Are there any apps that support RCS that aren’t made by Google or a crappy cellular provider (ie: bloatware Verizon apps)?

I appreciate the features RCS has, but I’d love to get that without sending it all to Google with a “trust us” approach to backdoor keys. The documentation I looked at indicated that anyone could setup an app to support RCS and communicate with Google’s RCS users, but I can’t find any apps that actually do that.

Also would love to be able to message from multiple devices using RCS, which Google has working in their web app.

  • umami_wasabiEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    Signal is great, but it was unclear if I would be able to self-host my own Signal server if I wanted to support the public network and provide redundancy to my local LAN and connected networks.

    You can’t. Signal’s server is closed source. Only the clients are open.

    I just discovered Signal open source the server. Please kindly disregard what I said. I had the old news in my mind (maybe).

    • BananaTrifleViolin
      8•1 year ago

      Signals server software is open source. I suspect you mean the main signal network is closed and centrally controlled (it’s not federated basically) - anyone can run a private signal server (and network) but not as a node within the main signal network is my understanding.

      • ChewyEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        Maybe they meant that at some point a few years ago Signal didn’t update their public open source server code for neraly a year or so while simultaneously rolling out new features.

    • MikelOPEnglish
      0•1 year ago

      I thought it was something like that. What I really want to see is an open-source version of Briar.

        • MikelOPEnglish
          2•1 year ago

          I just checked and you’re right! I looked into Briar a while ago and ignored it because I couldn’t run the Briar-Mailbox program on Linux.

          • @AbidanYreEnglish
            1•1 year ago

            I don’t think it runs on iOS yet either, which may limit who you can contact with it.

            • MikelOPEnglish
              1•1 year ago

              I have an off-grid Linux box that hosts a local Wi-Fi network and some communication and entertainment apps. I want to host a chat service for asynchronous off-grid comms. Briar looked like the perfect option if I could just add the mail-box to my Linux box.

              Simplex looks like it might do something similar, but it doesn’t look like it does comms over direct Bluetooth.

              • @AbidanYreEnglish
                1•1 year ago

                It doesn’t. But you can run your own server pretty easily.

                You could also check out Jami. It doesn’t do direct Bluetooth but it works on a lan if you run your own dht… proxy? bootstrap server? It can also do local discovery over udp, but I haven’t tried that yet. I think async may chew up battery though

                Maybe your own matrix server?

    • @mashbooqEnglish
      0•1 year ago

      To add to what others have said, Signal’s server code is open source, but they took the anti-spam module closed source last year