> Music.app is simply an ad for Apple Music,

If you use iTunes Match or load your own MP3s every time you open the app the search field is set to “Apple Music” and the search fails until you toggle it, every time.

Been like that for 2+ years

Buried in settings there's a way to turn off Apple Music (the subscription) and limit to only your own mp3s.

I tried to run both my music library and Apple Music subscription together, but found that when I let my subscription lapse, all my playlists got deleted, even the ones that just used my own music. Now I'm staying FAR away from apple music the subscription.

It’s been like that ever since Apple Music became a thing. I remember fiddling with this on an iPhone 6.

> Not only are Apple's services bad, they've becoming inescapable.

As long as you decide to stay in Apple's jail. Next time you need or want a new phone, buy a Pixel 9a for $399 on sale, flash Graphene, and you can be 100% Apple and Google free. It's even better when paired with FOSS apps only like Nextcloud and Home Assistant.

My family has made it clear that I need to be available on iMessage or I'd be right there with you.

Why? There is literally no difference. imessage is seamless with sms and mms.

Except group chat. And RCS couldn’t be installed on a custom rom as Google took over the protocol and locked user.

Message is the only thing preventing me to switch of iPhone, as lineage or graphene will require installing WhatsApp, which is a big No.

I'm in group chats with android users and it works fine. "10729287 liked $message" is about the only difference as far as I can tell.

That's because you are all "logged in" a RCS group. It's a nice solution altough not crypted on iPhone yet, but it's unavailable to a custom android rom because Google won't allow it without installing Google Apps.

Android Custom Rom = sms/mms(no group) or Signal (good luck making family adopt it) or Whatsapp (evil).

iPhones default to sending plain old texts to non-Apple devices so it's hardly an issue unless you don't have a phone number.

iMessage and RCS have some very different affordances, and apple keeps it that way to keep people walled into the system.

Most notably, a single non-iMessage member in a group chat will degrade the experience for everyone significantly.

It's very much an issue in the US.

By "degrade the experience" you mean you get a text that says "TheDong liked $message." The horror! Maybe people will go back to just sending a thumbs up emoji.

By "degrade the experience" I mean:

1. Unable to remove members, or change member's phone-numbers without recreating the entire chat and losing continuity / bothering everyone with noise about these changes.

2. Green bubbles, so if your teenage child talks in the group chat at school and one of their classmates sees the green bubble, they'll be bullied for the rest of the time in school.

3. Unable to send high quality photos or videos

4. Just plain failure to deliver messages with shocking frequency for a supposedly modern messaging system.

5. RCS still isn't supported by carriers in a bunch of countries, so when one member of the group chat travels, roams to a foreign network that doesn't support RCS, and chats the group chat can split into one for MMS and one for RCS, and then it's a total crapshoot based on network conditions as to which one the messages go to in the future, with messages having now an even higher chance of vanishing into the void.

Basically, it's a subpar experience. Every other group messaging app (signal, whatsapp, etc) works fine on iOS and android, Apple really should be publishing iMessage for Android to solve this. But, due to reason 2 where green bubbles result in becoming a social outcast and being bullied, they of course won't.

Like, signal, a company running on donations iirc, is able to build a messaging app for windows/linux/iOS/android, and yet Apple isn't capable of that? Come on.

Outside the US people use WhatsApp and other third party messengers so none of that is necessarily a big issue. As for teenagers they mostly use Snapchat and Instagram for groupchats nowadays.

> Green bubbles, so if your teenage child talks in the group chat at school and one of their classmates sees the green bubble, they'll be bullied for the rest of the time in school.

Wth, is this even a real thing?

Then use a vendor-agnostic platform instead for group chats like Signal or Matrix.

I do with anyone I can. Unfortunately some people I want to chat with (i.e. family) are too scared to install any third-party apps from the app store because each time they tried, they clicked on an app store ad and get garbage instead.

It would be great if people actually did this, but in the US that is not the case. There are only so many people you can convince to move off of their main platform, and usually you have to meet people where they are.

Exactly — I know a good portion of my family simply wouldn't switch. SMS and MMS are also less secure and a poor experience (e.g. photos are often swapped via iMessage).

> inescapable. It's rumored that they'll add ads to maps

If you move to the EU you can change the default navigation app on iOS and never see apple maps.

A plan to display ads would explain why they region locked that setting.

I'd much prefer the EU to the current situation in the US, but it's not in the cards at the moment.

You can remove the maps app in the US too.

You can remove the default navigation app, but you can't set the default navigation app to something else. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/MapKit/preparing-y...