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?
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.
