I don’t understand why the article writes that iMessage is the only way for encrypted messaging between Android and iOS. I can thing of several off the top of my head:

• Matrix
• Signal
• WhatsApp
• Facebook Messanger (very soon)
• Threema
• Telegram
• Viber
• Line
• Skype

And there are surly more …

cause lazy iOS users can’t be bothered to use anything else

Then why are we shaming Apple and not the iOS users? I think Apple is totally reasonable here.

Apple's biggest crimes here are creating a proprietary platform with an exclusive protocol and making it the default messaging protocol on their devices. None of this is really new, though. All that shit is common. We need Signal or Matrix to improve in user-friendliness and even do some marketing to the point where they become viable solutions.

The default messaging protocol is SMS. Unless you are talking with another Apple user

I can send pictures and video over SMS that are viewable anywhere. An iMessage user can only send a patch of 64 color changing macro blocks with some audio. While it’s technically true it’s the default. it’s purposefully degraded to the point of unusability.

Really? That seems odd. I’ve never had a problem sending reasonable quality photos to Android users and I can’t see a business reason why Apple would degrade image sending purposefully- it would drive its own users to get third party apps.

iMessage degrades images and video on MMS regardless of the capability of the network.