Hey everyone, I’m considering moving my cell phone number over to being a VoIP number with JMP.chat. Unfortunately, a lot of my family members are not the most privacy focused people in the world (they’re the “they already have my data so it doesn’t matter” types). Over the past few years, I’ve been fighting the good fight and managed to get a few of them over to using Signal and some even on Matrix, but for the vast majority of them, they still only text. They almost all use Apple products, so because I still use iPhone (switching to Graphene with my next phone), most of our conversations are via iMessage. My question is which would be more private/secure? Leaving my number as is with the cell carrier and texting via iMessage or switching my number to JMP and texting via SMS?
I don’t think there is any E2EE between a JMP number and an iPhone. Cheogram offers E2EE, but I think it is just between Cheogram clients. Although I have never used iMessage (or iOS), I believe it is E2EE between iMessage clients, so if all your family members are on iMessage, then may be staying on that will offer you better security compared to Cheogram.
That said, I know GrapheneOS has been working on RCS (although I do not use it). I have seen some of these RCS updates on their changelog, and some users report that it works too (see https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/6173 for example). So, may be you can ask your family members to turn RCS on, and use it to securely communicate between GrapheneOS and iOS?!