> For example having Facebook Messenger handle your SMS messages. Really? You want to voluntarily give all that info to a company as user hostile as Facebook?

The operating system shouldn't be paternalistically responsible for preventing this kind of preference. Some people do want to voluntarily give this information to FB in exchange for a simplified or more integrated messaging experience. I don't happen to be one of them (no FB account), but it's a meaningful positive that the OS allows this for a whole lot of people.

> Less drastically I question the need to hide apps away in an app drawer. If you don't use the app then just delete it. Am I alone in feeling that way?

Yes. I have an iPhone and a Pixel. The fact that I can't only keep 4, or 8, highly-used apps on my iPhone's primary home screen really does make it harder to use.

Imagine a Windows or a MacOS desktop that was literally covered in evenly-spaced icons. There's a reason most people don't do that.

Recently I cleaned completely my home screen (iPhone). In the dock I keep Phone, a folder with Safari and Mail, a folder with what I used to have in my home screen (Calendar, todo, clock... 7-8 things) and the "social" apps folder (Facebook, Whatsapp, iMessage, etc). The rest, I have it in a secondary screen, neatly ordered by folder. And anyway, when I need to open almost anything that is not in the dock, I just search for it, just like I do on my computer. It's like having an uncluttered desktop so I can see the background.

I did that on Android too. I hate the iPhone's "YOU MUST LOOK AT ALL YOUR ICONS" mandate, because a quick swipe down brings up a search that's much more efficient than looking at things.

You absolutely can only have 4-8 apps on your iPhones home screen. You can move them all off to another page. You could move them to the fourth or fifth or whatever page if you don't want them on the second page.

Good to know. I'm obviously a bit out of date on my iOS UI knowledge. Will experiment with this now.

After playing with the home screen on iOS for a minute I remember what was annoying. I can control how many apps appear on the home screen, but they always float up and to the left. If I want to use my phone one-handed most of the time, it's really critical that I be able to keep two rows of apps at the bottom of the screen. Currently impossible on iOS.

yeh, I wish it defaulted to the opposite. I want the icons to start in the bottom-right corner since that's where my thumb is.

I think the messenger part was the ability to give an app of your choosing permissions to be your default SMS app, and in this case he chose Facebook's.

App drawer, it's personal preference but personally I like having a single home page and the rest of my apps in my drawer. But again that's just personal preference, I'm sure a lot of people would call it a negative because they have to manually move an app out of the app drawer every time they install one.

By default new apps are added the the home screen as well, so without curation you have a very iOS-like experience.

But that's pretty easy to turn off on Android.

Facebook SMS support is client side only. They do not get your texts in any way.

They don't get your texts in the message routing sense, but they absolutely have access to the content and could be shipping it to their servers every 5 seconds or whatever.

I don't think they are probably doing that, but there's not really any way to prevent them from doing that.

Excuse me if I don't believe that - even if that is the case today - that it will be tomorrow.

That said, if you already use Messenger for talking to friends, adding SMS isn't going to make a huge difference.

Are you absolutely sure about that? I'd like to believe you but I can't take it on faith. I completely expect Facebook is giving itself some level of info about your SMS messages unless there is some reason they can't.

Trust is the only reason. I'm sure there are plenty of people who are examining the traffic of Facebook apps and someone would make a sink about it if there was evidence they were lieing about their privacy policy. That seems like an adequate assurance for most people but certainly not all.

> You want to voluntarily give all that info to a company as user hostile as Facebook?

He and 7 billion other people.

Seven billion people don't have Facebook handling their SMS messages.

But share photos, videos, information about who knows who, messanger and now whatsapp.

Edit: and which sites they visit and like.