Google Messages RCS issue with Firewall has been fixed, says company

Gone are the days we solely depended on postal services. When you write someone a letter, the reply takes significant time to reach you. And, it made the life difficult for many. But, you don’t have to do it anymore.

In this world of technology, it only takes seconds to receive a response. We now have instant messaging applications, using which anyone can get real-time replies. The messages are not restricted to texts only. You can communicate with each other using images and videos.

First proposed in 1982, Short Message Service aka SMS doesn’t come close to the IM services. Not only can you use emojis, but also you don’t feel like it’s happening real-time. Owing to the cellular network dependence, it is impossible to push an SMS from an area of weak signal reception.

That’s how RCS was born. Stands for Rich Communication Services, RCS incarnated after the efforts of a group of industry promoters in 2007. Nonetheless, it didn’t come into the limelight for a decade. In 2018, Google announced they’re working with almost all the major carriers to adopt to RCS.

By mid-2019, the brand started rolling out RCS to selected users. For now, you can only use it via Android Messages and Samsung Messages. Inside those apps, it comes with the name Chat. And, you will find it resembles almost all the major instant messaging applications.

So yeah, RCS is the new SMS. It bears many features the latter lacks. Nevertheless, the users had been facing a weird issue with the same. They couldn’t send or receive messages when they were on a Firewall-protected Wi-Fi network (Have a look at a concern below).

Hello,
Android user here from Canada. Since RCS rollout to our company pixel phones (pixel2), our users are not able to use “chat features” setting on their phones while on company wifi network.
This feature works correctly when on Mobile data or other public wifi network.
But when enabled on the phone while phone is connected to company WIFI, the status is in state:
Status: Setting up…
Connection in progress
This state persists for as long as the phone is on company wifi network. As soon as wifi disconnects and mobile data kick in, we connection instantly works.
We need instructions for our IT network department as to how to configure firewall, which connections and ports to open in order for this feature to work.
We tried enabling port found on one of the other threads here (TCP/50672), but this did not fix the issue.
Note: This issue has very bad side effect. When the connection is stuck in “Setting up”, this causes some sort of loop that drains phone battery in matter of hours (confirmed via testing and monitoring). And although we can ask our employees to disable this feature or not to use company wifi, we cannot do the same for any visitors. We don’t want to be responsible for someone connecting to our wifi to find himself in the situation running empty battery in mid day. And since RCS enabled becomes pretty much standard, we cannot ignore this issue.
Source

We were able to spot a few more user complaints on the official forum. Even Reddit wasn’t devoid of such worries. For all of them, Firewall blocked RCS. You can read another post from a user below.

Guess what! A couple of months down the line, the Mountain View tech titan has finally resolved the issue. They have migrated Messages to Port 443 in order to eliminate the problems caused due to Firewalls.

Given the fix just came out, no issues have been popped up so far. We will be updating this story if the issue persists or another one surfaces. So, don’t forget to stay tuned to this.

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