[edbaskerville]

Switched to this from Apple a year and a half ago. Works for most things. Unexpectedly, replacement apps lack polish. Also, RCS works very inconsistently (been without it for months), seems to be Google's fault. There may be workarounds, but I haven't had the energy to try the more complicated suggestions.

I am probably going to switch back to a used old iPhone for "phone appliance" tasks, but keep around the Pixel for other things.

My main takeaway from the experience is that iMessage is an even bigger weapon than I thought.

[microtonal]

Are you in the US? I get the impression that iMessage and RCS are only big there. Almost nobody uses them here in Europe. (It's mostly WhatsApp where I live and Signal is slowly getting more popular.)

As an aside, from the latest release notes: Sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer: add toggle for granting Play services access to ICC auth in order to support RCS with carriers requiring it for RCS in Google Messages including T-Mobile (see RCS usage guide)

https://grapheneos.org/releases#2026021200

https://grapheneos.org/usage#rcs

[empyrrhicist]

The RCS issue is why I switched back to iPhone, reluctantly.

If anything, iOS seems buggier and less reliable, but I know (and am related to) a lot of people who insist on using iMessage/RCS, and I can't be missing messages.

[drnick1]

> Also, RCS works very inconsistently (been without it for months), seems to be Google's fault.

The best thing would be to switch to Signal (Molly) for texting.