The person not using iMessage doesn't limit anything, in most cases, now that RCS is a thing on most Androids. Apple is the one that breaks the experience for everyone and then implies it was the non-iMessage user.

- reacting to messages/replying to messages

- sending messages over data (obviously)

questions: "reacting to messages"

it's most similar to upvoting, but with more emoji. So imagine if HN had an upvote on IOS, but instead on android it left a full message saying

>__MatrixMan__ reacted to this comment with "Upvote"

Much clunkier. his was fixed with RCS, fortunately, but that was the norm for some decade or so when talking with iPhones.

Oh, do iPhone users also see those messages when an android user is in the chat?

I had assumed that reactions worked fine for them and they were unaware that their iPhone was making them look like a bit of a buffoon to the rest of us.

The main thing I miss about having an iPhone is the ability to send full resolution pictures and videos over iMessage. In practice, SMS and MMS are seriously limited in the size of files they can send.

Do you not have Android with RCS?

That won't do anything for Android-to-iPhone messages until Apple implements RCS. Almost all of my friends use iPhones.

As an aside: I actually don't have RCS on my Android phone because I run LineageOS without any Google apps, and apparently Google hasn't added an API for RCS, so there are no open source alternatives to the Google Messages app if you want support for it. (Please, correct me if I'm wrong!)

You don't really need an OS API for RCS like you need for SMS/MMS, as RCS works over IP network. If you want/need to use USIM based authentication, you need a system privilege, so that you can talk to the SIM card.

Someone has written an open source RCS prototype app, but it is only for carrier-provided RCS and I don't know if anyone has even attempted to use it with Google's servers:

https://github.com/Hirohumi/RustyRcs

I think RCS is up to your carrier if you're de-Googled.

It falls back to plain ol SMS/MMS. So any features newer than 2008 or so.