It turns out that the only thing worse than the platform monopolist was the old phone carries monopolies.
> just about everyone outside the US tends to use messaging apps like WhatsApp/Signal/WeChat/etc.
This is The Way. Well, several ways, since you inevitably end up a bit fragmented, but usually a country will settle on one, usually WhatsApp. Further east Telegram is also popular.
...and then WhatsApp starts to send ads in push-notifications that you can't turn off. And you either have to live with it, or be a massive black hole in your friends communities.
I don't know if RCS is the way, but monopolistic messaging apps definitely aren't.
> and then WhatsApp starts to send ads in push-notifications that you can't turn off
*that you can't filter.
Every time an app begs me to enable notifications, I give it the side-eye because I immediately assume it's going to include notifications that I don't want to see, which are essentially ads for some app feature / some part of their walled garden.
I want to be able to filter notifications at the OS level. That could be by a substring search on the content of the notification, or by a unique-per-call-site (in the code) identifier included in the API the app uses to surface a notification (though I suspect most apps would just re-use the same identifier everywhere because the developers don't want me to be able to filter their ads).
> just about everyone outside the US tends to use messaging apps like WhatsApp/Signal/WeChat/etc.
This is The Way. Well, several ways, since you inevitably end up a bit fragmented, but usually a country will settle on one, usually WhatsApp. Further east Telegram is also popular.