I feel this as well. I’m in a mixed device household, and sharing images and videos between each other is a real pain. Nobody wants to mess around with going to an iCloud or Google Photos link and grabbing images or video. In the USA, few people want to use third party messaging apps. My family certainly doesn’t. My kid’s friends certainly don’t, and so everyone sticks to iMessage.
Because iMessage really is the best in this region given what is actually used by non-outliers. I use both Android and iOS, Windows and Mac. There’s no comparison. iMessage has more features than Google’s solution. Google’s “RCS” is better than SMS/MMS but isn’t equivalent to iMessage. And cross-device support for it is a joke. Samsung has their own little bridge if you buy entirely into their ecosystem–apps included (sorry, Google Messenger). But there isn’t the same identical experience that happens like with Apple: iMessage on iPhone is the same as on iPad is the same as on Mac. No web QR codes to scan, no weird per-device limitations, it really just works. Handoff works like magic. I know, cliche, but Google doesn’t have anything that competes with the feature set. iMessage is so much more than group chats and text messages and pictures like Android users tend to characterize.
Google has no room to call out Apple for its b.s. with iMessage, either; Google has its own proprietary messaging apps. They’ve tried several times to replicate iMessage and lock people in. Their latest is RCS, which is really a misnomer because Google took the actual RCS standard and made it proprietary. That’s why there aren’t third party apps outside of a tiny number of outliers with special business arrangements with Google (such as Samsung). That’s why Google’s entire campaign to “shame” Apple (really, remind iPhone users of the pain of interacting with Android users) doesn’t go anywhere. Google is just as proprietary as iMessage. Google requires all traffic route through Google’s proprietary Jibe middleware and cloud infrastructure.
At this point I doubt Google would actually share their proprietary RCS with Apple given that they don’t share it with anyone else except Samsung, and only then because Samsung was moving to fork Android (or abandon it entirely) after Google got into the hardware business. We know Google has a private API for their RCS implementation and that they actively choose not to share it, because they’ve accidentally leaked it before and XDA devs picked up on it. There are a million SMS/MMS apps available, not so much for “RCS.”