Using RCS with Google Messages on GrapheneOS

cb474

MetropleX Thank you for the link to the posts on Twitter about RCS. It's helpful to see all of those comments together. However, with all due respect, there is not much information there, especially regarding the problem of some users being stuck unable to disable RCS, because of how it breaks group messages, but having RCS not work properly on their carrier.

Instead, those posts contain repeated assertions about how RCS works on Graphene except on T-Mobile and AT&T, which I believe downplays the problem for reasons I won't repeat since they've been said so many times. There are some comments about RCS not being the best solution for privacy, which is beside the point of the problems many of us have with just needing functional carrier based messaging. There is a statement about a future Graphene native RCS apps, but that sounds like a very long term project.

And then there is this statement on November 25 of last year:

Google Messages RCS should work on all carriers other than T-Mobile and AT&T. We need to implement a toggle for granting what's required by Google Messages for the current version for those carriers and their MVNOs.

Followed confusingly by this statement on December 29 of last year:

Google Messages requires extensive privileged access to provide RCS with certain carriers which is why it doesn't work with AT&T or T-Mobile. Being able to give Google Messages highly privileged access is something only a small number of people want.

I'm not sure what is going on there, but those two statements seem to contradict each other.

I'm really not trying to be disrespectful to the devs. But I don't see anything that acknowledges the specific problem of those of us with broken group chats if we disable RCS, because T-Mobile and AT&T aren't supported on Graphene, and so being stuck with hacky workarounds with old versions of Messages that could stop working at any time. We've been in this situation for almost five months. What does Graphene and the devs suggest we do?

ShoulderSurfin

aoude .. the biggest problem I have is iPhone users that are .. "I use iMessage" and refuse to use anything else except maybe WhatsApp.

cb474

Turtacular Are you also on the Signal forums? Not that it's a great solution, but their forums allow messaging.

Do you mean this forum: community.signalusers.org. I'm not on it, but I could create an account. It also looks like the privacy guides forums allow messaging, if you're on that: discuss.privacyguides.net

Turtacular

cb474 I'll reach out on PG since you already have an account there.

Gramsci

MetropleX Thanks -- I fully agree that (i) the releases and public comments by the project provide adequate information on the topic and (ii) stating the dev team has been inactive/inattentive with respect to RCS is completely inaccurate and counterproductive.

bebop10

Hi, I'd like to give my data point/experience; hopefully someone finds it helpful. I am on Google Pixel 9 Pro XL and have ATT. I have tried every solution in this thread but as of right now RCS does not work. I tried the method of downloading an older version of Google Messages and it worked for awhile but then just stopped one day and has not worked since. Right now when I check the status of RCS, this is what I see: "Status: Trouble connecting. Awaiting retry... Details: Status Code 3200. Status details: Please wait, activation is ongoing. Carrier: AT&T". I am on the latest GrapheneOS version (I know it is not Graphene's fault). And now I've given up on RCS. Hopefully, in the future it works, but I am slowly trying to move people over to Signal which is incredibly difficult.

MrRoboto1212

bebop10 now I've given up on RCS. Hopefully, in the future it works

Same boat, but T-Mobile (direct, no MVNO). Tried 15-20 solutions, and none of them have worked for me for some reason. RCS worked fine, and now Etouffee will not turn true no matter the version. I've stopped caring for now. The likelihood of someone intercepting my phone specifically and grabbing my SMS messages is pretty slim considering the rural area I live in.

I'd rather not put in a mountain of effort and time to either 1. do the repetition every 36 hours or 2. have it break once again a month later and now I'm back at square one and did all of it for nothing.

Prioritization for issues by the team has been talked about a bunch in this thread already, but I'll reiterate: For how privacy and security-centric GOS is as well as claims to be, you would think RCS functionality would be towards the top of the bug fix list. - Not saying I don't appreciate all of the work the team does, but this point has been made before in the thread.

