The number of Europeans in here acting like What’s App, which might as well be Facebook Messenger, is some sort of high road is hilarious.
Yeah I still don’t get why people use or promote WhatsApp. If anything, use Signal or even Telegram
Telegram is worse than even Whatsapp, since it’s not even pretending to be end to end encrypted.
The real choice is signal or threema.
Or something equally secure and also decentralized like Briar or Cwtch.
I have thought this for years. Everyone slimes on Americans for using iMessage and asks who no WhatsApp? Same reason I’m not on facebook, don’t use a meta quest, and don’t use instagram.
While Whatsapp is not great, the problem with iMessage is that it is (was?) locked exclusively to the apple platform
Yeah, thats the main issue with imessage (and it still is) and if your switching from IOS to android, you have to start over on all of your messages unless if you figure out a way to back them up.
It’s not a good solution, but from a meme in c/selfhosting i learned that through the price of a used mac mini (about $120 at that time) you can selfhost iMessage on mac, and selfhost a 3rd party free software called Bluebubbles, which, as far as i can tell, uses Google and Cloudflare services to convey the iMessages to your Android phone.
I’m sure it is a privacy nightmare. But the shunning for not having iMessage from my own family was getting to me, real or imagined.
That is just so overly complicated, i would rather just start them over🤣🤣
I’ve never had a problem starting over. Used to custom ROM hope back in the day and start with a fresh Android release on the cyanogenmod nightly releases.
There is nothing in my iMessage that I would be sad to lose moving to Android.
What do you mean exactly start over? If you don’t have iMessage, you can’t talk to other people with iMessage.
Sure but if you want it to work wirhbpbine number you have to have a phone talk about every seven days.
WhatsApp does not commit the sin of not having cross platform support at all, it is genuinely the most pratical and easy to use proprietary IM solution besides the network effect
People will always trade privacy for ease of use.
Telegram are you kidding me?? Telegram is a thousand times worse than WhatsApp pal
Not even close lol. The sooner we stop using meta shit the better.
While I agree with you that Meta must die, saying that Telegram is any way better than WhatsApp is, I’m sorry to say, either delusion or extreme ignorance.
It’s not encrypted. At all. The company has full access to everything on it.
It’s also russian and actively used to spy on users by the russian FSB (FBI equivalent, kind of).
To be more accurate: Telegram is totally unecrypted by default, unless one chooses to enter a “secret chat”, in which case you use its proprietary encryption. As such its better suited for public group chats and not for anything that needs to critical privacy, but to say it has zero encryption options is not correct.
As for “Russian”, while its CEO was born in Russia, and made his cash to initially fund it from the Russian social media VK, he has lived outside of Russia for a decade now, and Telegram is head quartered in the United Arab Emirates, with servers installed globally.
It is, and he has, but if you’re following what’s going on in the RUvsUA war, you can see that the authorities are absolutely using Telegram to identify dissenters and leaks.
Hate to be supporting Telegram but I recall there also being some sort of Ukrainian Telegram bot meant to be used by Russian soldiers to safely give up and be taken to the other side, using the “share location” button. IDK how that’s meant to work now that you need Tor tunnels to browse fucking Telegram in Russia, though. Phone roaming or something? Point is, both sides are trying to use it for their advantage.
You can’t use Signal or Telegram because your contacts are on WhatsApp, but yes WhatsApp might as well be called Facebook Messenger
Your contacts weren’t always on WhatsApp, stop using it and if they want to talk to you enough they’ll join a better platform. Maybe just keep sending them links every day about how trash WhatsApp and Meta are until they get the point lmao
Already did that, and after two years I’m back on WhatsApp. Everytime you do something at least a bit social it will be a WhatsApp group, you can refuse of course, but believe me, unless it’s really close friends no one is going to put the extra effort to reach you.
Nah, Signal or Threema
And Briar or Cwtch
The inertia is real.
