You can download WhatsApp or Signal or Facebook Messenger or whatever else you might want, and have those work fine. iMessage works really well, and Apple enjoys some network effects here, but you say "they consider this a competitive advantage" like that's a bad thing.
They made a better mousetrap here. Bully for them!
You can download WhatsApp or Signal or Facebook Messenger or whatever else you might want, and have those work fine.
Signal on Android is a far better experience than Signal on iOS, because the former allows you to choose it as your default SMS app and the latter does not.
So your complaint is that iOS only lets Signal handle its own messages, not SMS messages? I can see that being useful but “far better” seems like a stretch these days where the biggest gaps are Facebook/WhatsApp.
Well yeah, because it means that I just message a contact in my default messaging app, and if they use Signal it goes over Signal, and if they don't it falls back to SMS (just like the experience of the system messenger and iMessage on Apple devices).
But you're right - what we really need is a way for each messaging app you install to be able to inform the system which contacts it can reach, a simple way to set a priority order (eg. just a draggable list where you can put iMessage above Signal above WhatsApp above SMS), and a single messaging frontend which can render all the ongoing conversations in each installed messenger. (I believe AppleTV attempts something like this for video streaming services?)
You can download WhatsApp or Signal or Facebook Messenger or whatever else you might want, and have those work fine. iMessage works really well, and Apple enjoys some network effects here, but you say "they consider this a competitive advantage" like that's a bad thing.
They made a better mousetrap here. Bully for them!