Is it currently possible to read the inbox of RCS messages?

Question

i'am currently developing a Flutter application for Android, and i found myself in need of reading RCS messages received through Google Messages. I have already spent some time searching for an answer on Google, but sadly with no result.

So the question is, is it currently possible to read inbox of RCS messages at all, using Flutter/Kotlin, or whatever?

Thank you so much for your time.

With best regards,

Jindřich Kovalčík.

Answer 1

This answer is complicated. There are no public APIs for RCS, however, from what I can tell, on my phone, RCS messages are stored in the mmssms.db file with all of the SMS and MMS messages. RCS messages appear to be saved in there the same as MMS messages, but I don't believe there is a way to filter them for RCS messages only. So in theory you should be able to read them if you have SMS read permissions.

That being said, this may be unique to how Google Messages behaves with using Jibe servers, and may or may not change in the future, and also may be completely different on your phone.