> it's about time that most of those 3 month trials expire. I imagine the number will drop substantially after.

Apple's been heavily pushing the service with the same 3 month trial for several years and has seen huge growth over the whole period. There's no big correction that's waiting to hit.

Despite numerous Apple devices I'd never gotten so forceful a push for Apple Music as I did early this year, and indeed Apple has started using tactics that were verboten before, such as push notifications. Of course there is "huge growth", there is a billion devices and they push it with the platform. I do think there are going to be enough people that just don't find it good enough.

I was surprised when a young girl I know was asking for an iPhone over an Android specifically because of iMessage. I gather the main piece of functionality here is that other iPhone users she texts know that she’s using an iPhone. Gotta get that vanity blue text.

It makes a big difference in group messages. Group messages just outright suck on android. And if you're in a group chat with both iphone and android people it doesn't always send messages to the android people

What is surprising indeed is the use of SMS in US, nobody uses SMS outside US.