I think people would have found out if it was a total lie. Still better than SMS though which may as well be public.
Where in the world are you? I speak for the UK when I talk about WhatsApp being the de-facto messenger. How do people do group chats or send files if they're still using SMS?
Sounds like you never have been to Europe...
I have and I'm not sure I get your point. I have an ability to understand how other people use technology. Which is aided by travel, not hindered by it.
sounds like you live in the land of the free, I mean the land of forced to use SMS becausd apple NPCs can't be bothered to use a proper IM service
I am suprised that it took this long to find someone that mentions how RCS will need to fight the network effect of pre existing IM apps thanks to no one using SMS in 2026 (for good reason, it is genuinely garbage and unsafe)
Many people still use SMS in the US because it is (almost) universally free as opposed to mobile data which is not.
carriers on brazil have unlimited mobile data for certain services, including whatsapp, for only 2 USD a momth
Patiently waiting for supported devices expansion and no i don't want them to rush, i just don't want to buy a new phone to be free of Google.
Pixel 4a is great and less than $100
I bought a second hand pixel 8 pro.
I get the vibe there's not much intention to expand compatibility.
They require certain features that most phones don't have in order to be willing to support them. They want phones with GrapheneOS to be impossible to break into even by sophisticated methods such as Cellbrite so it defeats the purpose if it can be circumvented by methods that don't involve the OS.
Wait, is my GrapheneOS phone unlikely to be hackable by Cellbrite? That's kind of amazing, I had no idea.
Not hard to achieve. Any zero days cdllbrite finds will be fixed by aosp asap.
Encryption works.
My current daily driver is an HMD Skyline and it's been great thus far and repairability is good but it isn't listed anywhere as being supported by alternative OSs.
The skyline has a locked bootloader that can''t be unlocked by users.
Wasn't aware of that... well shit...
They're working with Motorola to make a device
It's supposed to be out next year but only the highest end devices will be supported because GrapheneOS requires certain security features in the firmware and hardware that Pixel 11, the lower end Motorola devices, and the other brands don't/won't have.
Seems like Pixel 11 has the hardware but they turned the Arm Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) off in firmware for 'performance' reasons. gOS has been able to turn it back on, but the jury's still out on whether they'll support it as I understand it.
I looked at Motorola's current devices to get a sense and it's pretty sad. My plan of sticking with my used 1TB 9 Pro (non XL) holds. Honestly I need to look at phone insurance because I want to ride this thing out the full 7 years of support.
Only phones that can have the bootloader relocked by Graphene will be supported. New Motorola phones are coming but they will be expensive. Get a Pixel (not 11).
That's just one of the things required for graphene, there are a lot of hardware security features that are also required. Only Pixels (not Pixel 11) have these so far, but the Motorola phones will change that of course.
As of now, for clarification, Pixels 6-10 series, Tablet and Fold are supported by GrapheneOS. The new Motorola phones releasing next year will also support GrapheneOS.
For clarification, only some Motorola phones, likely expensive flagship models, for now.
Yeah but can you really trust pixels? Google hardware, ewww. I would rather pay more for proper hardware
Buying a Google phone in order to get rid of Google seems sort of counterproductive, doesn't it?
Yes
only if you can't handle nuance
Exactly why i would like to have on the phone i have now.
A big hurdle with RCS was carrier adoption, at least in Asia.
I wonder about two things:
On a tangential note, I would really like to read an in-depth analysis of how RCS had such a botched up implementation, which it has still to recover from almost a decade later.
The adoption is nowhere close to what it should have been, and instead it is now more associated with spam than actual communication. The Wikipedia entry does cover a lot of aspects, but it doesn’t explain how it went wrong.
biggest hurdle after that is that it still sucks ass compared to e2ee IM apps, and no one uses SMS nowadays anyway, so we barely benefit from pre existing SMS users that would be able to seemslessly swap to RCS because SMS users don't really exist, it basically has to face against the network effect of Whatsapp, Facebook messager, iMessage and WeChat, just like Signal has too [face the network effect] while being less secure than Signal and having less features
Everyone i know uses SMS/RCS or iMessages.
I only use SMS to msg my mum and get 2FA stuff.
You're worried about the network disadvantages of only reaching people who have cell phones?!
