Generally speaking, I trust Apple more than the other major tech companies, though that’s admittedly a pretty low bar to reach. That said, Apple’s historic reluctance to let iMessage play nice with other systems is starting to have a real impact on your security, and it’s time for a new solution.
Right now, if you send a message from iPhone-to-iPhone or from Android-to-Android, it’s encrypted and secure. However, if you send one from iPhone-to-Android or Android-to-iPhone, your message has a high likelihood of being intercepted. This isn’t necessary a huge problem most of the time, when your messages are along the lines of “don’t forget to pick up bread on the way home”, but when any message is potentially at risk it becomes a different conversation.
There are a few ways Apple could have solved this over the years, but they’ve chosen not to, so moving to a new platform that works for iOS and Android is the way to go.
Signal
Fortunately, there are simple solutions at hand. Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are both encrypted so that no one can read your messages, and I’m moving over to Signal (which is another similar app). All of those apps look and feel like text messages, but your content inside of them is very secure.
A big reason that I prefer Signal is that your message is end-to-end encrypted by default, and that it’s not owned by Meta. Using Signal, even Signal themselves literally cannot read your message — only the sender and receiver can. The same is true of WhatsApp, but Facebook Messenger only works that way if you manually set end-to-end encryption on every message. Really, though, any of those solutions are far better than normal text messages.
A little bit of everything
At the end of the day, I’ll still be sending messages a bunch of different ways. My family will use Signal, and I’ll use it with others when I can, but I’m sure I’ll have plenty of text messages (along with LinkedIn messages, WhatsApp messages, etc) coming and going for years to come.
Every little bit helps.