I tried to switch over a group of friends and got rebuffed because one of them really likes Whatsapp’s transcription feature. Signal doesn’t offer it. Nobody else cared.
I work with a lot of European teams and they always make me use WhatsApp. I hate it.
The number of Eastern Europeans pretending Viber is everything is insane
2 weeks now on Graphene. This is what a phone OS should be, simple, boring, juste the basics without a shit-ton of bloatware and spying crap.
I hope it’s functionally installable on other versions of android
I read installable and instable, I was like 🫠
I hope it can finally bring this piece of shit messaging protocol to Linux phones so my friends and family know when I read a message
Just move them to signal :)
i can barely get them to move off of telegram 🥀️
My immediate family is on signal, and has been for a while, my parents and my sibling are now on signal which is nice!
I have a few others I communicate with often I wish I could get them over because I hate using sms, even rcs.
You can always use Waydroid
If you phone is X:
https://github.com/1999AZZAR/use-waydroid-on-x11#installing-a-nested-wayland-compositor
The waydroid devs said not to use way droid for anything security related. This is bad advice.
I’m not seeing that anywhere, got a link?
Search their github issues for “security”
you do realise that rcs only works on unrooted stock google-certified android with a locked bootloader? that’t the whole reason grapheneos is making their own FOSS implementation
Everything they make is open source, so even if they don’t officially support it, someone else will probably fork it and upload it somewhere.
I’m sure it will install, but if it needs some system level thing it won’t actually work. It depends how they implement it.
Nah, it would be insecure (still more secure than defaults and way too secure for most users)
Literally everyone should just use Signal. I really don’t understand why we all don’t.
Because Signal 1) doesn’t ship as default, and 2) requires a login process.
You’ve already lost the majority of the general public with the former. On top of that, the Venn diagram of “people who go through with logging in” and “people who already know about Signal” has significant overlap.
But the same is true for WhatsApp…
You see, the problem is that whatsapp came very early, when it released it wasn’t shit and it provided free messages which in many european countries wasn’t a thing yet, everyone hopped on it and used it as main communication platform, this created a big ass network effect that is nearly unescapeable, even today i can’t escape from it because i am the only idiot who uses Signal and Matrix and no one wants to leave whatsapp because they already have an account and all their contacts
Was true (except for trustworthy encryption). Then network effects took over and peer pressure did the work.
It could happen again in a good way this time, but the resistance will be stiff.
deleted by creator
Used to shill XMPP but everyone should use Tox at this point ngl.
- No registration
- No phone number
- It’s impossible to send anything unencrypted
downside: Sharing IDs is annoying (QR code if you are on mobile? idk haven’t tried)
updownsides:
- It does not concern itself with backlog storage (unsent messages sit until at least one device of both parties are online)
- It does not concern itself with file storage (sent - poof, gone)
- Dropping SMS support made sense from a security standpoint but slaughtered adoption
- When the central server eshittifies, we’ll all have to switch again.
I don’t even understand how dropping sms support improved security, was it the code required for making it work (I know sms is fairly little on android and remember mms is a pain in the ass) or just because “confusion” about having insecure and secure communications right next to each other?
The latter. I think it was a huge mistake. Now the phone numbers just worsen privacy.
Because Signal requires a phone number.
But so does SMS, so signal is just a straight upgrade as an alternative.
Signal is pretty great and I use it at least a little myself, but it’s not necessarily perfect. The big elephant that’s always been in the room is its dependence on one backend and the fact they’re based in the US.
Different threat models call for different approaches, and every option has tradeoffs.
Because people stick with the default. There was a time people I know would try different messaging apps but after hangouts got canceled nobody wants to bother.
I use Signal via Molly and as @lka1988@sh.itjust.works points out, there’s friction in getting users to on to it. But also the UX isn’t even as good as WhatsApp let alone Telegram.
what ui? there is a namelist, a call icon, a message icon. what in the hell do you need?
one thing missing is support for Android Tablets, its pissing my GF off on her Samsung Tablet and yet it works for my mother on her ipad ffs
That’s a legitimate concern. However, the Android tablet market is a fraction of a slice of the pie. Meanwhile, iPads are the defacto “standard tablet”. Even my little kids just call their Kindles “iPads”. I don’t even bother correcting them, because honestly who fucking cares? At this point, “iPad” just means “tablet”.
