Submitted 13 hours ago by Sunflier@lemmy.world to [deleted]
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.
I miss the days when signal would do sms. then I didn’t need to deal with the rcs bs and could just use signal for everything
Absolutely, all they needed to do was mark it witj a red flag on the profile pic to highlight insecure messaging.
There is Fossify Messages. A caveat. Fossify is a fork of some apps that were abandoned or had the license changed. After that happened, they were unmaintained for a while. That appears to have changed somewhat, but it has been 2 months since the last update on F-Droid.
has signal gone back to sms or am I still expected to somehow evangelize all my contacts into also using it
I wasn’t even aware that removed sms support. It’s been ages since I used sms.
If you don’t evangelize all your contacts into using it, you wouldn’t get any benefit from using it for SMS anyway. That’s they removed SMS support, it confused people about the privacy of SMS messages.
Does that carry over all the conversations? Does it go to the phone numbers directly? Or, do they need Signal too (like woth TeamSpeak or Discord)?
I would recommend you update the post title to clarify you are looking for an app that handles SMS and not just any regular messaging app. Signal requires the other user to also use signal.
I never figured how to sms through signal, works great as a whatsapp alternative though
It was removed a few years back
Might I suggest a VoIP provider? It costs money, yes, but since you are using your real number on VoIP, you can routinely switch carriers to get new customer deals. For example, I pay $15/month for unlimited data and $5/month to JMP.chat. JMP gives me unlimited text, 2 hours of voice, and voice is less than a cent/min after that is used. I was paying $40/month before for unlimited (still capped after 10 GB). JMP doesn’t require personal information (though they will know if you port an outside number and your phone number is public no matter what, so…). You can lie about your name and address to Mint (though I recommend putting a hotel address near you to comply with regional taxes for your payment plan. They’ll know your approximate location anyway).
But why would you REALLY do this? Decoupling the phone number you actually use from your SIM card/eSIM is powerful. Everyone who wants to know your phone number can, especially if you live in the US. People search sites are crazy. Even barring that, you give it to the government, job applications, credit card companies, banks, random restaurants, tech companies (even if you are privacy conscious now you probably gave it to Google, Apple, and Microsoft at one point). Your SIM shows your approximate location, which can be legally pulled by the government. Stalkers, PIs, and bounty hunters can and do bribe carriers for this info as well. Unless you have a degoogled phone, your texts are likely being scanned by Google or Apple (look into the way they are blurring nude photos in texts unless your age is verified and asking you if you’re sure you want to send or open them).
VoIP protects you from this, and also prevents targeted SIM swaps.
Downsides: some websites won’t accept VoIP numbers. One government website even wouldn’t allow me to verify with my number that was previously not VoIP, but was the only number I had used, and therefore the inky way to verify. If you talk on the phone a lot it can get pricey. But you should really be using something like Signal for anyone who you frequently talk to. SMS, RCS, and even iMessage are all terrible for privacy & security, and should essentially be treated as a public social media post that you can’t delete.
My phone uses an alternate OS that does not implement RCS at all. I get & send SMS or MMS (multimedia message, i.e. pics, docs etc) to one or several recipients.
So, from my POV, the alternative is just fuck Google and use SMS.
You can use other RCS client through play store just search RCS . Their are not many as of right now
As far as I can tell that’s still impossible, so they are just lying or it’s a different RCS (like retail custom solutions). Also that search shows SMS apps that don’t mention RCS.
Many seem to have ads too.
What I never understood: you have to pay your carrier for SMS services, but RCS is free (just need internet, mobile or wifi) like iMessage is also free? Rght?
Free, sure. There is only one app that does it, with huge dependency on Google and/or carrier (whoever runs the servers), which could just… stop working one day, like it did for me.
Google would never just give up on a product that people love!
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.
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.
This is at least the second time they’ve made me run to another messaging service for no discernible reason, the bastards.
I couldn’t find it saying it supports SMS, does it?
I couldn’t find it saying it supports SMS, does it?
Steve@communick.news 12 hours ago
There are no real alternatives to Google Messages. There are lots of SMS apps. None of them support RCS, because Google won’t let them. So any alternatives will be a downgrade at lest in that regard.
I’ve used most of the SMS apps out there, none are nearly as nice a Google Messages. It’s a shame, but it’s true. I’ve kinda settled on Textra for now, but I’m always looking for something better.
BruisedMoose@piefed.social 7 hours ago
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sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 hours ago
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Squizzy@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Theybstole QKSMS reply in notification tray feature thats all I remember. Better times.
sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyz 12 hours ago
RCS is just read receipts right? is there anything you’re really losing out on?
Candice_the_elephant@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
RCS is encrypted in transit & preserves image & video quality that MMS can lose.
Grntrenchman@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
Internet-routed media transfers, bypassing some (very) shitty filtering done by carriers. Most will compress and downscale any media sent via MMS. A friend didn’t have RCS until recently, and I always had to remember to send links and not actual pictures because they would always recieve unreadable garbage if I let the carrier transfer it. But really, ANY other messaging app solves this… Signal, Telegram, Discord, even Steam Chat will blow the pants off MMS.
Witchfire@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Emoji réactions
amino@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 hours ago
E2EE
fizzle@quokk.au 11 hours ago
There are also no others that have a good web ui, Google Messages web ui is pretty great honestly.
That said, they recently rolled out a requirement to log in to to your google account to use that and I think that might be the line I refuse to cross.