> I'm still angry about how I must use an iPhone if I want to be able to text high quality video to people I don't know very well

You’re mad at the wrong people in this case though. iMessage can do high quality video and images because it’s a separate channel from the telecoms. RCS can now do high quality video and images too because it’s a newer standard and was built for that (and iPhones do support RCS now). But for normal “text” messages using the MMS/SMS systems, your quality is capped by the carriers and the carries have ridiculously (relative to current standards) low size limits. AT&T limits them to 1MB [1]. Verizon limits you to 1.2MB for images and 3.5MB for video [2] and T-Mobile limits you to 1MB for outbound and 3MB for inbound. Low quality is just baked into those paths and there’s nothing Apple (or Google) can do about it other than build parallel messaging systems

[1]: https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1041906/

[2]: https://www.verizon.com/support/knowledge-base-14641/

[3]: https://www.t-mobile.com/support/devices/device-troubleshoot...

Apple has absolutely been dragging its feet on RCS. The DoJ explicitly accused them of degrading cross-platform messaging to protect their smartphone dominance. Internal Apple communications revealed that executives were worried that bringing iMessage to Android would "remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones."

Apple is clearly the bad guy on the RCS issue.