Edit: honestly the challenge is getting other people to install it

This alone is the reason why I personally would not freely choose Signal, and only use it because some of my friends insist :-\

The Signal servers rate limit you severely, causing it to take tens of minutes (or sometimes half an hour) to catch up to where your friends are at. Brief losses of connectivity are near-unrecoverable without closing the app on either my laptop or Pinebook, and worst yet the read/unread status of reactions to your messages is not synced across to your phone.

Signal also just killed custom emojis for reactions to messages, by refusing to display them. Now my message history shows I have reactions on a message I sent, but I can't even see the darn reaction.

Large rooms (50+ members) in Signal will get your client rate limited quickly, preventing you from interacting with anyone on Signal in a timely fashion.

Element/Matrix comparatively just works across my laptops, desktop, tablet (somewhere Signal refuses to work) and phone. It uses a nearly identical tech stack for the client (Electron with SQLite) but it never seems to need to sync messages from the server, lag behind, fail to connect to the server or fail to send messages. This is with me being in a ton of active rooms on Mozilla's Matrix, bridged rooms with IRC and Discord, and my friends shitposting at incredible rates.

The chat ecosystem is moving, Signal seems to have veered off course :C

I definitely see that those issues would be irritating! I've never heard of Matrix, I'll give it a look - thanks!

For me it's a little annoying, but I find it an acceptable tradeoff. However I could easily see how for many people this would be a dealbreaker.

Element/Matrix might be of more interest, it syncs history instantly, has good room support (unlike Signal), bridges in Discord and IRC quite well, and has a ton of interesting native rooms from Mozilla Matrix, Pine64, Gitter and such

But iMessage isn't the product, it's a feature of the product. They think by not letting those features be available on other platforms they are creating the best product. You can't make the best product while simultaneously commoditizing your differentiators.

And it represents 20% of Apple's revenue so pretty sure this "they haven't actually jumped on the services train" comment is just a little off.

Nobody in our household is watching it; it has no app for Android TV.

Worst cast make people pay for some apple services to get iMessage if you really want to. They really are repeating RIM's mistake here.

iMessage would be trusted, largely spam free, etc.

My wife is now on Google Duo because it IS cross platform. WhatsApp and Telegram as well. These messaging networks are natural monopolies. So now I am on Duo etc. I just wish her parents could have installed iMessage on their phones - then apple could have charged us all $5/month for some type of family (10 person) plan.

No, they don't think that. Their refusal to extend iMessage to Android, to not even provide an iMessage API that would allow Google or third-parties to extend iMessage to other platforms has nothing to do with creating the best product. It's coercion, just as I quoted Federighi writing.

Just above that line he wrote "to get users to switch social networks we’d need more than a marginally better app."

Well then, make it insanely better. I happen to disagree with him though. I think he sold Apple short. I think even a marginally better messaging app would be sufficient.

Ultimately what I would like of Apple is for them to provide the best experience on their own devices, but also to provide interoperability with their services for third parties to extend to non-Apple devices.

BTW, it's interesting to see that they are extending to non-Apple hardware with AppleTV+. They've even paid Roku recently to get an AppleTV+ button on the Roku remote.

The only reason I consider getting an iPhone is for iMessage. I would gladly pay a monthly fee so I could use the phone I want AND communicate freely with the people in my social circles.

https://www.beeper.com/

$10/month and you get your iMessage on Android.

I would be willing to pay $10 if the solution wasn't so hacky... Maintaining a system solely to run unsupported software (in a way that I would have to imagine is against ToS somewhere) is just too risky to handle a critical piece of my communication. I can't drop a message - especially if my excuse for dropping messages is "the laptop in the corner of my closet had to install a security update and restarted on me"

How do they make money doing this?

It still baffles me why US has always had the different default IM compared to rest of the world. When the world moved from ICQ to MSN, they are still with AIM. When the world went with WhatsApp, no one in US knew WhatsApp until Facebook announced their $16B acquisition.

And what's worst is Apple didn't even care to improve iMessage.

I think this is what we all wish for but business is warfare and corporations will do whatever it takes to "capture" the market.

I believe you can have multiple phone numbers associated with your iCloud account if they are a physical number. This is assuming you have a phone that's capable of dual-sim or if you have a second iPhone linked to your iCloud account. The latter is what I do when to make myself available when traveling abroad.

The biggest reason is larger user base. But here are two things I do in WhatsApp that I can't do in Signal:

- Share live location. If I need to meet up with somebody, or let someone know how far away I am and when I'm arriving, I use share live location. "Share for 1 hour." In Signal you can share your location at a moment in time but it doesn't update.

- Broadcast messages ("mass text" basically). In WhatsApp I can send a message to a list of people without the people on the list seeing each other (to them it looks like I messaged them 1:1). In Signal I would have to use a group and all the members would see each other.

And now to add:

- Message history across apps. When I install the signal desktop app, it doesn't pull the message history with it.