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?
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.