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>not having imessage (90% of my friends and family are on iOS device)

iMessage sees very little usage outside of the US, where OP may not be based.

Or maybe it sees little usage inside of your own country? Even when most people use other messaging platforms, I see it used as the family/iphone-possessing-close-friends channel of choice, since it transparently replaces SMS.

iMessage makes it impractical to have a conversation with anybody on prepaid Android. Sure you can send MMSs and SMSs to them, but are they going to send more than a couple back? Nope.

Substitute "your own country" with "most countries outside the US" and you're about right. iOS prevalence simply isn't there.

While SMS fallback is handled brilliantly by iMessage, as soon as people are using it as more than a glorified sms client (group chat, file transfer...) and/or are really concerned about end-to-end encryption, the limitations of SMS/MMS start to become a dealbreaker.

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