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Help How to join iMessage group chat on Android phone?

F

F11

Lurker
Hey everyone! I recently converted from IOS to Android (a move I'm really happy about) but now I can't join my friends' iMessage group chat. I can text people who have iPhones, but whenever my friend tries to add me to the group chat it gives him the message, "The number is not registered with iMessage" (or something along those lines). Is it because I changed my number when I got the new phone? And is there a way to fix it?

Thanks!
 
psionandy said:
You need to persuade Apple that users of operating systems are allowed to join in....

(Apple aren't letting anyone else play)
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That's kinda lame :/

Things like that are exactly the reason I switched to Android. I guess the only option I have left is to make an account and join their other group chat on Snapchat but... oh Snapchat :rolleyes:

Thanks for the response.
 
F11 said:
And is there a way to fix it?
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A fix doesn't appear likely. iMessage is a proprietary texting protocol owned and developed by Apple, the issue being Apple has opted to keep iMessage exclusive only to iOS and MacOS users. iMessage is also protected by Apple's closed-source licensing so no other company can (legally) reverse-engineer the code to add support for it into their own texting services. And it's not even a matter where Apple might allow others to add iMessage support for a price, there simply is no such option.
So if you want a fix, keep lobbying Apple to open up iMessage and finally allow it to be used in other texting services. The public clearly wants this and since profit is the primary factor for anything Apple does, charging even a nominal monthly fee for users and licensing fees to other texting services would cumulatively result in a massive windfall. In the meantime though, the best you can do is keep asking your iMessage-using friends and family to be sure SMS/MMS is enabled in their iMessage apps to at least include you, on a limited basis, in their conversations. The odds any of them will switch away from iMessage to an alternative isn't likely, once one is immersed in the Apple platform, adding in a competing service and using that as the default isn't trivial.
 
Jobs made noises about making iMessage cross-platform in the early days. Then Apple realised that it provided a way of locking people into Apple devices, and that went away.

It's just commerce. Apple make their money from selling the devices, plus a commission on stuff bought from the App Store, so for them it's important to keep people buying their phones. Google make money on apps bought through the Play Store (no matter who made the device), and from people using their services (whether on Android, Windows, Linux, MacOS or iOS). So Google push cross-platform solutions and Apple push closed ones, but they both have the same motive: what makes money for them.
 
svim said:
The odds any of them will switch away from iMessage to an alternative isn't likely, once one is immersed in the Apple platform, adding in a competing service and using that as the default isn't trivial.
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That really does depend on the group. Very few people I know rely on iMessage group chats simply because not everyone they wish to communicate with uses an iDevice. Maybe in some circles it's different, but even then I've known groups who have changed message platform in order to include someone else for whom the one they were using wasn't an option (in the case I'm thinking of it was someone without a FB account rather than someone on a different OS, but it's the same principle). It is as simple to use WhatsApp on an iPhone as on any other phone, for example (though that one does need a phone, so if someone was only iMessaging from an iPad and didn't have a smartphone it wouldn't work).
 
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