I wouldn’t block them, but I’d be leaving the group chat.

That still means losing out on a lot of general life stuff. Just, overall.

As if i want my default sms texting app to be getting spammed by a big group chat.

I guess I don't see how that's made any different by the group chat being in a different app. I can turn notifications off or make them silent in either case.

Also the default at least here in Australia is pretty much Facebook messenger or maybe WhatsApp not because anyone likes it, but because everyone already has a Facebook account even if they don’t use it much.

Right. But everyone who has a phone has a phone number for texting.

Also it means you can easily have group chats with people who you need to communicate with but you don’t really want to have your number.

Yep, that's definitely an advantage. I'm not trying to sell you on SMS or iMessage, I'm just trying to explain why it's popular over here.

What a ridiculous notion to be using a platform specific service for a group chat, unless you are deciding your friends group or work colleagues based on the phone they use which again seems unfathomable.

Uh...wait. I don't see how that's different from Facebook or WhatsApp. Especially since iMessage does send messages to users on other devices, it's just a worse experience for the recipient. Meta is still a platform, it's just one you access by way of a username connected to your web activity instead of one you access by way of purchasing a specific device.

I am an iPhone user, in Australia and i have seen precisely zero iMessage chat groups even attempt to be created. Because everyone knows it’s a shitty pain in the ass service if someone doesn’t have an iPhone.

I'm glad people are so aware over there, but over here it's very uncommon for people to even be conscious of what phones their friends use. So an app that works well enough, as far as they can tell, is going to be the accepted default.

We all blame apple for that as we should not the android user. How it ended up inverted in the US is beyond me but it’s backwards af.

Because marketing.

This whole thing is a non issue being caused by lack of thought and logic of the users apparently almost exclusively in the USA

No, it's caused intentionally by Apple. They spent billions of dollars cultivating that perception in America, and it's paid off for them.

Personally i wish the default here was discord or signal but messenger is still far better than iMessage at least from a cross platform usability standpoint.

Yeah, and I wish the default here was pretty much anything else too. Like I said, I'm not trying to convince you. Just explaining the situation.