Fuckin annoying tbh. Can't stand when giga corps do this and sense it's required for rcs I can't just go get a better foss alternative sense none of the people I text are tech savvy or able/willing to switch to something else and rcs is pretty essential for me knowing if someone read it or not.
If I could I would ditch all google and giga corps products but I'm way to poor to do that. And it's so ingrained into society it's hard to find anything that works with these proprietary shit.
Mainly because some of the people I know read it and don't respond, for instance my partner coming home from work and me needing something at the store and she's driving and can't respond but pops up on her messages so she knows but can't respond. It's really helpful knowing they read it then me not sure wtf is going on.
Just a scenario riddled with probably lots of flaws but hopefully you get the point.
Linux on mobile is no good, and the devices it does run on do not support the proper bands and modes for usable coverage, if the carriers even allow the devices on their networks. (A more US problem all around.)
Pinephone pro had awesome cell coverage. Better than my pixel 4 xl even. Now battery life is a totally different story. I’d last I tried was pretty awful too as phosh wasn’t amazing and plasma mobile would kill itself often. It’s been at least a year since I last used any of it though since I left it 5 states away.
Bear in mind, the signal "bars" are a relative measurement, the only way to be sure is to look at radio debug and see signal strength across all bands the phone is connected to at the time.
However, that leaves out 14,25(superset of 2),26,29,30,46,48,66(superset of 4),71.
14 and 71 are necessary on AT&T or T-Mobile respectively for low band coverage in some markets where they don't own band 12 spectrum, the others are more capacity bands on the various carriers, but with the shift to 5G, they're more important on a phone that doesn't support 5G like Pinephone Pro.