You know, I’ve often tried to understand this criticism, but it’s a little bit difficult because I would have to suspend disbelief about how people actually use their phones.

It is not uncommon for someone to have installed an assortment of apps from the following, Android or iPhone: Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Viber, Signal, WeChat, LINE, WhatsApp, Hangouts, Slack, Discord, Telegram and maybe someone is still using BBM somewhere.

In addition to the iPhone Messages app, I have, and use the messages features of 4 of those, which I think is probably low, and I might be overlooking some. In order to make it all work though, I have notifications turned on for them, and the experience of receiving a push notification from Slack is functionally the same as receiving an iMessage which is functionally the same as receiving an SMS or MMS. In fact, it’s a pretty standard experience across most or all messaging apps, with the key difference that when I tap on the Slack message, it takes me to the relevant chat box in the Slack app, instead of the relevant chat box in the Messages app. It was much the same on Android. This setup and usage pattern is probably the common case; I’m not exactly coloring outside the lines using default phone features that require zero or minimal additional setup (i.e. hitting “Yes” on the notifications prompt) and reflects the behaviors I’ve observed or asked about in how others use their phones.

Now on Android, the key difference was that you could designate a different app to receive your messages. At the time that I used Android, Hangouts was the best one I found which was head and shoulders above the trash default on a Galaxy Note II (can’t remember if it was Samsung or Google SMS software by default), but as far as the basic experience of seeing push notifications from messengers aggregated and then deep-linking into the associated app, it was basically the same as my iPhone now.

So, what is the advantage here? I thought it was “neat” that I could designate the Hangouts app as my SMS receptacle, but even by that point the dream of one unified phone messenger for everyone a la Adium or Pidgin was dead for me, and is still dead for me. If Apple put in the additional work to build an SMS/MMS access API, they would also be on the hook for supporting it. If at some point in the future I took advantage of this and moved my designated SMS/MMS app to WhatsApp, not all of my iPhone-using contacts necessarily use WhatsApp and I wouldn’t want to see my chat experience degraded for them specifically, so I would probably still be using iMessages, but now the SMS/MMS users would show up in WhatsApp instead, and the “unified inbox” that is notifications center would still be aggregating from 5+ apps and deep-linking me into the relevant conversation threads.

So, how do I profit from Apple expending employee time on this feature request? The Messages app is still the best SMS/MMS interface I’ve ever used, and still has the familiar interface I’m used to from Adium/iChat AV, and the “problem” described all up and down the comments here seems almost entirely academic. I think the people that stand to benefit the most are people who have a very specific setup: iPhone users with iMessage disabled on principle + only one other messenger that they could in theory receive SMS/MMS messages in if there was an API. I won’t yuck their yum, and as paying customers they can ask whatever they want from Apple, but I’m a paying customer too and I’ll be honest, I would rather Apple expend employee time on almost anything but that.