this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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It’s not just about the bubbles - it’s about having congruent feature sets. When the Android phone joins the group message, the experience is notably different.
The other thing that drove me to iPhone over Android is that the experience is largely consistent. You can tell people what to do from a far based on OS version and phone model because there are so few models. It’s really hard to ask your elderly parent which phone and is this or that feature available remotely. You never know which manufacturer removed what feature
In iOS? Go here. Do this. Do that. Done
Things are a lot better now that the EU forced apple’s hand in implementing RCS, at least.
I haven’t forgotten the fact that at the apple event announcing iMessage they claimed it would come to other platforms at a later date. That was before they realized what a strong moat it was. For how much they claim to put the user first, they really only do so when it benefits their bottom line or they’re forced to by regulators. Fingers crossed third party app stores come to more places than just the EU and Japan.
This isn't even a little bit true.
If you need to claim this was external pressure, China was an actual driver of this but did not force this either.
The main reason is to get away from legacy sms/mms systems. Sending and receiving on the iPhone side is messy as a poor user experience for Apple's users.
One small example is how SMS gets split at 160 and would often come out of order because of the limitations of sms.
The cell networks are moving to a pure data layer model. Sms don't send over data, RCS does. Same reason everything it volte now.
Things currently fall back to sms, but expect it to be dead within a decade as future hardware cycles through (on the carrier side) and support is dropped in favor of streamlined protocols.