Oh hell no
Glad I use GrapheneOS and don’t use any Google apps or services anymore it’s amazing how I no longer get spam calls and texts since the switch.
Same but I think it will soon not be enough. I still cant believe it’s now so difficult to not be a google product, this is a digital nightmare built by decades of unregulated capitalism. Kiss my ass GAFAM.
I mean, nothing is forcing anyone to use any specific product, and there are certainly smartphones with neither Android or iOS.
Personally, at some point I will switch from iPhone to an Android device that can work with something independent like /e/ or one of the other decent ones.
De-googling is not enough, there must be nothing to de-Google from the start.
That’s one approach but far more limited than just using a Google-free Android build like Lineage.
Don’t you have issues with banking apps then? It’s the one thing holding me back from switching, but I haven’t really done a deep dive in it.
And yet they still probably won’t allow any third party app to have access to RCS via an API. FFS.
Wish the EU would start a lawsuit against them for that. It is blatantly anti-competitive and responsible for the death of so many messaging apps.
But I guess the EU is content with non-interoperable Whatsapp harvesting and gatekeeping the personal communication of almost every citizen. Even worse than Google Messages IMO.
The EU doesn’t use SMS or RCS. The anti gatekeeper legislation requires a minimal amount of users which RCS is never going to reach.
Also, if you don’t trust RCS, I don’t see why you’d trust Google or your carrier. Google is the only RCS provider with any decent uptake and they exist purely because of selling user data. Other RCS servers has been shutting down for years because nobody used their carriers’ servers. And even if they did, the messages would be just as plaintext, unencrypted, and searchable on a whim by governments as RCS is now, because only Google’s layer on top of RCS, containing all that delicious metadata in plaintext, is encrypted. Hell, RCS is in such an unmaintained state that Google is hosting RCS for carriers because they’ve actually bothered maintaining an RCS server all these years and almost nobody else has.
WhatsApp sucks but it’s heaps better than RCS when it comes to privacy. And at least third parties can communicate over WhatsApp soon, whereas RCS is restricted to telcos.
Sounds like a potential security hole. Hopefully there will be a way to fully disable it in the OS.
Not on my devices… Eff that
