So I just wanted to chime in since I just got an S10+ coming from an iPhone XS.
I too am ok of those people kinda feeling left out with the whole iMessage thing and I wanted to share why.
My entire immediate family are ALL on iPhones including the folks add in about 95% of my immediate circle of friends.
This means that things like group messaging and direct messaging bring a sleeping of benefits such as:
- WiFi messaging
- Full resolution video
- Audio messages
- 3rd party App specific sharing
- Ability to handle group naming for all parties invited to the group
- Chat actions like being able to have multiple people in a group chat be able to thumbs up a single response from a group member
- utilize icloud which will auto group collections of video and or photos
- send money to a friend via apple pay
- share detailed web site links
- high speed transfer rates
- sharing large videos are sent in seconds not minutes
- create new contacts and FaceTime from chat
- keep image sharing history for the life of a chat thread eg: click on button and see every image a friend has shared with you for full the life of a chat
This is just a off the cuff list of the things you can do and it doesn't require anything other than the default app that tons of people already have on their phones, the sheer convenience of it makes it undeniable.
Whole what's app can do much of this it requires a 3rd party app to be installed, registered, configured etc etc and that can just get in the way seeing as iPhones just do it out of the box with no hassle.
There really is much more but you get the idea, I'm Android you get used to using different apps and workflows but apple does a good job of getting that out of the way and it just works.