November 18, 2025
I’m in over a month now with non-working RCS on my iPhone 15 Pro. Apple blames the carriers, the carriers tell me it’s not them (mostly T-Mobile since I have good contacts there). They tell me they can’t really do anything about iPhones not working on RCS, go back to Apple. This is what it looks like:
In short, it’s probably Apple or Google and there’s zero accountability from Apple. I have AppleCare+ and really hoped they’d actually try to troubleshoot and fix this rather than waste my time working around it (in a stupidly expensive way for me and Apple).
My background #
I’m OS agnostic as much as possible, I daily both Android and iOS devices and previously used BlackBerry 10 and Harmattan (Nokia N9’s OS). If Windows Phone was still around I’d probably still be running that as well. If it’s possible to gather information on how all this works under the hood, I can and do. The OnePlus Android devices I’m running are my own LineageOS builds.
Previous history fixing MMS failures for Carriers/Vendors #
I’m also happy to blame carriers and vendors: I previously brought and helped resolve an issue with Verizon Wireless on LineageOS phones due to how MMS messaging works. Here’s my initial submission, their developer LuK found a better way to go about it, but it at least started the ball rolling: https://review.lineageos.org/c/LineageOS/android_device_oneplus_sm8250-common/+/333379
In short: When you received a picture message on Verizon in the past their network would notify your device that a new message arrived. When the device went to grab and download the image, it sends something similar to browser User Agent, called a UAProf. This is a link to a file that describes what the phone can handle, so a smartphone gets a high resolution image and a featurephone gets a lower resolution one. Verizon’s management sucks and decommissioned the domain that hosts all the UAProfs for their devices. Of note, Verizon is uniquely affected by this issue, T-Mobile doesn’t care what UAProf a device advertises, it’s not required on their network. I haven’t done enough testing with AT&T to answer whether it’s an issue for them.
MMS Failure Demonstrations #
This is a former link to a Verizon UAProf for a Samsung device: http://uaprof.vtext.com/sam/i515/i515.xml
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