Iphones and Androids Trying to Send /e/OS RCS messages (and failing)

willowec · November 9, 2025, 3:35am

Hello! I have a Murena Fairphone 6, and I’m loving it. However, when people send me messages from both IOS and Android, they default to RCS (which /e/OS does not support). For private messages, this just means that it fails and automatically re-sends as SMS, so I recieve it eventually no problem. However, for group chats no such failure/re-send behavior seems to exist, not for Android users and not for IOS.

As such, when folks create a group chat with me in it and send messages to it, on their end it looks like everyone received the message but on my end, I never see anything. This has caused me no end of headaches for the last couple of weeks. The problem persists even if I have everyone delete the group chat and then have me create it on my /e/OS Fairphone.

Does anyone know a solution or workaround? As it stands, it looks like I simply cannot be in texting group chats. Which is quite debilitating.

aibd · November 9, 2025, 6:49am

Not a solution but this micro-G issue may be of interest

github.com/microg/GmsCore

[BOUNTY] RCS Support [10000$]

opened 06:02PM - 01 Aug 25 UTC

unpluggederan

enhancement bounty

**Feature Description:** Google Messages is currently the only widely available …RCS client for Android. When attempting to use Google Messages with microG, users typically encounter issues such as: A persistent message stating "RCS chats aren't available for this device." An indefinite "Setting up...", where authentication of the phone number never completes. Recent developments suggest that Google Messages no longer strictly requires device attestation for RCS, making it possible to enable RCS functionality with microG. However, it appears there's a missing component or necessary adjustment within microG itself preventing successful setup. Google has effectively monopolized RCS, despite it being a GSMA-backed standard intended as a successor to SMS. Unlike SMS, RCS has become a closed ecosystem under Google's control, restricting open interoperability and limiting choice for users and developers. RCS has seen significant adoption, particularly in North America, and recently Apple added support RCS, further increasing its importance as a messaging standard. **Requested Solution** Provide a solution that enables Google Messages to successfully connect to and use RCS functionality when operating with microG. Acceptable outcomes include: - A fix or enhancement to microG itself, allowing seamless RCS connectivity. - Compatibility with recent versions of Google Messages is desired. Solutions that only support a specific Google Messages version from the past year will be awarded half of the bounty amount. - Modifications to AOSP or additional permissions changes are acceptable. - The solution must work on devices with a locked bootloader. Limitations Solutions relying on rooting, Magisk, or similar root-based tools are not acceptable. **Additional Information** GrapheneOS users, who leverage a Play services sandbox, have reported success with enabling RCS by applying permission changes. Although their setup differs from microG, the discussions that were taken in this thread (especially in the last year) may offer valuable insights for this bounty: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/1353-using-rcs-with-google-messages-on-grapheneos

tcecyk · November 9, 2025, 11:28am

off-topic trivia

that bounty attracted a (sad) LLM PR back then, like sendRcsMessage() { sleep(); return true }; style - doing absolutely nothing. Hallucinating an rcs interface to where the actual work would take place

as of now ~~there’s no~~ (apparently, with RustyRcs there is) foss RCS implementation, the only workaround is convincing the group to use any common messenger - but that you already know.

willowec · November 9, 2025, 1:34pm

off-topic trivia

It was an interesting thread to skim - classic LLMs lmao

I have successfully gotten one group chat to work, I just have no idea how I managed to make it happen. The chat contains 6 people including me, and all the others are using IOS. At least some of them are well updated past IOS 18, and as far as I know they do have RCS enabled. I can’t figure out why that group chat works, but the one with my parents and sibling doesn’t (despite them also all using IOS) and the one with my roommates doesn’t (one android, one iPhone, and me)

So, it seems like there is some way to get it to work, I just have no idea how to make it happen consistently

tcecyk · November 9, 2025, 2:46pm

rcs bounty thread

ah, I never got back to that thread after the first bogus PR (there were more wth) - has serious back and forth rcs debugging between phhusson and benwaffle resulting in some experimentation repos and ben getting quite far in replicating a rcs register flow. phh maintains an opensource ims package so he has credentials, bw contributes to quik, works for cape.co .. am I hopeful?

I’d expect “rcs fallback sms-retry” to be all carrier side logic