Samsung is shutting down messages and pushing the use of Google’s messenger. Are there alternatives? I don’t want to give Google that much personal info to train its AI or to give the regime an avenue to getting my info.
Samsung is shutting down messages and pushing the use of Google’s messenger. Are there alternatives? I don’t want to give Google that much personal info to train its AI or to give the regime an avenue to getting my info.
RCS and iMessage are essentially just separate internet based messaging apps like Signal or WhatsApp. iMessage doesn’t even require a phone number if you’re only messaging other iMessage users. The only difference being, they CAN message phone numbers, but if it isn’t “their” app, they’ll fall back to using SMS. iMessage has implemented RCS if messaging someone using Google Messages, but it is not encrypted, so essentially the same thing as SMS from a privacy and security perspective.
As far as understanding it, both carriers and Google/Apple need to pay for infrastructure. For carriers it is cell towers, for internet based stuff it is servers. Carriers need you to pay for the infrastructure because they offer a single service (kind of, all 3 sell your data). Google & Apple make all kinds of money off of you in many ways, and getting high adoption for their apps makes them more powerful, especially since they have closed standards while SMS is open.
It’s not quite the same as SMS, RCS is at least encrypted in transit so it requires the cooperation of the service provider to tap.