It’s really nothing special. I personally use WhatsApp with most of my friends.

The problem is when you have one person in a group that is on Android when everybody else is on Apple. This causes the iMessage conversation to use SMS instead. To signify this in the app, texts appear as green bubbles instead of blue, so it’s obvious when it happens.

This is bad because SMS is totally obsolete. It causes images and videos to be shared in extremely low resolution, along with problems of messages not getting delivered reliably and other missing features.

So effectively to the iPhone user, Android users very visibly cause group chats to be super crappy in iMessage.

This is not the fault of the Android user really, because it’d work way better if Apple supported RCS like Android phones do, but many people have a very strongly negative impression of Android due to this.

In fact, some iPhone users put social pressure on people with Android devices due to this in the form of excluding them from group chats or complaining about how they cause problems.

Apple has been perpetuating this problem because it suits them. People know this, but it’s Android and Android users that suffer regardless due to Apple’s dominant market position.

It provides a much better group messaging experience than SMS (you can see who’s in a group and add and remove people), delivery/read receipts, better image quality, is encrypted (although that gets somewhat negated by automatic iCloud backups), and is free as long as a data connection is available.

Of course many other messengers offer most of these features too, but for some reason, no alternative has been able to establish itself in the US.

iMessage was heavily integrated into the ios flow when sms was the dominant mobile text messaging system. It's not special, and that's the point. It just worked the way people want texting to work as smart phones gained momentum, and iPhones have so much of the market share that it's way more irritating to use a separate messaging app when you can't change the default integration on ios. I miss the convenience of heavily integrated iMessage comms at least twice per day.

Interesting, I use both Messages and a few third-party messengers, and I wouldn't say that Messages is integrated more deeply with iOS, in the way that e.g. Safari and Mail were for a long time (before you could re-associate http and mailto URLs).

The share sheet just shows my most-frequently-used messengers, as well as direct contact names for my most important contacts, no matter what messenger they're actually on.

The only thing I can't yet do on my third-party messenger is initiate messages from my Apple Watch, but that's presumably due to a lack of a native watch app more than anything.