And you can trust the reputation of the company. I think that’s really what matters for me in this particular situation.
I agree. Reputation is improtant. Many use Telegram and trust it. I do not, even when I compare it to WhatsApp. I don’t trust closed-source, proprietary, unproven encryption protocols. I also don’t backup my WhatsApp chats to iCloud since those backups are unencrypted.
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this thread turned into a pretty good discussion!
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Just wanted to call out some thanks to Burke for jumping in to do the switching and making the bumpers fun… and suspenseful. 
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Got RCS working BTW, seems OK. Chatting to my sis on it last night. OnePlus 6 and a Samsung S7, using Google’s Messages on the Three network in the UK 
this is the crux of WA encryption (after the fact we don’t know if WA properly uses the Signal protocol). You may not, but how many of your contacts do? It’s a flawed setup, IMO. But people want history, then it’ll have to be saved somewhere…
Though, ephemeral messaging seems popular with the younger crowd. So this will be interesting. But at this point, I just want cross platform rich communication that isn’t FB. I want RCS to make it because it’s the most likely to be cross compatible, but very pessimistic on it happening in any significant time frame. And done well since being on the universal profile is only step one… getting everyone updated to the latest version consistently and timely is yet another challenge.
The issue here is the trust of the app authors (and their code) vs the availability and network effect.
Text/RCS/iMessage is available to everyone, but it’s not secured from prying eyes and the experience (outside of iCliques) is fragmented and sucks. But it works for everyone (in the US).
Whatsapp/Facebook has billions of users and claim to use E2E but they have a serious trust issue.
Signal has verified E2E and Telegram has alleged E2E but not as many users. And then there’s the other things like Instagram, Hangouts, Viber, and I guess Twitter.
I think carriers can force Android phones to take their RCS but they don’t have the same leverage with Apple. Apple could, of course, support RCS but it’ll still be a fragmented green bubble situation - even if more features will be available. Maybe the RCS bubbles will be yellow. 
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