I simply can’t understand why Google is incapable of building a good quality alternative to iMessage over the past 15 years.
FB and WhatsApp have done it.
Signal has done it, slowly but surely.
FB and WhatsApp have done it.
Signal has done it, slowly but surely.
You also had Google Voice, Google Wave... and so on.
Google is where projects go to die.
Google wants your messages to feed their ad serving, which is their actual business. Messaging is just the crap they give away to feed their ad serving revenue machine.
Technically Google Messages is E2E encrypted, provided you stay one the happy path, which is harder than it looks, since they don't allow anyone but themselves to play in the happy path.
When I switched to iOS, that experience gave me a special appreciation for how smoothly iMessage/Messages works.
But that's selective recall too - for YEARS iMessage was horrible. You had an iOS device but no longer? Good luck getting any of your friends messages who were still on iOS.
Apple ended up having to build a portal just to allow users to properly de-register their numbers from iMessage so they could receive messages from Apple users again.
Happy-path use of Messages, when I switched, was much smoother.
I haven’t tried to switch from iOS to Android so I don’t have that experience to recall.
They had other messaging apps that were maybe ok, but I've never known anyone who used them, and whoever did was thrown off when they made 999 other apps.