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RCS UK Carrier Support for iOS

The supervisor at a call centre knows about as much as you or I.

Apple are being what? They have left the decision to enable RCS up to individual carriers. EE/BT have decided to go for it from day one (or technically earlier than that as it was enabled in the betas). Others will make their own decision.

The EU or UK authorities won't give an F over this. If anything they'll be happy that the option is finally there and iMessage's monopoly as the built in messaging protocol is over - if the carrier decides to enable it.
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Over at Macrumors, it is mentioned that UP "2.4 [is] from 2019"

"The Chinese regulation that was rumored to be the catalyst for them to implement RCS requires version 2.4 at a minimum so it seems they did exactly what was necessary."

"2.7 is the first spec update to add new frontend features like reactions, inline replies or undo send / edit messages."

"UK updates looks like Vodafone is awaiting approval from Google to enable RCS on iOS 18. On the subject of O2 and RCS in a mega thread related to the iPhone 16 and Watch 10 they said "We are working to ensure that RCS is available for all our customers as soon as possible" on the subject of Three, they said they are "working with partners and hope to bring this service to our customers soon!"

 
Interesting that BT mobile has had RCS added to its carrier profile.
 
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well they are just EE and as of October 2023 stopped accepting new customers
Yeah perhaps so, but they don't have features like Visual Voicemail for example. And also, if they want everyone off it, why would they add features such as RCS. Surely it's an incentive to move to EE which is something they'd want knowing BT.
 
I don't always trust the Apple Carrier Support page (KB108048), Vodafone UK have had iPhone Visual Voicemail (not the recent similar Live Voicemail feature) for a few years now but Apple still don't list it 🤷‍♂️
 
Reactions don't work for me.

I think the way reactions are working between iPhone and Android on SMS/MMS/RCS2.4 is a second message is sent quoting the previous message. such as "AbsolutelyRidiculous liked the Message xyz", then a text parser on the receiving side is adding the reaction to the original message.

Of course this will all change if apple move from 2.4 to 2.7 in future.

note: iOS 18 may have broken this text parsing since you can now add any reaction to a message.
 
I think the way reactions are working between iPhone and Android on SMS/MMS/RCS2.4 is a second message is sent quoting the previous message. such as "AbsolutelyRidiculous liked the Message xyz", then a text parser on the receiving side is adding the reaction to the original message.

Of course this will all change if apple move from 2.4 to 2.7 in future.
Yes that's absolutely how it works, and how it works over SMS too.
Androids translate this message into an actual reaction but iPhones just show the message.
1000112494.webp
 
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I think the way reactions are working between iPhone and Android on SMS/MMS/RCS2.4 is a second message is sent quoting the previous message. such as "AbsolutelyRidiculous liked the Message xyz", then a text parser on the receiving side is adding the reaction to the original message.

Of course this will all change if apple move from 2.4 to 2.7 in future.

note: iOS 18 may have broken this text parsing since you can now add any reaction to a message.

That's correct and was actually added by Google to their messaging client before IOS got RCS support to allow reactions to SMS. Basically IOS replies with the "xyz liked whatever" and Google Messages sees this and converts it into an actual reaction.

There does not appear to have been any cooperation between Apple and Google on this, Apple added reactions to SMS as a message and then Google decided to process these back into actual reactions. :)
 
That's correct and was actually added by Google to their messaging client before IOS got RCS support to allow reactions to SMS. Basically IOS replies with the "xyz liked whatever" and Google Messages sees this and converts it into an actual reaction.

There does not appear to have been any cooperation between Apple and Google on this, Apple added reactions to SMS as a message and then Google decided to process these back into actual reactions. :)

that's correct. The issue is some people are finding some reactions not appearing, this is probably because iOS 18 can now send any emoji reaction, and the Parser on Android can't interpret the text description of EVERY reaction back into an image/emoji. Google had to only parse 5-6 different ones before. This is unrelated to RCS and can happen on SMS too. It's such a kludgy system.

Like I say, this will all change if apple move from RCS 2.4 to 2.7 or higher in future, amongst other improvements, including E2E encryption once it works in the way apple want it to.
 
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Weasel words from the man at Google.

"We're proud to have offered end-to-end encryption (E2EE) in Google Messages with hashtag#RCS "

Yes Google Messages has E2EE between other phones running Google Messages, but that's not standards compliant RCS. Yes Google messages supports RCS (without encryption) on networks with RCS support. However the two are not the same thing.

Google's disingenuous statements about RCS are starting to come home and bite it. :)
 
Weasel words from the man at Google.

"We're proud to have offered end-to-end encryption (E2EE) in Google Messages with hashtag#RCS "

Yes Google Messages has E2EE between other phones running Google Messages, but that's not standards compliant RCS. Yes Google messages supports RCS (without encryption) on networks with RCS support. However the two are not the same thing.

Google's disingenuous statements about RCS are starting to come home and bite it. :)
It'd be lovely to have E2EE as an RCS standard.
 
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