The question must have crossed our minds at least once: why isn’t Apple taking advantage and launching? iMessage for Android, make your messaging universal and better known? Well, thanks to Epic Games’ legal battle against the App Store, we have an answer.
Using iMessage involves using Apple devices, outright
A series of documents that Epic Games has declassified state that the goal of keeping iMessage as an exclusive service for Apple devices is what you need to be thinking about: motivate people to buy these Apple devices. In emails Eddy Cue participated in, he reveals that the company could have brought iMessage to Android without a problem since 2013. It’s not about not being able, it’s about not wanting to do.
In the same emails, Federighi argued this corporate decision as a way to prevent families “buy Android smartphones for your kids“, knowing that iMessage would work on them. iMessage is a protocol widely used in the United States that prompts many citizens of the country to choose to use an iPhone.
Phil Schiller gives the last sentence of these emails provided by Epic Games: “Bringing iMessage to Android would do us more harm than good”. Maybe in countries like Europe, where WhatsApp is ubiquitous, it just doesn’t make sense. But in the United States, iMessage dominates, and that translates into device sales.
