I've been having some ongoing weirdness from my messaging app on my phone.
At one point, I was apparently sending out text messages that were coming through as Chinese characters.
My ability to do group texts disintegrated.
And, of course, there's the ongoing irritation of how my texting app interacts with the iPhone one:
I send a text. I include a couple of pictures.
They respond by tapping the "heart" icon to establish which photo they "loved." On their screen, the relevant photo now has a heart on it.
On my screen I get an entirely separate text that says, "So-and-so Loved a photo."
Or, if they're responding to the text proper, it will say, So-and-so Liked "Here's a couple of..."
I am irritated at the way this app interacts with all the other texting platforms so I'm sure as hell not going to switch to apple now.
But I have a much bigger problem. I'm very late to the party on this, but just in case the rest of you are also unaware:
It seems that the Android phones all let their texting apps die.
Quietly, they stopped updating them, and now they offer Google messenger as the default app. This started as long ago as 2024.
I got my new (to me) phone this week, and when I tried to set it all up, it tried to get me to use Google messenger. I went looking for an alternate app for that.
My Play Store wants me to use the one offered by Meta. No fucking way.
So now my options appear to be:
Just use the Google one, which I don't want to do for a variety of reasons, including that I use different Google accounts for different things.
Use a free app from the app store that gives me ads that look exactly like unread messages.
Use a free app from the play store that makes me look at an app every time I open the app to use it; including video ads that play at media volume.
Use Signal, which means getting all my people to use it with me
Use Meta which is run by nazis
Use What's App which is run by Meta
Are there any good options left?!
