I actually have a mac mini running as a imessage relay and using (https://bluebubbles.app/) to relay them to my android (been using it the moment I switched from ios to android). It works quite well.

The anoying catch is you have to use imessage via email. The biggest draw is imessage on iphone will show two duplicate chats one for sms and one for email.

I’m sorta working on decomissioning that relay and either switching to the closest 3rdparty app or moving people to sms. I don’t have many imessage group chats (I basically have none right now). Hence why I made this post (to test the waters)

As for image quality a partial solution is if I need to use sms I can either use google photos or samsung link share (though this only preservers the quality of images/videos I send and doesn’t fix poor quality photos comming back to me).