Facebook and WhatsApp crisis: How I discovered iMessage, and fell in love with the iPhone app in minutes

I literally had to watch the news in order to find out what was going on. Yes, up until that point, I thought my WiFi and data were both out, while actually Facebook was going through a meltdown.

Facebook and WhatsApp are down: A hero has emerged 

Anyway, I couldn’t communicate with anyone, at least not via an instant messaging app. Then it hit me! I had an iPhone. Flex. So I went ahead and messaged a friend on iMessage simply for the banter around the whole outage thing. We started chatting.

Before I get to how iMessage won me over, another key to this story is that I had never actively used iMessage before. I’m from Eastern Europe, where Apple’s iPhones, let alone services, aren’t nearly as popular compared to North America, for instance. Why? They are just very expensive.  And I’ve been living in Western Europe for a while now, but even in places like Germany, Spain, or France, WhatsApp and Messenger are much more popular.

So, I opened iMessage, sent the first text, got a reply. I immediately noticed how… animated the app is. It almost felt alive. The texts bounce off the bottom, and the navigation animations are smooth - in true iPhone fashion.

Then I got a text that appeared to be… dancing around on the screen. What?! I’ve seen this during Apple’s presentations, but it’s different when you actually get to use it. Apparently, these are Bubble animations. I then found out that I could send texts with these special effects and immediately started having fun while texting - as in from the act of texting. I hated to like it.

There are quite a few benefits of iMessage for Apple users

And then (not making it up!) my iPhone was almost dead. I plugged it in, and I immediately recalled that it must be possible to take my chat over to my Mac. Sure enough, I logged in, and it was all there, ready for me to pick up where I left off. It’s not magic - it’s iCloud syncing, but boy does it work like magic...

I’ve been using WhatsApp desktop on my Mac for a long time, and it’s always worked fine, but the convenience of not even having to think about connecting your phone to the app is great! I can also take my iMessage conversations onto my iPad Pro.

I then discovered there were more special effects! When you hold down on the send button, it gives you the option to go into Screen effects, and you can choose to send a text accompanied by a pyro show, balloons, lasers, etc. Interestingly, the iPhone will also create sound effects and will use the Taptic engine to vibrate in sync, which is so Apple. Is it an absolute gimmick? Yes. Is it fun? Yeees.

When is iMessage better than WhatsApp?

• The photo-sharing experience on iMessage is much faster and much better compared to WhatsApp (I’ve always disliked it), but similar to that of Facebook's Messenger.
• You can make use of some apps like YouTube and Google Maps without leaving the iMessage app - as in directly from the main menu, which can make some tasks super-efficient. Still, the functions are rather limited, so it’s not like you’ll never open YouTube or Maps while texting ever again.
•  If you are deep into Apple’s software ecosystem, you can also access Music to share songs and playlists. Sadly for me, no Spotify.
• You can choose whether voice messages play through the earpiece or speakers - very handy

So, in the end - am I abandoning WhatsApp and Messenger and telling my acquaintances to buy an iPhone and catch me on iMessage? As you might have guessed, no. This would be rather unrealistic, at least in Europe and many other parts of the world. For example, only about four of the people I know and actively communicate with use iPhones. Also, I have a Huawei P30 Pro too, which I use actively. No iMessage there.

But what I can do is to start initiating conversations on iMessage! If people just reply and keep texting, I’d be more than happy to carry on because… it’s fun. Apart from the long animations, which make it feel slower than necessary, and a weird lag when you try to review a stack of photos that you’ve sent, there’s not much to dislike about iMessage.

And just a thought - what if we got iMessage on Andr… OK, I’ll leave it there. Let’s not get into this. Maybe in a future story?