Hi @fisher99,
There’s nothing for us to support or work on. RCS is an over-the-top, third party messaging function that just happens to be built into a standard texting app.
We do not officially support it because, like other third-party apps, it does not use our service. If it stops working, there would be nothing we could do to fix it, because it’s not a service we provide.
RCS uses data, like Facebook messenger, Whatsapp, Google Voice, etc. The data it consumes is not “messaging” (SMS or MMS) and so is not included in your unlimited Talk and Text. The data it consumes comes out of your purchased data. Images and videos are not compressed to the same degree as they are for MMS, so if you are sending a large number of images or videos, you may see quite a hit to your purchased data.
When moving from one phone to another, you need to disable RCS on the phone you are leaving behind, or your messages will continue to be delivered to it. Google offers instructions to do so, both when the old phone is still available and when it’s not, here: https://messages.google.com/disable-chat
We’re seeing various situations, particularly when changing phones, moving SIM cards between phones, or on a phone provisioned with a CDMA SIM card, where RCS does not correctly send from the Republic Wireless number. While we may be able to help you walk through steps to clear up this oddness, it is not anything we can resolve through programming and development, because RCS is not using our messaging infrastructure.
When we say that we do not support RCS and we advise members to disable it, we’re not saying that you’re going rogue or violating our terms and conditions by using it. We’re saying only that if you use it and have issues, our Help Team and engineers would not be able to expend resources to resolve the issues for you.