Texting that never touches the internet.

A text is just a text — it shouldn't need a server.

Plenty of messaging apps route ordinary texts through company servers, or hold onto delivery metadata even when the message itself is a plain SMS. Messages doesn't have a server to route through — it talks to your carrier's SMS and MMS network directly, the same way texting has worked for two decades, and nothing about that requires a cloud account.

Like Phone, it's built to run completely offline. No sign-in, no background sync, no message content ever leaving the device except over the network already carrying your calls — which is what makes it a real degoogle replacement rather than a different company holding the same data.