You can attend or not attend someone's birthday party or other event for any reason. You don't owe them your presence if you don't want to be there.

However, it's a totally valid question to ask "why are you guys friends?" Doesn't sound like OP likes this guy much, and I kinda think the answer is that they USED to be friends in a more meaningful way, and OP didn't want to ruffle feathers by saying anything when his feelings about the friendship changed.

There are ads everywhere. To a certain extent, you can pay money to avoid them, but they're slowly sneaking their way back into some paid services as well.

Came here to say this. I HATE it when I set a reasonable volume level for the show, and all the commercials are twice as loud. Grrr!

I didn't know most of this.

Totally seamless Android to Android, and the videos are normal quality. And what are the multiple places to update core functionally of the phone? I get updates periodically, and I honestly have my doubts about whether any other place to check could really include "core functionality", but maybe there's another place for something about how it interacts with iPhones.

I tend not to send/receive a lot of videos, but the biggest problem I've had connecting between Android and iPhone was really more about the fact that I used to have an iPhone. When I switched, most things worked fine, but I stopped receiving texts from a few other iPhone users. I'd only notice I had missed anything, in most cases, days later when I opened up my Mac computer, and the iMessages would pour in that I never received on the phone. I kept telling these people to change their settings to send me regular texts rather than iMessages, but it turned out there was a setting I needed to change in my Apple account to disable "use iMessage". After that change, they all started coming to my phone like any other texts, but Apple definitely could have made that transition easier (if they cared to) by automatically sending these as texts if the user hadn't had an iPhone online in some time. If I hadn't still had a Mac computer, I might never have known about many of these, and people might have just thought I was ignoring them!

If you use iMessage on an iPhone, other messages from iMessage come in with a different bubble color than texts/SMS/MMS that don't come from iMessage. That's anything from a non-Apple device.

Why anyone cares, though, is all elitist nonsense. 🤷‍♂️