TL;DR
- Users who have rooted their phone, have their bootloader unlocked or are using some custom ROMs report that their RCS messages are not being sent, even though RCS shows them as connected.
- The Google Messages app does not show any error messages when blocking RCS messages of these users and does not send the messages out as SMS or MMS either.
- Google famously campaigned for Apple to include RCS messaging in iMessage but is now blocking it for certain Android users.
I’m not saying what is good to use. I’m saying what is used. Everyone from grandma to the local store. If you want to survive communicating, you need to use WhatsApp everywhere in the world except the idiotic USA.
I personally use other apps like signal and telegram, but I also have WhatsApp because I have to and it is convenient enough. I’m ok that Meta gets a bit of data showing the amazon delivery driver and I shared a message at a certain time. It’s useless data.
I’m trying to get friends into using manyverse myself. I’m trying to get away from corporate owned social media as much as possible, which is why I’m typing this right now on Lemmy.
You can try but rarely is it successful unless you’re a super popular influencer. If Mr. Beast came out with a platform and said use it, he’d get a million users in a day, all of them evangelizing to their friend groups and maybe it would take off. Otherwise you’re just going to get ignored unless it’s easy enough.
WhatsApp is easy enough and good enough. It is not the best solution, but part of its allure is that it is owned by a big corporation. Governments and billion dollar companies use WhatsApp as their backbone because it is big. They aren’t going to roll their own.
And when someone is completely against WhatsApp… Why? If it’s because you hate Zuck and Meta, then fine. Personal grudges are fine with me, but not a valid reason to dislike the platform for everyone, just yourself. The data that they get is who you are sending messages to, when, and the overall size. Everything else can be blocked. The content of the messages is secure unless you decrypt and backup elsewhere. One of my WhatsApp numbers is on a number from a VoIP line not even tied to my name or ID in any way. Meta collects information that I am talking to hundreds of delivery drivers arranging my deliveries. I’m ok with that.
They don’t have any of my info. I don’t have any social media accounts apart from Lemmy and a now retired reddit. Works well enough. And the older people can use it easily enough. Getting my mother to switch to telegram? Isn’t happening. But WhatsApp… She’s down for that.
I was just talking about my friend group which is quite small. I don’t really want to hear from people outside of that.