No you don’t. You can “deal” with iMessage users by using SMS and RCS

Then it would be more correct to say that we "lose when we forego control" when our friends push the iMessage on us.

In my bubble literally noone uses iMessage. More tech savvy use Signal/GroupMe, less tech savvy use SMS/Email. Family use Signal to chat with me, as I can steer my own family a little.

Also I sometimes open web-interface of Facebook, but any attempts to offer WhatsApp I answer "sorry no Facebook apps on my phone, no Instagram/Messenger either". Never had any issues with that. Although I heard some countries are very dependent on Facebook, so might be hard there.

By the way, I noticed it's not hard to use multiple messengers actually, sometimes it's even faster to find a contact as you always remember what app to look at in recents.

UPDATE: My point is that you can also influence your life and how people communicate with you. Up to a point of course, but it's not like you can do nothing with it.

But you don't need an Apple device to contact iMessage users. Every iMessage ID is a phone number (SMS/RCS) or email.

You've listed a whole bunch of alternatives available to you, but for some reason you demand that Apple change its unique offering into just another one of those for you. Why? Is that not a completely enforced monoculture?

Apple has always been off to the side, doing their own thing, and for some reason that fact utterly enrages people. They demand that Apple become just like everyone else. But we already have everyone else! And in every single field Apple is in, there is more of everyone else than there is of Apple.

Have you considered people like Apple products precisely because they're not like everything else? That making Apple indistinguishable from Facebook or Google is no victory, but a significant loss for customer choice?

That is no longer true. https://bluebubbles.app/ Well… it’s not exactly no longer true, you do need an Apple VM but it doesn’t have to be the end device.

Why? Just make iMessage users put up with green bubbles if they want to talk to you?

Thanks to Apple co-opting phone numbers, there's literally no need to ever have iMessage for anyone

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