It's that time of year again, folks. As the tech world has sights set on the latest Apple event that is producing the new iPhone 16 as we speak, we all know we'll be seeing slightly improved phones, some impressive specs, and a few 'innovative" or "magic" new features from Apple. For me, however, the...
Are those carrier apps FOSS? Are they on F-Droid? How do you install them? If not, it’s not really any better.
Just because no open source developers have bothered to implement a standard doesn’t mean the standard is closed. Anyone with interest could set up an RCS server, connect an RCS app (by manually specifying the base URL or by hosting a private 4G network) and start hosting their own RCS infrastructure, though you’d probably face difficulty trying to connect your open source network to the big ISPs.
OpenIMSS is working towards a fully open source LTE (and up) network that also sports RCS support. The voice/video calling features are already supported by opensips. I believe OpenIMSS and the underlying base software is run through docker. It’s a rather niche piece of software, as you have to be an MVNO or a carrier to connect to the public RCS network. Nothing prevents the open source community from running their own network, though; that’s how Matrix and XMPP work, after all.
As for RCS clients, https://github.com/Hirohumi/RustyRcs seems to fit the bill, though I haven’t run it myself to see how complete it is. There’s no pre-built APK but if you have Android Studio and Rust on your machine you should be able to get it running in no time.