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by nani8ot
919 days ago
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tl;dr Most people in the US use iPhones. They also like to use the default messaging app, which most of the time is iMessage.
Some people like to use Android phones (privacy, cost, freedom), but still want to message their peers who use the Apple-only iMessage. |
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The equivalent would be if Microsoft, when they had the largest market share of email clients in the US in the late 1990s with Outlook Express (OE), decided to make it so OE-sent group rich text emails with attachments could only be received by other OE users, whereas non-OE users only received plain text emails with image thumbnails and downscaled video attachments. People would have lots of good reasons to use a different email client, like forthcoming Thunderbird, Gmail, or Apple Mail clients. But they'd find they couldn't communicate well with Microsoft OE users.
If Microsoft had made this change early enough and also made it so non-OE responses were color coded with a green background to indicate they are "lesser emails," we'd be in a world of Microsoft Outlook Express users would wonder why everyone doesn't just switch to Windows (the majority OS, at that moment) to make everyone's lives easier. And friends/family would exclude non-Windows users from an email thread as not to "degrade" the thread.
Communication via text with friends and family should be an open standard. Barring the availability of such a standard (e.g. RCS), at a minimum, the chat clients to communicate with friends and family should be x-platform (like Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, and LINE all manage to be).
Ergo iMessage should, at least, have an Android app, even if such an app requires an Apple ID.