Yep.
This thread, man.
I get it - there's a whole entire world that doesn't revolve around Americans, and WhatsApp (or WeChat... or LINE... or w/e) is 100% suitably fine for that 90% of the world - and that's great!
But in the US, nobody knows what WhatsApp is. So let's ignore it for the sake of the discussion, since it seems the OP is from the US and was sharing his grievance from a US-centric perspective. (Apologies if I'm mistaken - I admittedly haven't read every page).
As an iPhone user, you have iMessage. It's built in. It's robust. Every single iPhone has it. It works SUPER well with other iPhones. But if you want to group chat with another set of iPhones, a mix of iOS and Android, or heck, with all Android users - you still use iMessage. And it still works perfectly. Seamlessly. It requires zero additional effort. And you will receive messages back just fine, too.
However, on the Android side - there are multiple messaging apps. Samsung has a messenger. Google has a new one every other year. I bought an S8 and for whatever reason all my texts were going to one app, groups to another, and replies seemed to bounce between them both. The built-in Google default app, from what I could tell, used archaic SMS or something still inferior to Apple's iMessage. Videos were hyper low-bit. Gifs didn't play. Replies were broken up across multple bubbles. And because manufacturers like to use their messaging app, Google is always pushing a new one, and heck, even carriers have some - on top of the bunch of options on the Play Store - there's no synergy between different Android experiences. And most importantly, it always requires something different to send (data or wifi of voice line), and/or it stuggles to have interoperability with tablets and computers; whereas if you are in Apple's ecosystem, your messages are always synced between all devices. And so long as your phone is near, regular, android-based green bubble texts, too.
