Outside of a few devices here and there that I switch to and try, the iPhone's generally my daily driver. It's the device I fall back to. While I love aspects about Android and Windows Phone, they're just missing things that I use every single day -- like easy audio source switching. I actively search for something to replace it, but it hasn't happened yet.
It's not from a lack of trying, though. And that doesn't necessarily mean on my end.
Apple's like many other companies that create things, both software and hardware, in the mobile market in that they want you to stay in their ecosystem. Just asking you to do that isn't really good enough, though, so they've got to create reasons to entice you. To make you want to stick around. For Apple, an easy way to do that is to create things that link with Mac users, so switching from your iOS-based device and your Mac OS-based device is smooth and (supposedly) painless.
It's certainly gotten better over the years. Apple's doing a nice job of not making the two platforms the same, but making sure that some of the features and apps that people use every day are linked well enough that there aren't any hiccups or issues. That's a broad statement, mind you, because we're dealing with technology and we know how easily things can just stop working for seemingly no reason.
The same can't be said for iMessage.
For a lot of iPhone users, iMessage is one of those features that you just use, and only really pay attention to when you text someone new, and wait to see whether or not it sends as a green or blue bubble. For that initial moment it can be pretty exciting, but after that I'm not really sure what the draw could possibly be when you're just using it on your phone. The "delivered" and "read" notifications are cool, I guess, but I honestly just try to not pay any attention to that anymore.
For me, personally, the draw for iMessage isn't that read receipt or the blue bubbles, but the fact I can open Messages on my Mac and respond to or start a conversation right from there, only to continue it on a mobile iOS device if I need to. It's something that we've seen in other messaging platforms, like GroupMe, or even Google's Hangouts most recently. It's an outstanding feature, and I use it daily.
And then when I switch to another handset, I realize why iMessage is awful. Since I've got two, and sometimes three, devices running iMessage, just turning off the service on my iPhone when I switch to something like the Galaxy S5 doesn't really do anything. I lose so many text messages, it's maddening. And considering how long it's been happening, pretty much right from iMessage's debut, at this point it's an agonizing and crushing reality.
Apple says they're working on it, which is nice, but it's frustrating that they've waited this long -- and only because of a bug that's making the issue even worse. I understand that switching phones isn't something that Apple (or any company) expects the average user to do a lot, but it happens, and it's going to continue to happen. Now that carriers are allowing for that sort of thing. This debilitating bug, which has been present for way longer than is reasonable, has to go away. Its destruction is long overdue.
