My VPN doesn’t work with RCS, which is, at best, annoying. It automatically connects when I’m on untrusted WiFi. Hopefully anyone messaging me has the “fall back to SMS” option enabled, but I’ve learned that several don’t. I learned that because I didn’t get texts from them until after I left work, (and disconnected from the work WiFi).

Even worse, group texts don’t have any option to automatically fall back. So I don’t receive any group texts at all while I’m at work, but the senders have no way of knowing that. In fact, there have been several instances in recent memory of friends/family being left out of the loop on plans, because they weren’t receiving RCS for some unknown reason, which meant they missed an entire group text conversation.

My father’s phone is particularly bad about it. It’s an iPhone, and he’ll just randomly stop receiving RCS until he toggles his cell service off and back on again via airplane mode. But who the hell would think to toggle airplane mode, when there is no indication that they aren’t receiving something? It’s a catch-22, where he doesn’t get any notification that something is wrong, because he doesn’t know he’s supposed to be getting notifications at all. There’s no way for him to prove a negative, so the only way for him to reliably get RCS is to toggle airplane mode every few minutes. Which isn’t really a feasible use-case scenario.