I think a source of confusion in this thread is that people in North America actually use SMS to communicate with other people, and in most of the rest of the world, that's uncommon. I haven't received an SMS from a human on my European phone number in over two years, and the last one was someone verifying my Signal safety number.
There's a dominant messaging app in most other regions which everyone uses unless they're a luddite or a free software absolutist. Whatsapp is the most common, but others are dominant in certain regions.
no one should feel forced to have a phone number
Not remotely what I said.
Very much needed.
This has been missing for years
I switched away from e/OS for this very reason. As much as I hate SMS based communications it just isn't practical to ditch them completely in the US. It's simply too widespread.
you got only RCS available, no old school SMS? I was relieved I exited the Google's RCS.
SMS/MMS was working but only with individual conversations. Any group messages would fail. RCS is supposed to fall back on MMS when some recipients can't use RCS but something about the handshake was broken and it never would do that. I spent two months trying to sort it out and I never could.
Im having this very same problem on e/OS. Just moving everyone over to Delta chat cause i got tired of trying differernt apps, and trying to work out that same issue with SMS not working properlly.
I've been using JMP.chat/Cheogram for this personally
It'll be a while I'm sure, but I'm here for it 🙌🏾
This would be great. Definitely one of the few missing features.
I've had my GV number as my primary for ~16 years. I've been on grapheneos for about a year now. Maybe I should actually pull the trigger and migrate my number to my provider and finally get RCS. All the better if GrapheneOS provides native support.
Yep, I always laugh when I think that Google managed to successfully bully Apple into supporting RCS, yet Googles own service, Google Voice, doesn't!
I'm in this same boat.. FOMO is hitting me hard.
I think GV is the heaviest anchor holding me to Google right now.. :-\
I'm not sure you'd have to? You should be able to just download the app and register your # and they'll just start coming.
Is RCS hosted by the carriers? If not, how to make the end run around Google?
Some carriers do, some never did, and some did but gave up. In the end if they want wide deliverability they'll have to connect to Google's hubs (servers).
It is annoying that Google doesn't provide an API for RCS as they do for SMS and MMS.
Only system apps can offer RCS support, so there has been essentially no 3rd party apps for it, just Google's and from a few OEMs like Samsung
And Samsung gave up.
And...I guess, graphene?
That seems to be outside of their wheelhouse (intentionally), and it makes me nervous.
RCS is finally good now!
Think again
Meh, RCS is too little, too late, and archaic in design.
We moved away from hardware-based network identifiers in the 1980's, and RCS requires a unique hardware ID. It's fucking backwards.
I will never use the garbage that is RCS - it's already dead, just needs to be buried.
You say that until you cant even text your family or friends because every messaging application requires RCS. In the US, almost everyone is using RCS or we are using Windows with Microsoft Teams because of work. We dont use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, etc, unless its about traveling out of the country. Apple and Google really want SMS and MMS to kick the bucket but if GOS can pull this through, Im 100% for it.
The US doesn't matter.
Besides, almost everyone in the US has WhatsApp for their Latino friends. And if they manage not to have Latino friends, they're almost in certainly a racist pos
What the hell does having Latino friends have anything to do with what type of messaging services they use? Your completely missing the point or your just trying to start drama.
Because >99% of people in Latin America has WhatsApp. And their family too. And their friends too.
will it be usable on LineageOS? could it help with RCS support on linux?
Lineage os maybe. Linux, doubt
GOS team is so ambitious and I think we kinda need it too
I like how the one comment on that article is a guy baselessly saying that RCS is an open standard.
It's open as BGP. Public documentation, nobody will connect to you if you're a nobody.
A quick search shows that it is technically true, though..?
Open standard doesn't mean implementations are wide open to use.
bro trust me, its one more msg app, it is gonna solve everything, just one more bro
RCS is a protocol, not an app
Just one more protocol extension bro it's gonna fix everything
Next thing they have to do is add support for realme, huawei and doogee phones or any phone running a certain version of google or having certain specs and letting users take the chance on installation and bricking. Rather than pixel phones only because this is shit not being able to use graphene.
Then tell those phones to meet their security standards.
Unlikely because they have very strict hardware requirements for security reasons. So far only Pixel phones had the required hardware. Motorola is planning to release some GrapheneOS phones in 2027, but they will be very expensive.
Except the 11.