To be fair, it's probably stomping iMessage because you can also talk to people who didn't buy the same electronics brand.

I'm very torn about this. I can see why they might want to keep this on Apple hardware only. I've yet to see a video chat solution work as well as FaceTime on iOS devices does on Android. Maybe Duo is it but I need to see it to believe it.

Still, it's very frustrating. I have an Android device as my main phone but have an iPod touch to iMessage and FaceTime friends.

Strange, I've had pretty bad luck using FaceTime. Anytime my wife goes away for work it seems to be laggy or calls don't connect, or it doesn't even ring on the other parties side.

Not trying to dispel your point, but my girlfriend uses her iPhone to FaceTime her relatives in rural Russia with where their main broadband is spotty 3/4g modems; and it performs better than anything else they've tried.

Well, for Messenger to work you can only talk to people on the same social network.

Honestly, MMS/SMS, and email seem to work fine for me.

Though I am a little bummed that we're not all on an end-to-end encrypted XMPP standard communication by now...

> Well, for Messenger to work you can only talk to people on the same social network.

You can casually install Facebook Messenger on your device. You can't casually have a second phone.

you can use messenger with just your phone number and no account. you dont need a facebook account.

I think a bigger reason it's doing so well is because you don't need a phone number to contact someone. I have several friends who I first talked to on FB Messenger before I had their phone number.

Their wifi/data-based group messaging is also far superior to MMS groups.

You don't need to use a phone number for iMessage and FaceTime, IIRC it also supports email addresses.

Then it would be nice if Apple simply supported your preferred email address wholeheartedly and didn't keep trying to always rope you into an icloud email. Seriously, those are dark patterns that people hated (and still hate) about Microsoft and Windows.

Huh? Apple lets me use my own email address, unlike say, Google.

I'm not sure if you'll find that helpful, but you can create a Google account with a non-gmail email. When you create your account, below the username textbox is a blue "I prefer to use my current email address". Never tried it myself though..

They've changed it now so if you want to signup for a Google account it asks for your existing email and has a text link to signup for a gmail. If you are on the gmail landing page and hit sign up then it's how you stated though.

It may well be that Google is worse, but I keep on having to opt-in my accustomed email address and shut off the icloud one. I've probably shut that thing off in Facetime over a dozen times. It keeps on coming back like some sort of boss zombie. It has even caused arguments with a girlfriend, when emails got sent to the icloud address because it keeps coming back. (Now forwarded.)

Google lets you use your own email address. Not sure what the complaint here is.

If you also have an associated Gmail account it won't let you use another email address as the primary one.

That said I'm in some apple limbo land where I need to switch to an email address for iCloud but it won't let me use mine since I had a pre-email appleID. Yay.

What do you mean by primary?

You can't change your "username", but you can set it to send all correspondence, recovery, etc, to your non-gmail address.

I guess I mean the username. It was previously [email protected] but now it's an ugly [email protected] in all the Google UI.

Oh well, I avoid logging in anyway :)

My Apple ID is a Gmail address. Never saw a problem with that.

Still, you can meet someone organically and follow up with talking to them the next day knowing just their name and what mutual friends you have. Email and phone numbers are both unnatural arbitrary strings compared to names.

Nailed it.

Any app or service that isn't cross platform has no real future.

Some features are not intended to maximize penetration; they are differentiators for their platform. Super Mario has a real future and you can only get it on Nintendo.

Right, but we are talking about a communication platform which inherently should be crossplatform

"Should be" does not equate to "no future"

I know this is purely anecdotal, but nobody around me with an iOS device uses Messages. Everyone is using Whatsapp, or Telegram.

Coincidentally, Super Mario is a single player game.

That is, indeed, purely coincidental. The parent could have just as well said "Pokemon." :)

Halo.

I really enjoy FB Messenger. There's a part of me that is disturbed by how deeply integrated into my life Facebook has become, but there's another part of me that just loves the convenience of it all.

Now if only they'd fix that random infinite-reload-loop bug that's been plaguing me for the past week...

> There's a part of me that is disturbed by how deeply integrated into my life Facebook has become

You have no idea. I thought I was just choosing not to use Facebook - I didn't realize I was choosing not to have a social life any more, too.

I was hoping that they will launch iMessage on Android. I would have uninstalled FB messenger from my phone then.

Problem is they don't want the dominate chat app, they want to sell iPhones.