Other than the RCS stuff, I'm loving GOS. Thankfully RCS isn't a must-have for me like many others.

litlelilim

The 36 hour reset has turned to more like 24 hours DX or maybe this update broke something. Feels like its been breaking sooner than 36 hours for a while now.
(T-mobile, Pixel 10)

cb474

litlelilim For me it's consistently remained at 36 hours. Although I stopped using 20250311_04_RC01 as the second version to get Etouffee to "true." I've been trying progressively newer versions to see if one lasts beyond 36 hours (with no luck). I've tried: 20250319_02_RC02, 20250326_00_RC09, 20250402_00_RC02, and 20250409_01_RC01. They've all gotten Etouffee to "true," but also all reset at 36 hours.

If you're not experimenting like me and you're not already doing the following, I think it probably makes sense, after you use 20241120_00_RC07 to get RCS "connected," to then just update to the current Play Store version to get Etouffee to "true." I assume it will reset at 36 hours. But at least then you are using the most current version of Messages with all the security updates and bug fixes.

sabhain

cb474 have you tried to just stay on 20241120_00_RC07 instead of upgrading to newer versions?

ax898

I have a pixel fold 10 with tmobile (directly, no mvno). And unfortunately I have to return this phone and switch back to my older samsung phone as RCS is a must-have to communicate with my friends and family.

That being said, I spent some time looking into it. I have some observations.

I created a custom build of GOS and added a current version of Google Messages as a privileged system app. I confirmed it has all the permissions it specified. Yet I still ran into the same issue of not being able to connect RCS. It gave the same logcat error of not finding any phone numbers. I assume the issue is somewhere with unprivileged google play services. I thought about installing that as a privilege service, but at that point I may as well just run stock os. So I didn't try it.
I read through a lot of this thread and there's a lot of discussion around single registration model vs dual registration. The logcat messages say (at least for my tmobile sim) that single registration is not allowed. This is verified by looking at the effective carrier config dumped by Google Messages (via debug menu) and looking for the "ims.ims_single_registration_required_bool" key. It was false for me. So from my understanding that whole aspect shouldn't play into this at all. It's still using a dual-registration model but something else has changed.
The MicroG project has had a bounty for RCS support since last year. The bounty has grown to 15k USD so far, https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/issues/2994. A number of people have been working to reverse engineer how google messages performs its provisioning and auth, but there hasn't been any success so far. There are concerns that there is hardware attestation involved.
Recently there was an article in Hacker News about RCS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46687841 There are a lot of interesting comments as well and is a good read for those interested in RCS. I can't verify the content of the comments, but they seem to indicate this issue is a much more involved issue than simply granting permissions. Again, there are a few stating that hardware attestation is required.

I really hope GOS devs are able to get this running. I'd love nothing more than to switch back to Graphene OS. But it appears google has really locked this down. There's nothing open about RCS. In actuality they own the entire stack. It's a proprietary product masquerading as an open standard for marketing purposes.

cb474

ax898 That's very interesting and a little depressing that it's so complicated. I saw the thread last week on Github with the bounty for solving the RCS problem on Microg. It seems like there was a lot on enthusiasm for a while, but their efforts eventually got stymied and not much has happened for a while, despite the large bounty.

I do wonder, if there are all the constraints you suggest on getting RCS working. Then why are people able to get around them by using old versions of Messages? It seems like the issue is more in the app, than in the backend or play services. Yes? No?

WestQuester

cb474
Yeah, my Pixel 8 on Mint Mobile running 20241120_00_RC07 is Etouffee provisioned true, but I couldn't get it the exact same thing to work on my wife's Pixel 7 pro. No idea what the difference is.

ax898 This was very helpful. Thank you for posting.

ax898

cb474

Unfortunately I don't think anyone outside of google can answer that question. If I were to speculate, I'd probably say the older app version is using an older api version that is more permissive than the current version.

Google Messages (at least for my tmo sim) is using tachygram as the backend protocol. Which is googles proprietary messaging service and not gsma rcs. In this world, anything goes.

I could see a world where the service for initial provisioning is distinct from the service handling refreshes. If the initial provision service accepted connections from the old version, but the refresh service didnt, you could definitely end up with the current 36 hour limitation.

Google can deploy or rollback changes to these services whenever they wish. Perhaps that week long outage a few weeks ago was result of this.

But again, this is all speculation. Your guess is as good as mine.

