Do people really buy iPhones just for iMessage? It’s one of the nicer benefits of using an iPhone, and communicating with other iPhone users, but it’s hard to say how much of a selling point it is.
The question is what impact iMessage on Android would have had. Though you could argue that WhatsApp was already on its way there, which is why Facebook paid $19 billion for the company.
Instead, the Facebook-owned WhatsApp cemented itself as the go-to cross-platform messenger of choice. Certainly not since RCS isn’t supported on the iPhone. The company has been pushing for mass adoption of iMessage-like RCS messaging over the past couple of years, but that hasn’t made much of an impact. Google has struggled with messaging apps over the years, and there have been several attempts to offer instant messaging that never really took off. A lot has changed since 2013īut with the benefit of hindsight, we know that Cue’s fears never played out the way he imagined. Unfortunately, the rest of the conversation that could pertain to iMessage is redacted, and we can’t see what else Cue might have said on the topic. As Cue pointed out, the search giant already had search, email, video, and browsers under its belt at the time. iMessage on Android would also prevent Google from asserting its dominance in another field. The idea of that project being that it would give users on both iOS and Android a way to “exchange messages with one another seamlessly."Ĭue’s argument was that Apple had the best messaging service at the time, and by porting it to Android it could become “the industry standard”. It turns out that Cue disagreed with this argument, having already recommended that Apple make iMessage on Android “an official project”.