You're confusing first party apps with third party apps. Also you're forgetting that this is a forum which is heavily biased to developers. I use Android because my phone isn't a fashion piece. Some of my users sadly use iOS. They want the software on the devices they purchased and own, but Apple is preventing us from delivering this to them unless we do exactly as Apple commands.
My phone is not a fashion piece. AFAICT the blue bubbles will show up with an old 4S just as well as with a 14 Pro Max.
I have an iPhone - which I got after many years with Android - because iMessage is an essential app for me. I live in the US, so my business partners do not have [choice of alternative messaging app] installed and they are not going to install it just for me. I'm a doctor working in a hospital that has two complete dead spots for cell reception, and whose IT department blocks WiFi calling. So I can't make phone calls on either service, and only on iOS can I get messages that are really, really important over the hospital WiFi.
I could talk until I was blue in the face about how other methods are better. Or how Apple is being a gigantic bunch of assholes by not using something other than vanilla SMS if you're not an iMessage user. But it's sitting at about 30:1, and you can either go along and be aware of important things going on, or you can be left out.
When business decisions are being made over those conversations, I'd be a fool to ignore it. I don't much like the iOS way, having gotten used to Android and LineageOS, but after my experience with the Nexus 6P that suffered the infamous "battery goes to shit overnight one day" problem that Google wouldn't fix, as well as being dropped from updates after two years, five years of security updates from model introduction sounded pretty nice.
But on Android, you can replace the default messaging app, and that app can have access to SMS as a fallback, so it's really easy to convince people to switch. "Hey, uh, plain messaging is annoying some of us, please install this app, we can all use it, but it will work even with people who don't have it over the regular text service."
It's still getting rolled out a lot of places. Google sees it as the successor to SMS and it's built into native messaging apps. I recently saw cross-carrier support get enabled locally and that made it universal enough that so far anyone I message that's running Android is already connected via RCS.
Apple intentionally doesn't support RCS in order to keep imessages from interoperating with android.
a system that can deliver messages through SMS or wifi is better, especially one that was a protocol, not a product, and would allow multiple platforms to access
You’re being downvoted (clearly by multiple people) for having a valid opposing opinion in a subjective debate. Hate to see that kind of behavior on HN. Upvoted you to balance it out.
