RCS messages are not working on a rooted Android phone

One of the things we love about Android is its customizability. If you’re not a fan of the version of Android your phone is shipped with, you can easily swap it out for a custom ROM. If you root your phone, you can even install third-party apps that can do things that you normally can’t. Unfortunately, if you own a rooted phone, it seems that RCS messages will no longer work for you.

There are a growing number of posts online of users with either a rooted phone or a phone with an unlocked bootloader that have trouble sending RCS messages. What’s weird about this issue is that there is no error message. Instead, the message disappears when the user taps the send button.

This is a problem because unless the user is paying attention, they might not have noticed that their message did not send. This is versus trying to use Google Wallet on a rooted device. When this happens, users get an error message that tells them it’s because their device might be rooted.

This does not appear to be a bug. Google confirmed with 9to5Google that this issue might occur because they need to abide by the RCS standard’s “operating measures”. This isn’t really the end of the world because regular SMS/MMS will still work in these situations. It is annoying because now users have to decide if they want to give up their customizability in ROMs for RCS.