this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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Apple doesn't "share a lot of the blame." The blame belongs solely to Apple and their insistence on a closed ecosystem. They intentionally hamstring any cross functionality with competing devices, even features as simple as text messaging. It's important for Apple to foster a cult-like mentality among their consumers.
Apple has no obligation for users outside of their ecosystem. Apple saw the landscape of carrier messaging being terrible, and they made iMessage to help their customers communicate with one another better, while continue to maintain support for basic carrier communication. They have now updated to offer RCS, the current modern carrier messaging standard, which as demonstrated is still fragmented and outright garbage.
There is a Google proprietary protocol that’s based off of RCS, but as demonstrated by the Android market, even Android devices doesn’t do that — so Apple isn’t likely to (and frankly shouldn’t) do it to give more information to Google (even on the alleged promise of E2EE, it allows Google to know who is communicating with who at what time, and potentially roughly where via cell tower origination).
Apple is not a charity and has no need to open up their proprietary protocol designed to better their clients’ communications to non-clients. Want to make a phone call? Pay your carrier. Want to have electricity? Pay your power provider. Want to use iMessage? “Buy your mom an iPhone”.
Apple management has explicitly stated they do not want to support better compatibility between Android and iPhone, their response when asked what parents who buy cheap Androids for their kids should do it was to buy them iPhones. Many of the problems are very easy to fix on Apple's side and keeping them problematic is intentional.
That’s the point. It’s not Apples problem. Apple supports basic carrier messaging. If someone buys an Android, Apple users can message them just as anyone who buys a Windows Phone or BlackBerry.
It’s either an Android problem — getting fragmented service and no E2EE — at which point don’t buy an Android; or a user preference problem — “Inprefer iMessage” — at which point buy an iPhone.
Vendors on both sides have gone up and down the market to cover the spectrum, it’s not even a “can’t afford the premium feature” problem anymore as it were decade ago.