The only reason why people use SMS in the US seems to be Apple. They didn’t make SMS worse than they were (which would be hard to achieve), but they basically force people to keep using them.

I can’t explain why, but the default in the US is still to exchange phone numbers, and that means SMS. We have all of the same options, but moving to another messaging service just didn’t happen here. Even adjusting for time frame - iMessage had little power until at least 2013-14, which I’m by that time was probably long enough to move on in the EU and quite a lot of the rest of the world, and we were still using phone numbers.

Only between Apple and Apple, and Apple and Android.

This isn’t a standard that can be enshrined in law. I want to create NightOS on the NightPhone (which honestly sounds rad) this basically locks me out of doing that.

They don’t have to handle the data between Android phones if they support some form of federation.

Again, “support” doing a lot of work. You don’t just “support” a billion users. Huge time, attention, cost, even if you’re not storing the data.

Still, very malicious behavior.

“Malicious” implies intent. You can not like it, my post doesn’t even indicate that I like it (back to the original, I highlight a business case that makes sense for Apple to open this up) but just saying “I don’t feel like supporting your OS” is not malicious. Companies do it all. the. time. Any modern iOS device is many times more powerful than a Nintendo Switch or a Playstation 4, is every developer that doesn’t support iOS “malicious?” Even just regular people do this all of the time - me being on some social media but not others is not malicious, it’s just because I decide where my attention goes. We’re all making trade offs. The game companies don’t support Apple because the effort to profit ratio is too low. I don’t go on Facebook or reddit because as trivial, my ad impressions are actual money and I don’t want to support those companies. Apple so far hasn’t put iMessage on Android because it just doesn’t make sense for them to do it.

Your basic supposition comes down to “Apple should do a lot of work for less than free.”