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I hate iMessage

2026-09-05
tags: musings, personal

I use Discord and iMessage every day, and I vastly prefer one over the other - here are a few reasons why. These are largely mobile related, because I do not own an Apple laptop or desktop of any kind, just an iPhone.

  1. You can't pin messages.
  2. It's slower, less responsive on average, at least to me. Discord feels snappy, and iMessage's animations piss me off with how lumbering they are in comparison.
  3. The @ aka ping system is less reliable.
  4. I use GBoard for my keyboard on my phone, because I don't like the default Apple keyboard, and I can't:
    1. use Markdown for my messages, unless I swap to the Apple keyboard and press an additional button. Separately, doing *text* should result in italicization, but it suggests bolding the text instead, which is moronic.
    2. React in text with emojis using something like :<emoji_name>:. Even better is that Discord has the ability to autocomplete it.
  5. The reason for this post; while you can respond to individual DMs in Discord, iMessage creates what amounts to a thread of chained messages, and replying to any one in the chain amounts to simply appending that message to the end of the chain, with no indication for which prior message in said "thread" was replied to. This is stupid.
  6. The ability to search is significantly worse. Holy crap dude searching through messages in iMessage is an indignity, whereas Discord has the ability to filter not just via string matching but whether attachments were present, who sent the message, if there was a link, and so on. Not to mention that searching is localized to a DM, and not across... all messages.
  7. Group chats and private messages are poorly segmented in comparison to Discord, there is a good amount of isolation which makes it easier to distinguish between types of chats, which I think is a good thing.
  8. iMessage is artificially worse with android phones... (bruh, even with RCS). Enough said, I think most people have experienced some flavor of this.