From forbes:
My advice remains to use WhatsApp over RCS for cross-platform messaging until such a time as RCS adds full encryption between iPhones and Androids. Once you step outside Apple’s or Google’s walled garden, the security protections fall away. With good secured platforms available, it’s not worth taking the risk.
There are other fully encrypted platforms as well—notably Signal, the best of the bunch, albeit with a much smaller install base. Even Facebook Messenger now fully encrypts messaging, making standard SMS/RCS texting even more an outlier. Signal and WhatsApp also enable fully encrypted voice and video calls cross platform, and so they should also be your default choices given this FBI/CISA warning.
Ironically, Apple’s iOS 18.2, due this month, will enable iPhone users to change the default messenger on their devices from iMessage. Timing really is everything.
There it is again. It’s nice that they mention fully encrypted with signal but again failed to realize that:
RCS < WhatsApp < Signal
I do at least appreciate that forbes author mentions lack of E2EE cross platform correctly with RCS at least unlike NBC. But this focus for Whatsapp recommendation as well makes me feel like that this is why we’re gonna struggle to get people to use signal also as I mentioned before:
That was my fear, Someone reading this could choose Whatsapp over Signal because they’ll see both and go “Oh Whatsapp, Friends and family are here too” Missing the whole point of why we prefer signal, That’s why in my article I never mentioned Whatsapp aside from the example for metadata and plain text backups.