No way around it: Apple absolutely could and should do better with this. Now, here's the reality of this mess - from two very different and somewhat at-odds perspectives.

Not exactly optimal, right? And Apple adds insult to injury by tacking a prominent green background onto the message of anyone who's using an Android phone - that 'dreaded green text bubble' we were talking about a minute ago - thus emphasizing the difference, creating a fascinating sort of manufactured stigma, and maintaining the perception among iFolk that their messaging experience is subpar with said humans because and only because such lowlife dare to use a non-Apple-blessed Android device (gasp - THE AUDACITY!).

Our current-day technology didn't exist back then, and no one was using messaging at the level we use it now (Neanderthals!). It was designed in the 80s, for cryin' out loud.

SMS doesn't offer table-stakes contemporary messaging features like built-in encryption, active typing indicators, or the ability to send high-quality images and videos in a message.

When you message with any non-Apple users from within iMessage - as in, us lowly Android-preferring land organisms - Apple's software falls back to SMS, a text-centric messaging standard that dates back to the mid-80s and was absolutely not designed with modern messaging uses in mind.

tend to use it automatically, and (b) unlike virtually every other modern messaging service, it's deliberately locked down to the Apple universe and unavailable to anyone on any other type of device. The main differences are just that (a) it comes preloaded on iPhones by default, so most iPhone users in the U.S.

iMessage has its own closed-off network that allows you to chat with other iPhone owners in a modern messaging environment, similar to what you'd get in Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, Google Chat, or any other such service.

In this case, that means you can use it on an iPhone or a Mac - and that's it.

Just like BBM, iMessage is completely proprietary.

Apple's iPhones come with an app called iMessage, which is roughly comparable to the old (and hilariously named) BBM messaging service from BlackBerry back in the day.

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