Given this pretty graceful degradation, what do you mean by not being able to message 85% of smartphone users?
I'm more or less OK with the idea of Apple not developing for other platforms. However, they are actively hostile to anyone who has offered and tried to get interop working on other platforms, which is really a shame.
While WhatsApp/Telegram messages are actually free if you have got data.
And nowadays I get absolutely zero SMS's from people. All senders are now just bots and notification services.
Whether this limitation is intentional is irrelevant, the UX is still bad.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207006
A single contact / conversation can even mix and match.
1) For some reason, photos take forever to be received (and sometimes are not received at all) when I send them to certain people. Best I can tell is they're using older devices and/or are in poor reception.
This + I can't send a photo with a message attached means that I'll send the photo, then a message with context, but the person never receives the photo so it's confusing.
2) There is no clear way to dismiss messages from the list of conversations without deleting them. It makes it hard to find conversations later when I have to scroll through a bunch of stuff I don't care about, but may want to search later.
- Only available on iOS and MacOS
- Copy and paste is unreliable on both iOS and MacOS
- Plugins don't exist on MacOS
- Lots of fail scenarios for phone number switching.
- You cannot control encryption outside of the AppleID ecosystem (AIM supported user certificates)
- You cannot control identity for a corporate device, unless you use Azure AD.
That said, it's a great service that I use every day. But it could be better. Facetime is way worse and more disappointing from an Apple POV.
Here’s how to handle that before you move:
https://support.google.com/android/answer/6156081?hl=en
Here’s how to deregister that later:
https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/
Basically just SMS 2FA showing you control the number to deregister.
Today, iMessage is probably the best single messaging platform, which is pitiful because it has key design and UX flaws.
I think in the case of AIM, it existed by virtue of and thrived under corporate neglect. The others withered as the complimentary services withered (Yahoo) or the corporate strategies shifted in inscrutable ways (Microsoft, Google). It was a weird scenario where MS and Goog behaved similarly... Microsoft with their mysterious purchase and subsequent neglect of Skype and Google with their drunken monkey product management process.