floracapsule I was thinking of getting into the RCS action on Google messages since I can't get people into signal and I have a lot of friends with iphones. After reading many of the posts in this thread I am now thinking that it is super unreliable and annoying to maintain an RCS connection. I know the graphene team has made things better recently for people who want to use Google messages. So what's the verdict. Does it work well for most users and I should dive in OR is it overall problematic and I should avoid it? I'm on a pixel 8 and Verizon prepaid if that matters. Thanks.
Honestly, I would not mess with RCS on Grapehene. It is fundamentally broken. Even for people where it is working better on carriers like Verizon, that is because those carriers are apprently still having Google run more of the backend. But the situation with T-Mobile is apparently the future. T-Mobile, as I understand, has done what Google wanted, which is run more of the backend themselves. This is causing the requirement for special privileges in Messages that makes it not work or fail every 36 hours if you get it working by installing an old version of Messages first. Supposedly other carriers will eventually be going the way of T-Mobile, so presumably Graphene users on these carriers will eventually have the problems that people on T-Mobile have.
@GrapheneOS has said they are looking for a solution for T-Mobile users, but providing toggles so people can enable the special privileges Messages needs is not "the Graphene way." I guess if they were willing to do that, it would be the quick temporary fix. I don't know when better work around will come along. On Github the privileged permissions issue causing the problem for T-Mobile users has been labeled a feature request, not a bug. This does not to me imply urgency in addressing the issue. In a way, all this reminds me how much I don't have control of my own device and that I am in many ways beholden to the Graphene devs, just as I would be beholden to Google if I were on stock Android.
Moreover, who knows when Google and the carriers will do something that breaks RCS with Graphene again. It was working well for me for a year, until the current problems arose at the beginning of September. It had gotten to the point where I was going to suggest to my partner it would be okay to enable on her phone. I'm really glad I didn't do that.
The biggest problem is that once you enable RCS and have group chats that get turned into RCS group chats, there's basically no going back. When RCS breaks, those chats will not fall back to MMS, the way individual threads fall back to SMS. The only solution is to get everyone in the chat to delete it on their phone and then create a new chat. I'm not even sure this will work to retroactively go back to an MMS based group chat with that specific group. I only know it was necessary just to get a working RCS group chat with the same people. This would have been a nightmare for my partner who has many large work related group chats (where people probably won't want to delete and lose the whole history of the chat). For myself, I'm now stuck endlessly doing the every 36 hour work around with an old version of Messages, just so I can keep existing RCS based group chats working. If those group chats would just fall back to MMS, I would happily disable RCS as this point.
So I just don't know at what point I would trust RCS on Graphene again. It doesn't seem like it's a goal of the project to treat RCS as basic required functionality.
If you really want RCS, I think the best option is to go back to stock Android. It should work okay there, especially on a Pixel device. It may be what I end up doing, if there is no reasonable fix from Graphene coming. Honestly this is the first thing that has made me feel like Graphene is not practically very useable in a basic way. Like it or not, apparently RCS is the future of carrier based texting. I think Graphene needs to treat this a necessary basic functionality.