Smartphone Required (digital exclusion of people without smartphones)

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This community collects stories, cases and situations where people without smartphones are excluded from society.

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SMS 2.0 (RCS) only available exclusively to Google patrons -- at least in my area. (fedia.io)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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RCS seems to be replacing email-SMS gateways. RCS is supposedly an open standard, but apparently if you do not have Android 8.1 or newer, you cannot use RCS to send an SMS in Belgium.

In principle, iiuc, you should be able to use a desktop app or browser to send an RCS msg. But for some reason it’s a shitshow.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

@Doodle Jump RCS has potential, but its limitations, like requiring Android 8.1+ and poor integration with desktop apps, make adoption frustrating. It needs better accessibility and cross-platform support to truly replace email-SMS gateways.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Can you elaborate on the limitations? In Belgium it seems more like a shitty deployment, but I don’t see what blocks a community FOSS option. Is it just that no one has been inspired to make an open source tool, or are the carrier’s APIs proprietary, secret, or restricted?