Still need a valid phone number with a SIM that can do the special SMS needed for this, so it's hardly going to produce a big spam farm too fast.

Better to kill it early. I get spam calls on WhatsApp (an app which I absolutely loathe)

It’s completely trivial to get a real number for sms these days thanks to scum like twilio. You can use your legitimate Apple device identifiers to run something like a hackintosh and then use iMessage that way, or use the script linked last week.

Wouldn't your iPhone still receive spam SMS text messages with Apple Messages? And isn't Apple Messages commonly exploited by NSO Group (Zero-clicks)? Maybe I'm wrong, but this does not appear to be very fort-like.

Yes. I believe people are just saying that they assume unknown-contact SMS is spam and that sort of sounds like Apple's SMS spam filtering isn't very good.

For iPhone there are two tiers - the carrier provided SMS spam filtering, and apps written to provide such filtering[1].

1: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sms_and_call_repor...

Oh, so there's no builtin message filtering at all??

This explains some things. Why wouldn't they just add a spam filter. Is there still iCloud email addresses? Do they have spam filtering?

I'm pretty sure some of the spam I am getting was using this vector. Hopefully it kills it now.

that's one of the reasons they're doing this

but I don't think it's their main reason, if anything I see that argument as convenient posturing which aids in covering the uglier underlying reasons