[Bugzilla - Bug 1939366] VPN blocks RCS instant messaging on iOS 18.2

[lesleyjanenorton]

Copied over from Bugzilla [Bug 1939366]

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User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.2 Safari/605.1.15

Steps to reproduce:

Mozilla VPN turned on on my iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.2. A friend of mine running Android messaged myself and my wife (who is also using iOS).

Actual results:

My wife received the RCS based message in our 3-way group. I did not receive the message. I power-cycled the iPhone with no joy.

Expected results:

The RCS based message should have properly been delivered even with the VPN up and running.

When I turned off the VPN the RCS based messages showed up within a few minutes. This was deeply surprising.

[ValentinaPC]

@lesleyjanenorton We tried to reproduce this and we could not. We made the following setup:

• install Google Chat on 3 devices - iOS 18.1, iOS 17.6 and Android 13;
• create a group with 3 members;
• have VPN installed and ON (with or without Exclude traffic feature on) on the iOS 18.1 device;
• send instant messages between devices; All messages are received. We also tried instant messages while using google chat via web => everything works as well.