Including an Android user in an iMessage group chat acts like a time-travel bomb, rendering the entire chat through the much older and more limited SMS texting system. There is not really anything important that iMessage does that competing services like WhatsApp don’t do, but with iPhones being the most popular phone in many friend groups, including mine, group chats are often inadvertently iMessage chats. Because it is the default messaging system on iPhones, texts and, especially, group texts are automatically initiated in iMessage. IMessage is an infuriating tech scourge, a messaging protocol created by Apple that is intended to work exclusively on Apple devices. This is all because I put iMessage on my Android phone.

Anyone who tried to text me would have been texting into the void, a void I created out of curiosity and masochism. For the next four days, when I was across the country for a wedding, I could not send or receive text messages.

This is not something that normal people would ever encounter. I checked my phone, which informed me that I was unable to receive or send text messages. We both had internet connections on our phones. My wife wanted to text me my digital ticket, which is a very normal task that should not have presented any difficulty. Photo: Neil Godwin/Future via Getty ImagesĪ couple of weeks ago, I was in the airport, about to get in the security line.

Can u use imessage on android