“It’s time for Apple to fix texting”

As someone who worked around Windows Phone and had to deal with Google's unwillingness to support other eco systems; Pound sand android.

> I'd rather live in a world with spam […]

That is a personal choice, and I choose to not have spam on my phone. Several months ago I was subjected to a floodgate of good ol' fashioned SMS spam that lasted several weeks. There was no way to stop the spam because the phone was receiving it through the legacy SMS channel coming specifically from Android devices infected with Flubot; the bulk of spam now comes from unpatched Android devices because hardware vendors stop releasing security updates after a short cycle, or due to loose default app permissions set on the device. I ended up creating a support ticket with my mobile telco and soon I received the following reply from a human being:

  What you have encountered is, as you may have guessed, not a legitimate SMS notification.
  This particular message is designed to entice you to click on a link, and doing so would potentially expose your device to malicious software.
  This malicious software is trying to target Android devices, so, if you are an Android user, you should take particular care with such messages.
  Note that you may receive this message even if you do not use Android devices - the website link is simply being sent to a number of random telephone numbers in the hopes that an Android user will receive it, and manually bypass the built-in security protections and install the malicious software presented by the website.
  In other words, if you use an iPhone, you can still receive these SMS messages (often claiming to be relating to a voicemail or parcel delivery), but there is no direct risk to your iPhone by simply receiving the SMS.  Nor is there currently any risk to your iPhone if you happen to click on the link that is in these SMS messages.
  If you use Android, you should avoid permitting your device to install any software that did not come from the official Google Play store.

> … where corporations get to decide what I run on my devices …

Corporations, such as Google, make decisions for users without getting their consent nor without informing the users. If you sign into a Google account in a web browser on your phone, for instance, the sign-in will also silently and non-consentually sign you into your Google account across all Google apps installed on the device without informing you.

The corporations, good or bad or anything in between, must be bound by the code of conduct they ought not to be allowed to get out from: must request the explicit user consent first.

In the last 6 months SMS spam has increased a lot for me. A lot of it are random messages like "I'm sorry but please don't message me again!" or "Hey, I really had a great time last night, let's make plans for next weekend!" that basically is reply-bait.

Android and Chrome too. They are products, not open source. Google uses its lawyers to jump through loopholes and lie about being open

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but with better PR

I setup a BlueBubbles server on a spare Mac and I installed the BlueBubbles App. Boom. iMessages on Android. Done.

Messaging is already extremely fragmented. BB is only the eighth messaging app on my phone. Considering getting on Beeper to consolodate this madness. Matrix/Element was too rough to utilize as is.

Almost everyone I text with is on iMessage in the US. 95% or more of my regular contacts. Many are often outspoken about their cult like allegiance to iMessage. Finally some respect.

The look on their face when I send them an iMessage from my Galaxy is priceless.

Now, nearly all of the SMS messages I get are spam. Google Messages and the phone companies are pathetic at stopping them.