I agree. Especially if you aren’t living in the US or something like Russia, China, etc, where carriers are horrible.
Here in my country, I’m actually a fan of my carrier and I trust it, I like almost everything about it except for the price, but even that is good compared to prices in other places.
I’d take WhatsApp, metadata isn’t protected, but at least the contents are. In the case of SMS nothing is protected.
This isn’t going to apply to most people, as most will use ordinary SIM cards in their phones and have SMS capabilities, but I personally do not. It has proven to be quite an attack surface, and my fears for using this in zero click attacks have in the recently years been confirmed to be valid. I do still use SMS via VoIP, but only for services that require a phone number still. The number I use on chat apps purposefully does not support SMS so that people can’t contact me this way.
Now, it has to be said that of course this can also occur in other software, but something like WhatsApp is easier to patch and therefore most likely more robust.
Moreover, soon WhatsApp will get options to not require phone numbers to set up conversations — just like Signal. This will eliminate the need to have a widely shared phone number, thus making it easier to hide your phone number(s) from thread actors that have access to aggressive spyware capabilities. Phone numbers are a weak point in the security of people, so removing the need to share this for contact will be a good way forward.
In mine a carrier gets hacked seemingly every couple years. Im not trusting them even if I liked any of them, which I dont, no one here does. Its meta for me any day of the week if those are the only choices 