Key Takeaways
- Google Messages comes preinstalled on most Android phones and offers RCS support.
- Most of my contacts already use Google Messages, and the app will soon gain compatibility with iMessage.
- Meta’s ownership of WhatsApp raises privacy concerns.
WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging apps around the world, but I don’t have it installed on my phone. I use Google Messages. If, like me, you live in the US, this probably doesn’t come as a surprise. There are reasons most of us aren’t using WhatsApp and, if we have an Android phone, stick to Google Messages instead.
1 Google Messages Comes Preinstalled
Not that long ago, each Android phone came with its own app for sending SMS messages. Now most phones come with Google Messages out of the box.
This change didn’t come about because Google Messages was the best SMS app. Rather, it’s one of the few apps available that supports the Rich Communication Services protocol. This means Google Messages has the features we’ve come to expect from modern chat apps, like the ability to know when someone has read our messages, see when someone is typing, and react to individual messages with emojis.
Rather than develop their own apps, carriers and smartphone makers have agreed to embrace Google’s app instead. Just like that, if you buy a smartphone that isn’t an iPhone, you already have Google Messages.
Since Android phones come with Google Messages, most of the people in my social circle have this app installed. I don’t have to convince anyone to install a new app, like I would were I trying to use WhatsApp.
Rather, the opposite is true. I don’t particularly even like Google Messages. I use it because it’s the app my contacts already have. I would personally choose Signal over WhatsApp and Google Messages alike, but I’m pretty burned out on trying to convince people to change their habits. I’ll accommodate theirs.
3 All of My Texts in One Place
Here in the US, a fair bit still gets done over SMS. It doesn’t matter which texting app is your favorite, you still need to have an SMS app around for certain messages, and you will have to switch between multiple apps—except when using Google Messages.
Since it handles both SMS and RCS chats, most of my conversations are in one place. The only other chat app I have installed is Slack, if that even counts.
I stopped using social media years ago, so my conversations aren’t as scattered as many of yours might be. You may have friends that you only talk to on Facebook, Discord, or Instagram. I’m fortunate not to be in that situation. WhatsApp would just be one more app on my phone.
4 No One Asks Me to Talk Via WhatsApp
Again, in the US, WhatsApp hasn’t caught on like it has in the rest of the world. Most of the people who use it here are primarily keeping up with family members or work colleagues who live elsewhere. Immigrants may use the app to chat with people in their diaspora, then switch to other apps for everyone else.
I’ve observed this first-hand with my wife, whose family moved here from India. I could install WhatsApp to chat with them, but they already use SMS to talk to people outside of the community, so it’s no big deal for us to just stick to texts.
The only other context I’ve been asked to use WhatsApp for involved chatting with work colleagues scattered around the globe. I joined a group chat for a month or two, but since I had literally no other chat threads, I uninstalled the app.
WhatsApp may wish it had wider adoption in the States, but it faces the same headwinds as Signal and every other chat app that isn’t part of an existing social network.
SMS is a notoriously non-private way to communicate and there are reasons we should just stop sending texts. Carriers have records of anyone you message and the contents of texts are stored on both the sender and recipient’s phones in plain text. Compared to that, WhatsApp is a more private alternative. After all, WhatsApp has end-to-end encryption baked in.
Yet WhatsApp is owned by Meta, which also runs Facebook, a social media company that has faced scandals and lawsuits over how it handles user data. That, for me, is a bright red flag. I would avoid WhatsApp for the same reasons why I would avoid Threads.
When installing WhatsApp, the app requires access to my phone’s contacts in order to send messages or place calls. This is not information it needs. I can create and save contacts in Signal without giving that app the ability to read my entire contact list. In that app, integration with my phone contacts is an optional add-on.
End-to-end encryption doesn’t provide any guarantees that WhatsApp isn’t providing Meta with my contacts list. Many mobile apps use the contact list permission to suck up data about us, which they either sell or use to dish us and our contacts even more hyper-targeted ads. I grant very few apps access to my contacts, and WhatsApp will not be one of them.
6 Google Messages Will Soon Work With iMessage
Quietly, Apple has rolled RCS support into iMessage as part of iOS 18. While there won’t be full feature parity across platforms, the compatibility enables iPhone users to see when Android users have received their messages, know when they are typing, and share non-blurry pictures.
For the time being, Android users need to be using Google Messages for any of this to work. Sadly, there isn’t yet another RCS app for Android to pick from. As someone with an Android phone, if I want the best experience texting with iPhone owners, I need to have Google Messages.
In countries where people don’t use SMS so extensively, WhatsApp has served as a viable way for Android and iPhone users to have modern conversations with other another. In the US, even if you try to use WhatsApp, you will still need to fall back to Google Messages or iMessage for a large swathe of your conversations. If those conversations have most of the same features as WhatsApp, why use WhatsApp at all?
