I originally missed iMessage too because I was an iOS + Mac user, but as time has gone on, there's only a couple of people I'd message with iMessage... My wife and my parents/family, who have iPhones, but now the people I know who have iPhones is much less.
And then you realize that what you thought was working for years, was never really working, as non-iOS users got bastardized messages especially on group chats coming from iMessage.
Why is that? iMessage allows me to send higher quality video to others. I've sent videos to android users that have to go through mms and it looks like balls. I love iMessage, especially since it works if you have no cell service.
Yeah, this is an iMessage and carrier problem, and it's not just iMessage -> Android that has the problem, but old iMessage -> Anybody (Android or new iOS). My family is notorious for not updating their phone software because they are convinced that new versions of anything just break what works (it's insane but I've stopped trying because I was tired of being the bad guy when I'd tell my parents or sisters to update their software, then something random would stop working and it'd be my fault). The result is any video message from my sister to anybody is literally the worst quality ever... Like postage stamp size, 5fps, horrible color, terrible sound.
But this isn't an Android problem, it's an iMessage and carrier problem. Android sends fine video to people on Android and iOS; Android receives video fine from anybody on Android and iOS.
iMessage is pretty good if you primarily only talk to people on iMessage, but Apple abstracts so much from iMessage that most people don't know when something isn't working. Apple lost a lot of credibility with how they handled messages disappearing into the ether and failing silently, for me. When I switched to Android about... I dunno 4 years ago or so, Apple never thought anybody would
switch from iOS to another OS, and so they never accounted for people who used to have their number associated with iMessage and then disassociated it. The result was messages from iMessage users to former iMessage users never got delivered, with no error message, the messages were just dropped and never delivered, but iMessage didn't report anything wrong. Eventually Apple fixed this, about 2 years after the problem was first reported, but they only fixed it proactively on updated versions of iOS, so if you were on an older version of iOS (again, my family being notorious for not updating software for months and months), you just never knew there was a problem.
I only knew about the issue because a friend of mine had switched to Android from iOS a few months earlier and told me about it... And because my wife called me once and was like "Wtf are you okay why aren't you replying to texts?" And when your spouse is mad at you for ignoring texts, there's no manner of "Oh, no, this is actually a problem with
your proprietary message delivery system..." that will save you or convince them otherwise.
This was eventually "Fixed" but only for iOS/iMessage/iPhone going forward, not backwards. My sister still has an old iPhone with an old version of iOS and I still regularly don't get messages from her, and all of her videos look like shit to anybody else (even people on new versions of iOS). I actually think the problem for her is a carrier issue, with Verizon ruining videos over a certain size, but she doesn't know that. My parents and her just assume "this is what video is supposed to look like over a phone." I lost faith in iMessage with the undeliverable issue, and really Apple lost a lot of credibility with me. They just don't make software that integrates with anything other than these really tiny, ideal use cases.