Just to counter your anecdote, I've never had a single performance issue on the Android Messages app on my phone or the web interface. I have had friends with iPhones that fail to render images I've sent them, and they send this obnoxious "so and so responded with a thumbs up" (still do, android phones just do the right thing now and show a thumbs up reaction instead of the text). So YMMV. Apple needs to fix their broken messaging app.