Apple will use it's dominant position to create lock in like how they did with iMessage instead of cooperating with other platforms on a common standard.
Oder friends and family are surprised when they want to video call over Facetime and find it hard to believe other people's phones don't have Apple apps.
The app allows iPhone users to create an event. Anybody on any device or browser can RSVP. The event can be shared as a link. Making an event invite app that only works for users on one platform would be pointless.
Also - non-Apple users have been able to join FaceTime calls via. A link for several years.
It's not the color itself that's the problem, it's that having one green user means the entire conversation falls back to SMS and thus photos, videos, etc are all degraded and you can't do more rich messaging things like reactions. This is changing with RCS but it is in Apple's interest to make it a social change rather than just a technological limitation.
> it is in Apple's interest to make it a social change rather than just a technological limitation.
It is a technical requirement? How would non-iMessage users respond to the whole group including the ones on iMessage?
When you sit for 5min and think about the whole flow across a bunch of message exchanges every other way there's really no other technical solution than downgrading the whole conversation to SMS/RCS.
If people want to group SMS they should open their phone's SMS app. If people want to group iMessage they should all open iMessage. If people want to chat on signal, they should all open signal.
Unfortunately, iMessage is bizarrely both iOS's SMS app and a custom signal-like chat protocol, but the user can't pick between the protocols easily and it switches between them in an opaque way.
It's just a bizarrely bad UX by a company that supposedly is good at UX, and the only purpose it seems to serve is to provide this broken green-bubble experience.
I'd much rather if iOS just had "iMessage" as an app without SMS, had "SMS" as an app for only SMS/MMS/RCS, and then allowed android users to make an apple account and install iMessage (possible with an optional 1-time fee to prevent spam, like having to buy a $700 iPhone and throw it away as a sorta "proof of work" in order to make a iMessage-for-android account. This isn't too different from how some of my friends do this now, with a mac mini in their closet for iMessage which they remote desktop into if they want to chat to iPhone using friends, and use for nothing else).