> anything-but-iMessage is a (often-times insurmountable) burden on many iphone users who only want to use one app for all the things [...] my kids have actually been left out of social groups in the past [...]
This bizarre attitude is exactly why my phone number is not registered on iMessage on my iPhone. It works great as a meta-filter for people that filter their social contacts based on phone brands.
> iMessage doesn't (or didn't?) work very well with Android phones
It doesn't work with Android phones at all, and iPhones fall back to using clunky legacy protocols such as SMS and RCS.
Google is extensively pushing it because they bought one of the few companies capable of implementing it, and are now selling that as a service to phone operators.
The protocol itself is a hot mess based on existing telco standards from the early 2000s that makes XMPP including every single extension look like the minimal platonic ideal of an IM protocol.
This bizarre attitude is exactly why my phone number is not registered on iMessage on my iPhone. It works great as a meta-filter for people that filter their social contacts based on phone brands.
> iMessage doesn't (or didn't?) work very well with Android phones
It doesn't work with Android phones at all, and iPhones fall back to using clunky legacy protocols such as SMS and RCS.