Technology

No, otherwise Apple wouldn't be able to perpetuate it.

It should be easy. Your product is knowingly and intentionally creating problems for the youth in this country. You are hearby banned from all sales and usage in this country. If you would like to change your product and re-apply to do business here, feel free.

More than decade ago when phones started to be capable to use Internet-based messaging standards, those that exists for computers for 30+ years.

I've been waiting for average users to catch up since about 2010 when I was running Pidgin (XMPP) on my Android, since SMS is terribly unreliable.

SMS is a best-effort protocol, with zero error checking, meaning no error correction, no ensured delivery. It's known to lose up to ten percent of messages.

It's also tightly bound to cellular architecture, since it encapsulates messages into the mostly-empty management frames of the cell network.

It was bleeding edge in 1986 (IIRC), but it's long past it's retirement time.

Because SMS are paid. I only use them because I am on a dumbphone and the plan is like $3 anyway.

The messaging is provided by a third party who is dedicated to working on their iMessage compatibility. Apple has no reason to stop this because this is a good move for them in the larger battle between mobile messaging standards.

Google owns Jibe, the company behind RCS messaging found on all Android phones and an emerging, competent product from the only game in town that can compete with Apple. Google has decided to take this to the government level and push for a unified phone messaging standard, normally a good thing, but proposed their own RCS solution. The one they own and whose servers Google scrapes for user info.

Apple is pushing iMessage as a protest against Google and their inevitable lawsuit to conform with RCS adoption. Android may win unless Apple shows it has parity and provides a non-legislative option: if enough people use iMessage then governments don't have to make any laws or enforce changes. The company Nothing is using iMessage, which helps Apple prove there is both a significant user base, which would cause a burden on Apple and it's customers to change, and there is no monopoly on iMessage or messaging in general. So if enough people use iMessage, Apple sees it as a good thing.