The rollout of RCS on iMessage has been confusing to me. I know some carriers like Mint don’t yet support iMessage RCS; the company’s founder has said that it’s something on their end that will be fixed around December. But I’ve also seen some people on Apple’s forums pointing fingers at Apple.
I want to get a better understanding of what the holdup is. How does the iMessage RCS bridge work? What are the technical challenges? Why was every carrier not working on this for months and prepared for the iOS 18 rollout? And if I’m using Google Messages on an MVNO that doesn’t yet support iMessage RCS, does that imply I can’t RCS message an iPhone user on a carrier that does support it?
If people from Mint are saying it’s on their end why wouldn’t you believe them?
You’re not owed the technical details. If you want to encourage/pressure them, contact Mint support. They’ve already said that it’s a priority.
You can use RCS to message anyone on a carrier that supports it for their device from a carrier that supports it as long as you both have it enabled. There is a setting on your phone to turn it on. Consult the documentation for your carrier/device.
RCS is a bundle of things. It’s not an inline protocol of just messages with attached metadata like SMS.
Software is one part on the phone, then you have transmission services at the network, and THEN you have metadata/status services which translate between carriers and such.
No idea how Apple is doing it, and they won’t tell you either, all they have to do is be in compliance with the protocol to make it work.
I was under the impression that the only RCS networks that still existed was Google’s Jibe and Apple’s own in house. And that RCS on android was 100% done through google messages which uses the jibe network for rcs therefore bypassing the need for carrier support. Could someone explain where I’m wrong?
I don’t know the details but both use services from the carrier. I think google hosts for the carriers but there are checks thats rely on the carrier. If you look at the details for google messages it address specific URLs based on the carrier.
For iPhone its all carrier depend. If the carrier doesn’t support it, iPhone will not have it.
To answer the last part of your post:
So far my experience is that the RCS-iMessage feature is working (or not) depending on the Apple user’s provider. I’m on Android with a “cheap” provider in Canada and RCS-iMessage work with my iMessage contacts that are on major providers but those on cheaper providers don’t work yet.
So if you are on Android and your basic RCS works you should be good.
