Ask Paul: March 28 (Premium)

Happy Friday! The last Ask Paul of March 2025 is a monster, thanks to an incredible set of questions from readers. Let's kick off the weekend a bit early by diving right in.
? Getting the message on messaging
Some interrelated questions...

helix2301 asks:

Apple now lets you change your default messaging app even in USA. How surprised are you by this I thought iMessage locked would never change. So far, Whatsapp only one that allows it. You can now change the default message and phone app like on Android. Mail App you can change and default browser. You pointed out while go on FRD that they don't let you change maps and other defaults cause they don't want to give up areas make them money.

This is a weird confluence of issues and coincidence for me. I will try to be succinct for a change (and will fail).

I'm reading the book Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, which is an insider account of the happenings at Facebook/Meta, a company I don't like or trust. I read a lot of industry books and would have normally ignored this. But when I found how badly the company wants it to be banned, I bought it, and it's disturbing. I never respected Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, this company, or its products, but it's so much worse than I imagined. This has catapulted Meta to the top of the charts in my mind now for antitrust regulation. It is a cancer that needs to be stopped.
I routinely move back and forth between the iPhone and Android, and while this is normally a fairly seamless process, there is one exception: My text messaging (SMS/MMS) is always screwed up after a switch, in either direction, despite the fact that I always follow Apple's instructions to the letter for enabling/disabling iMessage on either side of this. I don't get text messages, group messages are f$%ked, etc. It's a nightmare, and it's literally the one thing that has kept me, so far, from switching back to the Pixel during this trip. I would have done so already.
Like many people, I'm drowning in what I'll call messaging apps, and I have too many people using too many ways to contact me using these apps. When everyone was outraged over the coming death of Skype, all I could think was, good, that's one down. But in addition to text messaging, I use WhatsApp, Slack, Teams, and Facebook Messenger, plus all the DM capabilities in services like Twitter/X, Threads, Bluesky, and whatever else. I want one thing that does all this, what Microsoft tried to do briefly with Windows Phone. And I know I'll never get there. But reducing the number of apps is desirable.
I'm on the iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS developer betas across those devices, and it's been a busy several months. Apple updates those OSes more frequently for developers than it does with the public, and it seems like I'm always getting new beta releases these days. Keeping up with the changes is difficult, and as is the case with Windows 11, remembering when...