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Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

Apple doesn't care if you can communicate with non Apple users. They have their iMessage population hostage. Those people can never switch to Android because they'll be left out of group texts. It's vendor lock-in of the highest order. Spectacular play by Apple, really. They guarantee switching to Android is painful, you risk losing business deals and messages from friends. I doubt it's legal, but for now they are getting away with it.

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I've never had a problem with mixed Android/iOS group messages and media with iMessage. I've made no special effort to get it to work. It's seamless. Am I doing something wrong? Or right, rather?

Now, back when I used Android I remember Hangouts ruining everything it touched and I had to switch back to the deprecated Messages app (which was completely fine and did not need replacing) to fix it. Maybe the problem with the Android users on these group texts isn't on the iMessage side....

If you associate your phone number with an iMessage account, and then deactivate iMessage, Apple will just silently stop delivering group iMessages to you. You won't notice and your friends won't notice, they'll just stop coming.

If you unregister your number from iMessages, group texts switch over from iMessages to non-iMessage as soon as you send a message that has a member in it that is no longer iMessage.

That's not true. Everyone in the thread has to delete the thread and create a new one before new messages will go to an iMessage-deactivated number.

This has not been my experience. I have some very long running group messages that switched over automatically when my brother switched from iPhone to Android.

Why would Android users be left out of group texts? I regularly message a group that has a mix of iMessage/SMS users and it's worked pretty well.

When you switch from an iPhone to an Android phone, other people's iPhones will continue to send you messages over iMessage, which your Android phone will never see.

If you include a non-iOS number in a group chat it becomes an SMS group chat. Not sure what the big deal is.

That's true, but if one of the people in an existing thread deactivates iMessage it will stay as an iMessage group chat and silently fail to deliver to that person.

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