I used signal offical app and honestly it has a good UI and UX, what does it lack? What seems bad? I don’t understand
Telegram’s UI fucking blows. I use Telegram on occasion, but only to follow a handful of software projects that inexplicably only distribute release notes via Telegram 🫥
Signal’s UI is exactly as one would expect. Open it and you have a list of chats. Tap a chat and it opens. Done.
Telegram has been winning awards for their UI since inception. WhatsApp has basically mimicked it. Signal has gone in its own direction which suits 40 year old geeks who use Lemmy, but the actual masses…
Come on, can we at least pretend to have the self-awareness to know what we like isn’t conducive to how the masses use these apps.
It’s like how people on Reddit use to try and say that front facing cameras were useless and so they want small phones without them. 😮💨
I’m honestly confused as to what UI differences people care about between Signal, Telegram, and Whatsapp. All three have a list of chats as the main view, with a search field or button, and a chat screen with prior messages on top and an input field at the bottom.
I do not pretend to be a UX designer and would appreciate an explanation.
Because signal dropped SMS support.
Still a corp and you can’t host it right? Wouldn’t it be better if everyone used Matrix for all communication
For those who got too excited by the title: read the original messages from the GrapheneOS. RCS de-facto is not an open technology, there’s a massive amount of work and multiple steps are needed to get anywhere near the proper independent implementation. It’s gonna be amazing if the GrapheneOS team pulls it off, but don’t get too excited about the release dates and its availability for other systems (e.g. Linux).
To be honest, I’d rather they use the effort elsewhere (as a very happy gOS user). The number of people on gOS who wouldn’t prefer Signal (without phone number rego) / Threema etc. is probably vanishingly small, but that takes going up against the incumbents with heavy resistance.
There’s only so many irons you can keep in the fire. That said, gOS devs (sans drama) are freaking awesome, and seems to keep growing in number, if they can pull it off it will be a true coup.
That’s true on one hand, but on the other there are also family and friends with who we still want/need to communicate via the “normies” protocols, and it’s better to do it without explicit spyware on your phone (aka Play Services or Whatsapp). So yeah, it’s an absolutely ungrateful work what they’re doing, but huge thanks to them for that.
As a basic sms user, is RCS the reason my conversations now sometimes get flooded with messages like, “so-and-so loved this”?
Yup
If you’re on Android, the Textra app handles most of the emojis on messages without needing RCS. Sadly it still doesn’t work with reactions to images yet.
Looks like scamware, only available on Play Store, and it doesn’t look like it’s open-source. I wouldn’t go near that.
Why? You aren’t confortable with a random guy developing an app having access to your conversations or to your 2FA codes from your bank?
TBF I used it for a couple of years, tho I don’t anymore. It’s a good app. Didn’t get robbed or murdered.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! I’ve been busy, ok?!? Now if you could stop moving, I can’t aim!!
Quik, an open source SMS app on FDroid, handles this already without needing a specific OSes RCS.
Unless there is something fundamental thats wrong with Quik and its development, I dont see why one would be excited about another vendor specific solution. Quik works on any degoogled android, not just Graphene.
I might try Quik again at some point, but to be honest I don’t care enough about sms messaging apps to go beyond the default one usually. I think I remember I stopped using Quik because at least at the time it didn’t have link previews, which is a hell of a lot more convenient to me than emoji react buttons.
iMessages does that when it falls back to SMS.
Google Messages works around it by manually parsing the message and adding the emoji to the message like iMessage does.
So Apple caused the problem, and only Google Messages accommodates for it afaik.
In a proper RCS chat that won’t happen as Apple and Google will send the reactions natively.
