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Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

You’ve pretty much indirectly nailed the issue: on iOS, iMessage is much more than just a “chat app”. It has an unrivaled feature set on iOS that isn’t replicable on other chat apps. The discourse that reduces it to a “chat app” is critically missing this point.

This wouldn’t mean much if iOS was a small percentage of phones. In regions where it is a majority of phones people use those additional features. In places like the US where most people are using iOS, most people don’t even realize those features don’t exist or are semi-broken on other chat apps because they don’t use them. For average people that have been using iMessage for a long time with other iMessage users, using those other chat apps feels like a downgrade.

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What features?

The only two features I can think of that iMessage has which discord/whatsapp/etc don't are:

1. Automatically can flip to "do not disturb" mode when my phone is in sleep mode, and display that notice to my companion. Other chat apps require manually configuring that I think. I also suspect apple doesn't provide an API to make this easily possible for other apps.

2. iMessage makes it easy to identify the poors, the android users, and ignore them. If I exchange numbers on a dating app and get a green bubble, I can know to immediately ghost them.

Are those the features you were thinking about, or something else?

Knowing focus status and being told live when it changes are public API. I think other apps just choose not to do it. Sample project: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...

You don't work with non-techie adults, do you?

They use iMessage with their family and friends. They use it at work too. Some of their friends, and maybe some of their family, work at the same place. I can try to convince 11 other people who are my business partners to switch to, say, Signal. A special app used only for our group communications. Or I can buy an iPhone. I chose the latter.

It's not my choice. I'm making the best of it that I can. I wish it were not so, but it is.

All the non-tech people in every non-US country have whatsapp/telegram/wechat/line/kakao installed (depending on the country), and it seems to work fine.

It's just the US that has picked a universal messenger that doesn't work on android, every other country, the vast majority of the planet, defaults to a cross-platform phone messenger app.

In short, consider moving to europe.

Not every non-US country. Most people in Norway have iPhones, so iMessage is heavily used. They also use Facebook messenger a lot for some bizarre reason.

> iMessage makes it easy to identify the poors, the android users, and ignore them.

I hope this is sarcasm, and you're not actually that narrow minded.

It is an interesting complete marketing victory in the US by Apple though, that there is a widespread perception that you would only have an Android if you couldn't afford an iPhone. I've had an iPhone for work, it's fine. I much prefer Android and I'll stick to it, and the reasons for that have nothing to do with money. I'm glad I don't love in the US where that would apparently make me a social pariah.

iMessage's killer feature is that you can send a group message to more than a total of ten people. SMS does not officially support this.

I do not recall this being a problem in the pre-iMessage days, even with flip phones. I was on prepaid T-Mobile and had to pay for every message I received, which is the one place where I thought the US billing system had gone nuts - you could always decline to receive a phone call, knowing the number, but you can't refuse a text. I was surprised that nobody ever abused that, but they never did so on a large scale. At ten cents per text, sent or received, you communicated when you needed to, or when you had something to contribute, but one minute of voice was the same cost. One sent and one received text cost as much as two minutes of talk, which can convey a lot more information.

I can't remember the last time I sent an SMS. Comparing iMessage to SMS is not useful. Compare it to one of the (several) cross platform messaging services.

In Europe, Android is on equal par with Apple. WhatsApp is the default messaging service - it is universally installed among my friends, relatives, colleagues, contractors etc.. No-one cares what model of phone the other person has. Everyone communicates.

For good or ill, I have to work with the situation I find myself in, not the one I wish I did.

Most (all?) of the Apple iOS apps and data can be collaboratively shared, edited, etc over iMessage and it is extremely seamless with fine-grained access controls. I get people sending me calendars, notes, slide decks, documents, etc to either read or work on together via iMessage/iCloud. You can selectively share most things in your iOS environment with any other person in the iOS ecosystem. Google Apps is a pale imitation of this. And the security is tight.

I’ve never seen anything like this on any other chat app I’ve used. Most objects in iOS can be directly shared or collaborated on over iMessage, and that is a very rich set of objects. People that only use iMessage don’t even realize other chat apps can’t do some of these things.

So… attachments? WhatsApp and Signal can send those too, directly from the share sheet.

I find the iMessage implementation very clunky compared to WhatsApp. It’s trying so hard to be “minimal” about delivery status and recipient capabilities that I never quite know whether something worked or not, especially with contacts that have older devices on their iMessage account.

> I also suspect apple doesn't provide an API to make this easily possible for other apps.

They do: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...

There’s an API for “focus mode” now, I believe.

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