DeletedUser638

anorak This has not worked for me, though I didn't run the adb shell commands since it is almost certainly unnecessary.

cb474

sabhain This doesn't work because for most people 20241120_00_RC07 doesn't provision Etouffee to "true." It gets RCS "connected," in the RCS settings, but you can't actually send and receive RCS messages without Etouffee "true." So you have to update to a newer version. That's why it's a two step process.

This has been discussed a lot in this thread already.

As far as I'm aware only two people have reported having 20241120_00_RC07 provision Etouffee to "true," but there don't seem to be known steps to get this to work and others, myself included, can't get it to work.

sabhain

cb474 I've spent zero effort trying to determine Etouffee status or any of that. I only tried to get functionality, and then once I had it .. I sat tight.

What I have observed {hoping to not disturb the RCS gremlins by posting this} is that I get the "Connected" with the 2024 version. I needed to reboot a couple times to get to that. I did the March 2025 load per all the instructions a couple of times and was content with the need to repeat it. One time, however, I got interrupted and didn't load the 2025 flavor and went about my day.

Then, it seemed to function well .. with a couple of caveats:

#1 - The first message you send to someone who would ordinarily be on RCS sometimes won't send, so just let it (that particular message) flip to SMS/MMS. Once they get it and reply .. RCS with them then works. It's not been that way with all my contacts .. but it happened with enough that I felt it was a trend, so I just let it flip to SMS if it was taking a long time.

#2 - The read receipt is not always getting flagged. Meaning, I will be messaging with someone back and forth, so I know they're reading my messages, but the double icon thing doesn't always go blue.

Otherwise, I've been able to be added back to group RCS chats without incident, and RCS message with both Iphones and Androids. It's clearly not 100% .. but it works, and I haven't touched the setup in at least 2 months.

Regrets as I sort of stopped monitoring this thread once I got off the 36 hour cycle. I'm pretty sure I'm on the Pixel 7a, and i let everything else stay updated and current. Good luck to all.

anorak

I can't provide any more information on how to get provisioned on 20241120_00_RC07 but I will add that after a GOS system update and phone reboot, RCS is still connected over 48 hours later.

ZenIsFluffy

Yep my PIxel 8 Pro on TMO has only been staying registered for about 24hrs now. Similar to what others are experiencing. It's not a deal breaker for me. But it is frustrating losing my work and family group chats. (Especially recently with the snowstorm here in the US), but I will manage. Here's hoping someday we have a fix! I'm going to leave it disabled for a while.

Should also add, I tried grabbing the Carrier Services app (com.google.android.ims) from Google Play. It installed but was disabled. I will poke around with ADB and see if I can enable it + give it permissions. Maybe it will do something to help on RCS. Doubtful, though!

ZenIsFluffy

ZenIsFluffy I lied when I said I was giving up. I have no idea what exactly I've done, or if it will continue, but RCS has stayed active for over 48 hours so far on T-Mobile for me. On the latest version of Google Messages from the Play Store.

I installed Carrier Services from Google Play. It installed but was disabled. The enable button in settings did nothing. I enabled it using ADB pm enable com.google.android.ims
I uninstalled Google Messages and cleared its storage. Installed the 2024 version mentioned in this thread. Allowed the permissions and set as default. Then I opened it and signed into my Google account. Finally rebooted my phone.
After that, I updated to the latest from the Play Store. I don't recall what it said in settings. The Report RCS option in Debug menu now says "Report Multi SIM RCS Connection State" despite only having one SIM.
This gave me an idea. I have a Verizon eSIM from US Mobile. I transferred it to my Pixel 8 Pro. Rebooted.
Suddenly both SIMs were connected, and I could RCS message with both of them. It's been 48 hours, so we're moving into day 3 with T-Mobile being active. Coming from having to reactivate every 24 hours, that's an improvement.

I'm still holding out for a future where this will work normally. But I'm doubtful this industry standard Google has co-opted into their own monster will be slain anytime soon ;-;

cb474

sabhain So RCS works with some of your contacts but not all of them? And, after installing 20241120_00_RC07, with group chats someone else has to add you back to the group chat for it to work?

sabhain

cb474

As best I can tell it works with all my contacts. It's just that the first text I send to a contact fails over to SMS. Once they respond, it seems to flip back to RCS and we carry on as before.

And yes, having someone in a group chat re-add me has worked, and those behave as expected thereafter.

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