Amid the insanity that has been the iMessage for Android conversation in the past week, there’s an underlying question. With iPhone users almost unanimously choosing iMessage, what’s your most-used messaging app?
To address the elephant in the room right out of the gate, yes, this is a US-only problem. While the rest of the world uses pretty much whatever messaging app they want on whatever device they want, most Americans seem unable, or at least unwilling to download anything that’s not the default messaging app that comes on their device. On Android, that means they’re using SMS or, in recent years, RCS. On iPhone, it’s all about the Messages app which, surprise, really wants you to use iMessage with other iPhone users.
iMessage has, over the years, become a dominant force in the US smartphone market because, for many people, it’s viewed as the only “good” way to message people. “Green bubbles” just equal messy group chats, terrible photo/video sharing, and tons of missing features, and that’s just because anything that’s not an iMessage is SMS.
That’s set to change next year, as Apple is adding RCS, as a green bubble, to the iPhone with interoperability with Android, but that’s also still months and months away.
But, really, I think boiling down this conversation to just RCS, SMS, and iMessage is more than a little ridiculous.
iMessage, despite its reputation, is honestly a pretty boring messaging app by modern standards. My personal biggest gripe is that emoji reactions are limited to one of just six options (and they’re not even the ones I want), but compared the likes of Telegram and WhatsApp and every other big messaging service, I just don’t see the hype. iMessage does nothing better than any of these other apps, besides the fact that Apple managed to get millions of people in the US to be obsessed with it.
For me, I’d love it if Telegram could be my only messaging app, but I also have zero problem using several others. I also use iMessage, SMS, Google Chat, WhatsApp, Instagram messages, Twitter DMs, and even Slack to talk to different people in my life. The only I don’t regularly use as an Android user, ironically, is RCS, and that’s only because Google Voice stubbornly hasn’t added it yet, but that’s a rant for another day.
What about you? What’s your most-used messaging app? Do you use more than one? Vote for your the messaging app you use most in the poll below, and let’s discuss further in the comments below!
Note: In the poll below, we’ve added SMS and RCS as “apps” for simplification. As it stands today, the primary way to use RCS is Google Messages, and not everyone who uses Google Messages also uses RCS, as it is optional.
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