I wish we could simply get everyone to switch to text-based messaging systems that don’t suck.
I miss when Jabber was more common.
Excellent! Since Signal removed SMS support there’s no trusted app supporting old SMS and encrypted messaging on one UI
SMS is not to be trusted because it is plain text and full of vulnerabilities.
I know. But I still need it whether I want it or not.
I have a limited data plan, so the only way I can communicate when I’m not on WiFi is by good ol’ fashioned text and call.
The chronophobia induced by realising ‘those damn kids texting all day’ has become ‘old fashioned SMS’ is more than I expected. I remember when that shit was 10p a go!
however SMS doesn’t need a data connection, just a mobile signal, so as an emergency backup type of communication it’s great
That old behavior of Signal confused what was encrypted and what isn’t.
It really didn’t. Blue messages encrypted, green not encrypted. There was nothing confusing there
I agree, it was a huge bummer that they removed it. Their reasoning didn’t quite make sense for me.
I think a huge selling point was that it wasn’t one more app to message with, you could just replace your SMS app and if your contacts also had Signal, your messages would be encrypted. Very simple proposition.
What the fuck is RCS?
Ok so RCS is basically WhatsApp/Signal but Google(+Carriers) but retarded:
- The client software is propiertary and screws you over when you e.g. root your phone
- They finally realized that E2EE exists - 10 years after everyone else implemented it
- You can’t view the docs unless you’re a Google Partner
- The protocol seems to be a mess
- You need a mobile data connection for it to work (sometimes not)
- Knowbody knows how the server software works or can be hosted, everything is “Google Jibe” or needs to connect to it to work
whatsApp […] But retarded
Huh? That’s literally a Meta platform… Doesn’t get much worse than that. I’d sooner just use SMS
What’s app is owned by Mark Zuckerberg and Meta.
- GOS will code a proprietary client, like Whatsapp? I doubt…
- It’s E2E with 3 ends, the 3rd one being Meta, like Whatsapp?
- There is no doc available, like Whatsapp?
- The server is as closed as one can be like Whatsapp?
Frankly, if one actor gets in RCS and gives me confidence it’s going to be secure and respect our privacy as much as can be, it’s GOS.
RCS might be below some other standards, but phone messaging is still a thing. GOS is not about idealistic massive adoption of Signal, it’s about what’s needed in the day-to-day life, but with privacy and security.
I think it’s texts for people who don’t use Signal or WhatsApp, so… nobody I have ever met, I guess
It is literally a standardized communication protocol. That is what iMessage is
iMessage is anything but a standardized protocol with crossplatform support
what did you drink? are you ok?
Huh, I just assumed it was built on the protocol but I guess not lol
You’re correct. EU users didn’t adopt, or at least continue to utilize, SMS based messaging like users in the US did. This is not a problem for anyone using web based messaging like the ones you mentioned.
I’m quite surprised by the reaction this comment has received, are Americans genuinely still using SMS? Don’t they need to have group chats, send pictures, transfer files, make audio and video calls, or make use of encryption?
I don’t know for sure but my guess is that a lot of US users thought you were wrong because they don’t know that SMS / MMS is essentially dead in the EU. It’s still the primary text based communication method in the US.
MMS supports all the things you mentioned (albeit in a shittier way) except encryption. RCS adds a new layer that is more like Signal in that it supports encryption and emojis and a few other things but it is controlled by Google and there are no open source alternatives currently.
Does MMS support all that? From my brief research it basically just sends an SMS with a link to the media to be downloaded by your WAP browser, so while a client could implement group chats etc I’m not aware that it’s actually built in. Not that I can check, my network doesn’t even seem to support MMS anymore!
Yes we mainly use SMS and then if both users are on compatible devices they’ll switch to RCS or some other protocol. But most of my texts including spam messages are just plain SMS.
For phone calls i make a phone call.
it’s trying to extend the sms/mms system
Replace, not extend.
extend only, it will fallback to SMS, and guess what? who the fuck even uses SMS and MMS nowadays?
