This is why I get so furious when I hear Apple apologists try to defend the lock-in nature of iMessage.
Before iMessage was so ubiquitous on iPhones, everyone just expected that you could message anyone else, regardless of their phone or carrier, over SMS/MMS. And I also don't fault Apple at all for releasing iMessage. But it's not like they released iMessage as just another app in the App Store like Whatsapp or Telegram. In true "Embrace/Extend/Extinguish" fashion, iMessage was just released as the default "texting app" on iPhones, and over the years the situation became more and more awful for iPhone -> Android communication. Non-US folks often don't understand the situation - "Why don't you just choose another messaging app?" Because in the US most people never "chose" a messaging app to begin with - they just used the default texting app on their phone. The US didn't really have the issue with exhorbitant SMS fees that other countries had that pushed usage to other messaging apps.
I guess they meant the situation became more and more awful for Android users as Google released a new messaging app and killed the last one every month.
That's not what I was talking about. Google's messaging apps were famously a mess, but my guess is that the vast majority of Android users never cared. There was always a default texting app on Android devices that handled SMS and MMS, and later RCS, and that's what most people (again, in the US) used for texting.
Before iMessage was so ubiquitous on iPhones, everyone just expected that you could message anyone else, regardless of their phone or carrier, over SMS/MMS. And I also don't fault Apple at all for releasing iMessage. But it's not like they released iMessage as just another app in the App Store like Whatsapp or Telegram. In true "Embrace/Extend/Extinguish" fashion, iMessage was just released as the default "texting app" on iPhones, and over the years the situation became more and more awful for iPhone -> Android communication. Non-US folks often don't understand the situation - "Why don't you just choose another messaging app?" Because in the US most people never "chose" a messaging app to begin with - they just used the default texting app on their phone. The US didn't really have the issue with exhorbitant SMS fees that other countries had that pushed usage to other messaging apps.