Matthew W.

Apps like Beeper wouldn't exist at all if Apple hadn't been stubbornly, purposefully and artificially making messaging between iPhone and Android utter garbage for years. And I'm not holding my breath for their adoption of RCS to fix everything - I'm sure Apple will find some way to make RCS artificially worse than iMessage.

Where exactly does Google fit into this? You don't provide a single example of a Google Assistant speaker being "inexcusably terrible" at knowing when it's being spoken to. All of your examples were Alexa-powered devices, and my experience with Google Assistant has been quite good. I have a Google Home, two Google Home minis, and I use Google Assistant pretty regularly on my iPhone Xr quite a bit, and it has never once failed to recognize me, it always knows the difference between myself and my husband (I know this because the Google Assistant voice is different) and it's never misunderstood a request. And while Siri is also very good at recognizing when it's being called, it fails to understand requests correctly on a regular basis. So much so, that the only time I invoke Siri is to tell it to go to Google Assistant, because Apple stubbornly refuses to allow other assistants to be invoked directly on iPhone.