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- Hacker News
What is the point of RCS though? It seems to be strictly inferior to Signal. It seems a Google product meant to serve Google. I wouldn't hate it if GrapheneOS would totally ignore RCS. I fail to see any value in it, but maybe I am lacking information(?)> RCS isn't an open platform in practice. It isn't even as open as SMS/MMS. It heavily depends on proprietary Google and carrier infrastructure in practice. We can start by replicating Google's approach and then we can work on only using carrier services for carriers where it's actually supported.by exceptione- RCS allows higher resolution pictures than MMS.
- It's nice to be able to send/receive photos with more than 13 pixels in them.by yellowapple
- I believe it was meant to be federated, like SMS, and then in practice it wasn't. With Signal you depend on your carrier and on Signal - with SMS you only depend on your carrier.by mitxela
- RCS's point is to deliver ads. It is its first purpose. The way I see the situation, the point for Graphene to implement RCS is to prepare for the foreseeable deprecation of SMS. Who knows when it will happen, but better start working now than wait and get stranded when it'll happen. I'm pretty sure RCS implementation will take a long while.by hollow-moe
- The point is to access an e2ee protocol bundled by default on many devices, and is cross-platform.
GrapheneOS does recommend using superior platforms like Signal, but that is 3rd party, and thus has adoptability issues in convincing people to use it. Just because better platforms exist does not mean RCS should be ignored.
- The point of the exercise is for Google and Apple to maintain control over the ecosystem.
RCS is technically superior (protocol, transport, security, all of it) but is captured from the start on the technical level by design by the big players. From the perspective of the vast majority of users who have very limited technical awareness, it was silently slipped in as an upgrade at one point or another. This means that those not adopting the proprietary BigTech solution are perceived as being difficult by insisting on using software that's now perceived as outdated or as otherwise mildly incompatible.
by fc417fc802 - From [0], it seems that RCS can use the cellular signal instead of LTE or 5G:
> In cases where RCS is able to operate over cellular networks without data, it supports messaging as well as file transfer, enriched calling, and more.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
by ebb_earl_co - RCS was DOA from day one as far as I'm concerned. The carriers being involved in any capacity deeper than providing dumb pipes alone was enough to make it pointless, but no E2E in the base spec makes it extra pointless. They may as well have just extended SMS to be more capable, because that's what they've effectively created.
- Certainly, with Opus 5 and GPT-6, modernizing or even completely rewriting self-contained, non-critical tools seems like a Friday afternoon job now. I wonder however how important this is, in the grand scheme of things. I use GrapheneOS and the bundled messaging app is serviceable. It isn't pretty, but it gets the job done.by drnick1
- They are using AI [1]. I don't think messaging app is non-critical though.by Cider9986
- We're definitely not churning out code with AI models. There's no vibe coding going on in GrapheneOS. We're carefully writing and reviewing code as we've always done. We now have additional tools to assist with it. The main way we're using AI models is for code review and helping to write a lot more tests than we used to. It's helping to improve our code quality, not reducing it. We're not trying to get things done substantially faster.
The code generated by even the bleeding edge publicly available frontier models is rarely good enough to meet our standards. AI models are creating a lot of additional work for us because of how many more security issues are being discovered in upstream projects. It's also helping us raise our standards for our own work by pointing it at that to get extremely pedantic criticism catching many things we would miss.
We've hired multiple experienced app developers who have spent months working on modernizing the Messaging app and carefully reviewing it. There's no vibe coding going on for our apps. Why not look at the actual process of porting Messaging to Compose and our code review for each incremental part of the process?
https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Messaging/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3...
by grapheneos - There are excellent FOSS gallery apps already, like the Fossify suite. Why not use them I wonder?by andrepd
- Media handlers are a security nightmare, might lead you to the right answer if it isn’t it.by DANmode
- Their license is invalid due to being GPLv3. GPLv3 cannot be included in GrapheneOS as that would necessitate GrapheneOS give up their permissive licensing.
Refra Gallery is licensed as Apache 2.0, which is a permissive license GrapheneOS can bundle in the OS.
- We're going to be forking one of them (ReFra). We want to make extensive changes and have a different vision for it than the upstream project. For example, we don't want it to have integration into services. There's plenty of room for both an increasingly different fork of it in GrapheneOS and the original project which our users will continue to use who want features we don't consider inside the scope of what we want from a local gallery app.by grapheneos
- "RCS isn't an open platform in practice. It isn't even as open as SMS/MMS. It heavily depends on proprietary Google and carrier infrastructure in practice. We can start by replicating Google's approach and then we can work on only using carrier services for carriers where it's actually supported."
Except... what carriers still remain using their own RCS carrier services and haven't been pressured by Google to adopt Jive?
by kotaKat - None except Jio in India and various carriers in Chinaby benwaffle
- Could they just do PGP over SMS, built into the default app? They have all the machinery in place to store keys securely.by il-b
- And send the content + PGP envelope over how many text messages? And for every single message?by hn8726
- twitter versions have paragraphs not threads
https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/status/2096677808424788256#m
https://nitter.click/GrapheneOS/status/2096677808424788256#m
https://bsky.app/profile/grapheneos.org/post/3muun5c4fdc2o
Secure paste:
https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/status/2096685327020933355#m
https://nitter.click/GrapheneOS/status/2096685327020933355#m
by Cider9986 - I believe this is the planned gallery app. I've already been using it: https://github.com/IacobIonut01/ReFraby goda90
- Just tried this out. I may soon be cancelling by Google Photos subscription...
- Our plan is to fork ReFra and drastically change it. We have a different scope and requirements for it. ReFra will still be useful for people who want features we don't plan to provide. We've considered trying to do it as an ongoing fork and making upstream contributions which we started on but it likely isn't practical. We haven't fully decided on this.by grapheneos
- I hope they replace the AOSP keyboard with FUTO keyboard. I'm mostly fine with the other stock apps, but that keyboard was the one thing I absolutely had to end up replacing due to its jenky behavior.by ravenstine
- Probably never happening in the next millennium. GrapheneOS has a gripe against FUTO because it is tied to Louis Rossmann, which dared to challenge GrapheneOS's social skills in the past.
- Why not Unexpected Keyboard?
- They cannot. The license FUTO uses is not open source and is incompatible with being bundled with GrapheneOS.
- I wish Futo had the ability to use a typing heat map for more accurate predictions like SwiftKey. It constantly suggests "AMD" when I am trying to type "and". I have fat thumbs OK! I don't even have the caps on and I RARELY talk about AMD. It's just the one thing I miss. I do find the predictions generally less accurate as well, but perfectly usable.by Geezus_42
- I use Gboard with the network permission disabled. It works well but I hope they have a better stock keyboard, I haven't found any others that don't annoy me in one way or another.by broodbucket