If you are willing and able to enter a partnership like Samsung, you can do it fully (including encryption support etc).
Samsung can interoperate. We cannot. We cannot enter into partnerships with Google. We are people, Samsung is a massive corporation. You understand the difference, right? Google will not let us access their servers. They're not making it difficult, they're not making it possible at all.
you don't just need to support the protocol, you need a server to communicate with your client, and Google is not here to federate its RCS service with Bob's summer Github project.
Matrix is the federated messaging network. It's also end to end encrypted, although people have pointed out issues with server security and with metadata—which is why they're working on peer to peer tech.
RCS is not similar to any federated technology at all. It's operated exclusively by Google in the US and most other countries. The technology was created, from the ground up, for carriers. But even carriers couldn't actually make it work in practice, so they asked Google to take over. It's a fucking albatross. We, as a society, need to drop it.
Google is the exclusive RCS provider for all carriers in the US and many other countries. The desire for an AOSP android API is for developers to be able to write clients the way they do SMS clients, not to replace Google's servers—that's a pipe dream. IIRC, Google actually helped Samsung develop RCS support in their app. I'm not sure why it's so difficult to implement.
There is an RCS test app, we could theoretically modify that, but I guess nobody has for some reason. I don't particularly want people to use it, Matrix makes so much more sense.
It's kind of open. It's pretty much open for carriers to implement on the server side, and for OEMs to develop on the client side. There is an open source client in AOSP's RCS Test App, but for one reason or another, as far as I know nobody's attempted to implement it in an actual usable client app. I don't believe there's a server reference implementation. And, in the US, all the carriers' RCS services are run exclusively by Google, so there's no real point in attempting to set up your own server. Apple might be able to navigate the politics with carriers and with Google to make something work, if it wants to, but it's really not a standard for us to play with.
Use Matrix Instead.
I disabled the Google App back when "Google Now" was still a thing. Remember when it would give you directions to get where you were going after you were already on your way? I'd be on the train, it'd tell me "oh, you wanna go somewhere? Get off the train, take a cab to the nearest train station, get on the train..."
They removed everything but sports score tracking, I kept using it for a while, and then I realized that I could just fucking use my browser for search, since that's where I wanted to read search results anyway. And that's what I did.
They're going to keep doing this again and again, making their app worse and worse.
No idea why I would ever want the Google app back.
If you are talking about something like openauth (where you sign into some random website using your Google account) yes, but your base identity is still tied to Google. So if Google goes down, you lose your google account, and you also lose your account at every other website you logged in to using your google account.
Yeah, essentially that. The back-up plan in case your instance goes down is a separate issue, my main plan is just that users shouldn't need a new account for each fediverse application they want to try, considering one account is already able to make any kind of post.
couldn't your instance just serve your identity to other instances?
I don't think the fediverse needs more platform alternatives.
What I really think we need is a way for people to use one fediverse account to log into different interfaces, so people can try out a new app / interface without starting a new account. Many apps can do this, but web apps generally cannot, they're generally tied to an instance.
well, yeah, because it's private messaging, it requires encryption and things like that. Really, fediverse instances should ideally incorporate matrix chat in some way or another, but that's not exactly trivial.
why?