Only because nobody but carriers have bothered writing RCS capable apps, and of course carriers lock their software to their own network
That’s not RCS’ fault either, and I don’t see why they’d need Google services to be honest.
I’d love to see an open source RCS app. Implementing it is probably a massive pain (hundreds of pages of specification) but the core of RCS is a bunch of HTTPS calls transferring XML documents and text. RCS is not like SMS where you need to interact with the modem driver to send or receive messages.
The biggest challenge will be authenticating, for which you may need to reverse engineer some code. The spec has definitions for this (send an HTTP request to config.rcs.mnc$MNC.mcc$MCC.pub.3gppnetwork.org) but that won’t work when it comes to registering with Google’s servers, which are what most people use. Of course you can use Google’s RCS servers without a Google account, so the authentication process should be relatively straightforward.
Only because nobody but carriers have bothered writing RCS capable apps, and of course carriers lock their software to their own network
That’s not RCS’ fault either, and I don’t see why they’d need Google services to be honest.
I’d love to see an open source RCS app. Implementing it is probably a massive pain (hundreds of pages of specification) but the core of RCS is a bunch of HTTPS calls transferring XML documents and text. RCS is not like SMS where you need to interact with the modem driver to send or receive messages.
The biggest challenge will be authenticating, for which you may need to reverse engineer some code. The spec has definitions for this (send an HTTP request to config.rcs.mnc$MNC.mcc$MCC.pub.3gppnetwork.org) but that won’t work when it comes to registering with Google’s servers, which are what most people use. Of course you can use Google’s RCS servers without a Google account, so the authentication process should be relatively straightforward.