Agree to disagree. Messenger and WhatsApp are more advanced and combine the social dynamic to chats. They’ve also made a lot of headway in competing with FaceTime. Which apps would Apple have a distinct advantage of it loses iMessage and FaceTime?
Edit: to elaborate I don’t mean a direct bridge to android, rather a substitute for iMessage that’s available on iOS and Android which makes switching relatively painless.
In my experience, it is not a tech problem. Equivalents absolutely exist. They may even be superior, although us tech folk tend to focus on features and not usability, and then we are surprised why regular folk don't like what we've built. In any case, when I switch out of the iPhone world, a solid half my contacts are unavailable to chat with except by old-school texts, and no equivalent for FaceTime. Some family members I switched over to Hangouts, but since they only use it for me, they forget about it, or how it works.
Every iPhone can do iMessage and FaceTime out of the box. That is a meaningful advantage for Apple, I think. Making something good enough that your users don't want to go find something 'better' and then making it 100% universal makes a strong ecosystem.
No question that iMessage and FaceTime are advantages for Apple out of the box.
But what happens when Facebook continues to enhance its messaging platform and people slowly find themselves in a hybrid situation where they are communicating with a mixture of WhatsApp, iMessage, and Instagram?
Anecdotally, I probably use iMessage for 80% of my texts with my girlfriend but we still regularly use Instagram and WhatsApp for chatting, depending on the situation. I could foresee us ending up swinging the other way and using Whatsapp for texting and then getting used to it. Sound unlikely?
Suppose we are discussing what we want to order for dinner and WhatsApp has our favorite delivery places and their menus available and we can order and pay through the app. Now instead of texting back and forth and then opening Grubhub to look at a menu and order and pay we can do it all in one place. Pretty soon we are using WhatsApp to communicate and haven’t used iMessage in months. I find myself using WhatsApp so much I replace iMessage in the dock with WhatsApp.
Six months later I’m in the market for a new phone. Since I use third party software for just about everything now, all these devices are on a level playing field and maybe I try a Pixel this time and find I like it just as much as my iPhone. This may sound far fetched but this is how disruption happens and is pretty much how Facebook destroyed MySpace- users finding themselves using two services for the same purpose and eventually scrapping the one they use the least.
Edit: to elaborate I don’t mean a direct bridge to android, rather a substitute for iMessage that’s available on iOS and Android which makes switching relatively painless.