- iMessage is built into the sms/MMS GUI and opportunistically "upgrades" sms chats to iMessage chats. This alone is a huge deal and makes me wonder why you would even ask this question.
- Everyone with an iPhone will have an account (the phone is practically unusable without one.)
- The app is built into the OS, when combined with the previous 2 integrations that makes it the only thing most iphone users are willing to use unless they have a very very good reason not to.
- I think the sharing UI has some special imessage-only shortcuts
How is this so hard for you to understand, iMessage gets shoved in people's faces and is activated automatically. It's extremely anticompetitive and isolates people not on apples platform. It's far worse than anything microsoft did in the 90s.
How exactly is anyone ‘isolated’? There just doesn’t seem to be any basis for saying that that.
All it does is improve the use experience for people who do use Apple’s platform. They are just as able to communicate with people who have SMS as they were before and vice versa. You are going to need to explain this ‘isolation’.
Literally billions of people use competing messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Facebook messenger.
It's not just preinstalled, it forces you to make an account to use the phone and inserts itself into what was previously the most popular messaging system in the US. If apple did something like this with the mail app everyone would probably completely flip out, the only reason they don't is because SMS was already terrible.
