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There’s a new iMessage for Android app — and it actually works
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It's not, it's a superficial opinion on color and functionality that apple and Google want you to think is a big deal but in reality it's two companies using two different protocols and they want you to pick up their product over the over. Even Americans don't know why it's a big deal, they see green in iMessage and freak out.
Sounds like you're an iPhone user, or at least someone who doesn't have kids with Android phones and doesn't participate in group activities where the people primarily use iPhones.
I won't bother explaining it all, but the real issues are group chats that contain both iPhones and Androids, and image/video quality, reactions, etc. The issues are bad enough that kids especially get left out of group chats over it, and bullying incidents are widely reported (and I've seen it first hand)
As an android user with a wife and kids that have iPhone, it's obnoxious that any video my wife and kids attach to a group message gets auto-reduced to sub-potato quality. We send them with Facebook messenger now but I can see where other groups might simply exclude the people with Androids to avoid the need to use alternate apps. Apple k ows what it's doing.