I’m not a fan of the “war” between Android and Apple when it comes to SMS/texting. The rest of the world doesn’t use SMS/RCS/iMessage as much as WhatsApp and the like, so the US is pretty much lagging behind everyone else on this anyway.
That being said, I have to admit Android did a good job with this!
I trust my carrier even less than Google, which is saying something.
The nice thing about E2EE is that you don’t need to trust your carrier. You could write your messages on a billboard along the highway if you can keep the message’s secret key to yourself and the recipient(s).
Annoyingly, that does require someone to actually implement Google’s RCS encryption protocol (which is really just Signal + MLS but over RCS) and publish the source code (and provide reproducible builds to prove nothing’s been messed with).