It’s not the messages I worry about so much — it’s the contacts.

I can’t use WhatsApp because on iOS it asks for access to your contacts, which I refuse to give. (Facebook already burned me once, there.) So in WhatsApp, all my contacts show up as numeric phone numbers, and there’s no way to change that, so it’s basically useless to me.

TBH all your contacts who use WhatsApp already uploaded your name and number combination to Zuck's server...

A data protection consultant once told me in theory I can sue my friends for violating my data privacy by doing that...

That's indeed the part I like least about WhatsApp: The fact that it both requires phone numbers as identifiers, and insists on full phonebook access.

At least on iOS 18 it will become possible to provide partial phonebook access, as far as I've heard.

Easier to discriminate against anybody who buys an Android, I guess. That's totally the better solution.

It's not discrimination to say "the message you just sent is green because it went over SMS (and now RCS) and we can't verify the E2E encryption, deliverability, etc like we can with iMessage".

In my view, it starts being a problem as soon as people start complaining about the person "causing" said lack of functionality, rather than the companies at fault for it. (Everybody who believes that unencrypted RCS, after a literal decade, is the best these two giants could come up with is deluding themselves.)

I'm fortunately too old to ever have experienced this myself, but so I have to rely on others' observations for this.

That said, I wouldn't quite call it "discrimination" yet, but it's certainly uninformed, targeted at the wrong entity, and on top of that is at least a bit icky given the quite large difference in retail pricing of iPhone and Android smartphones.

The companies did it, but also, the buyer had choices.

Why the past tense? Every US iPhone user can install a third-party messenger on their phone today if they wanted to!

The reality is just that people only install new apps if the preinstalled ones don't do the trick, or at least only if most of their friends already have too.

So in my view, the entire problem is that apparently no regulator has been considering it a problem for the better part of a decade that Apple is effectively running half of the country's communication infrastructure without being regulated anywhere close to the way landline or mobile carriers are from a competitive and interoperability point of view.

But this seems to already be changing; Apple definitely didn't implement RCS out of their strong desire for openness and interoperability. I just wish they'd picked a better protocol/system.

I don't want to use a third-party messenger app because I don't want to deal with separate apps, and none of them are very good anyway. FB Messenger is close, but it doesn't work well with non-"friends".

On the large scale, I agree. We have telecom regulations for good reasons.

Ah, right, I forgot that nobody in the US uses Instagram or Facebook (which are both not end-to-end encrypted, like SMS and RCS, and unlike WhatsApp).

I don’t use Facebook, and I’m not required to use Facebook or anything adjacent to it when I chat with my friends who do

Maybe you don't, and I respect that, but I wanted to push back on GP seemingly responding on behalf of all Americans, somehow ("we prefer to keep our messages out of the hands of Facebook" is evidently not true).