Isn’t that a possible reason why my my
e/OS/phone can’t send text messages, nor call, some numbers. (In France, where many people use meta shit like whatsapp and facebook messenger, and won’t be interested in another messenging app like signal, delta chat, etc)it is as convenient for the users as sms/mms, unlike signal/telegram/whatsapp
I am suprised that it took this long to find someone that mentions how RCS will need to fight the network effect of pre existing IM apps thanks to no one using SMS in 2026 (for good reason, it is genuinely garbage and unsafe)
Many people still use SMS in the US because it is (almost) universally free as opposed to mobile data which is not.
carriers on brazil have unlimited mobile data for certain services, including whatsapp, for only 2 USD a momth
It’s the next gen sms, with features to bring it closer to parity with popular messaging apps
while still being horrible
Very much needed.
This has been missing for yearsI switched away from e/OS for this very reason. As much as I hate SMS based communications it just isn’t practical to ditch them completely in the US. It’s simply too widespread.
you got only RCS available, no old school SMS? I was relieved I exited the Google’s RCS.
SMS/MMS was working but only with individual conversations. Any group messages would fail. RCS is supposed to fall back on MMS when some recipients can’t use RCS but something about the handshake was broken and it never would do that. I spent two months trying to sort it out and I never could.
Im having this very same problem on e/OS. Just moving everyone over to Delta chat cause i got tired of trying differernt apps, and trying to work out that same issue with SMS not working properlly.
I’ve been using JMP.chat/Cheogram for this personally
Aw helllllllll yeah 😎
It’ll be a while I’m sure, but I’m here for it 🙌🏾
A big hurdle with RCS was carrier adoption, at least in Asia.
I wonder about two things:
- Would Graphene team’s implementation be usable on other devices that are less fortunate to be supported by the OS?
- Would this be a drop-in replacement or would Graphene team need to work with carriers so that their implementation actually work?
On a tangential note, I would really like to read an in-depth analysis of how RCS had such a botched up implementation, which it has still to recover from almost a decade later.
The adoption is nowhere close to what it should have been, and instead it is now more associated with spam than actual communication. The Wikipedia entry does cover a lot of aspects, but it doesn’t explain how it went wrong.
biggest hurdle after that is that it still sucks ass compared to e2ee IM apps, and no one uses SMS nowadays anyway, so we barely benefit from pre existing SMS users that would be able to seemslessly swap to RCS because SMS users don’t really exist, it basically has to face against the network effect of Whatsapp, Facebook messager, iMessage and WeChat, just like Signal has too [face the network effect] while being less secure than Signal and having less features
Everyone i know uses SMS/RCS or iMessages.
I only use SMS to msg my mum and get 2FA stuff.
You’re worried about the network disadvantages of only reaching people who have cell phones?!
no one should feel forced to have a phone number
Not remotely what I said.
I think a source of confusion in this thread is that people in North America actually use SMS to communicate with other people, and in most of the rest of the world, that’s uncommon. I haven’t received an SMS from a human on my European phone number in over two years, and the last one was someone verifying my Signal safety number.
There’s a dominant messaging app in most other regions which everyone uses unless they’re a luddite or a free software absolutist. Whatsapp is the most common, but others are dominant in certain regions.
I’ve had my GV number as my primary for ~16 years. I’ve been on grapheneos for about a year now. Maybe I should actually pull the trigger and migrate my number to my provider and finally get RCS. All the better if GrapheneOS provides native support.
Yep, I always laugh when I think that Google managed to successfully bully Apple into supporting RCS, yet Googles own service, Google Voice, doesn’t!
I’m in this same boat… FOMO is hitting me hard.
I think GV is the heaviest anchor holding me to Google right now… :-\
I’m not sure you’d have to? You should be able to just download the app and register your # and they’ll just start coming.
This would be great. Definitely one of the few missing features.
