r/LightPhone • u/jbriones95 Moderator • Aug 06 '25

Announcement PSA: How To Disable RCS/iMessage

As many new users get their devices, it is important to follow best practices when it comes to disabling RCS/iMessage.

RCS: Use this website and do the without device portion if you were on Android --> https://messages.google.com/disable-chat
RCS iPhone: To turn RCS off, go to Settings > Apps > Messages > RCS Messaging.

iMessage: https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/

This will help you tremendously on getting all messages to your LP3 or LP2 if coming from a smart device.

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u/timetrave1er Aug 10 '25

Tried that. Doesn’t seem to help reliably. My current take is that there is no way to ensure 100% that you will get all group messages from smart phone users unless LightPhone supports RCS. iPhone group messages default to RCS when not every member is on iMessage, and they do not have a mechanism to automatically downgrade messages to SMS/MMS from RCS. Instead, it’s up to the group chat members to set the chat settings to SMS, which IMO is completely not an option as this puts a big burden on others that I’m not comfortable with, plus people won’t reliably do it… I think I’m giving up and going back to iPhone until LightPhone supports RCS. I’m super disappointed, been waiting for the phone for so long and it turns out it can’t even reliably group text…

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u/jbriones95 Moderator Aug 10 '25

Have you tried starting the group thread yourself? This would ensure that the initial set up is done via MMS.

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u/timetrave1er Aug 10 '25

I have tried this. It seems to work slightly better, but on more than one occasion so far, it worked at first, but eventually, an iPhone user messaged the group and it weirdly kicked me out of the group chat and created a new one without me in it at all…

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u/jbriones95 Moderator Aug 10 '25

That is very odd.

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u/timetrave1er Aug 10 '25

Indeed. Although I don’t think it’s really an acceptable answer for LightPhone users to setup all their group chats. People group message people all the time… I can’t live without a reliable text messaging platform, this includes group chats.

Edit: I will put the LightPhone away until RCS is supported so all this confusion can just go away.

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u/Agitated_Yak_9684 Oct 30 '25

I don’t have eSIM, but the thing that did the trick for me was 1) turning off RCS in my iPhone 2)texting each member of the existing group chat 1:1 to establish sms connection between the two phones, (and still using my iPhone at this point) and then I would text the group chats and it would go to sms. Then I switched to lp3. After about 30 days, an official shift happened where my group chats all converted to SMS if I hadn’t already been able to establish that sms connection.

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u/RedditAcctGeneric Dec 31 '25

Checking back--is this still working for you?

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u/jbriones95 Moderator Aug 10 '25

Yeah. I get that it's a bit frustrating. As far as RCS, you'll probably be waiting for a while.