Before implying SMS is preferable to an E2EE messaging app because Google “has access to everything in the phone's memory”, please exercise your critical thinking.

Okay, now we’ve established that even your dishonest spin on the relationship between companies that provide the software and communications using the software is extremely unconvincing: that’s a dishonest spin on the relationship between companies that provide the software and communications using the software. Google/Facebook has to mount an active attack, serving you malicious software, in order to get the kind of access you’re talking about, which is risky and something we’re slowly but surely getting better at defending against (attestation, transparency logs).

I don't use google accounts on my android phone. And yeah like you say whatever access they still have (not so much IMO) they have anyway regardless of which messenger I use. And yeah I do mind having facebook involved but it's just not really avoidable where I live. I really need whatsapp.

I do however have one mitigation: I don't run the whatsapp app on my primary phone. I use a matrix bridge. The app is still installed on another phone which is left at home. Because every month or so you have to enter the pin code (apparently meta thinks us users are retards that will forget it if we don't keep entering it).

On my phone I use the ElementX app then. I did get banned from whatsapp one time which was presumably to do with the bridge (I don't see what else it would be).

I'm not sure I understood. Are you saying that you have a primary phone which isn't Android, on which you type into Matrix, Matrix relays into a phone that you have a home which passes messages from Matrix into WhatsApp? Is that what you're describing?