> All they did was put an optional message service in the same app.

They did a bit more than that. There were the glory days that if you ever left the Apple ecosystem, but iMessage ever had an awareness of your number, no other iMessage users could reach you until or unless you did some incantations that Apple didn't make obvious, ideally from an Apple device (that you may not own anymore), to allow your friends to keep sending you even green bubble messages?

I know multiple people who had to go to Apple stores to try to do this process.

Ya I got bit switching to android when people started calling wondering what happened when I wouldn't respond to their texts.

However, the same thing happened to me when I switched from my pixel 3a to an iPhone. I wasn't able to text from my iPhone for a week. I ended up contacting Verizon and they actually had their network engineers investigating. What they ended up discovering, and sent me a contact number for it, was that some how Google's RCS was still holding a lock on my number or something.

So this isn't an exclusive Apple problem.

> there has been no embrace or extend

Embrace: include SMS

Extend: add iMessage

That's not what the phrase means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Embrace: include HTML

Extend: add ActiveX

Yeah, it is.

Could users still access functionality of pages with ActiveX content, albeit in a “degraded” state?

Given that it never fully replaced HTML, yes.