I don’t understand why there’s such a hard push for iMessage access on Android. The tinkerer in me finds this thrilling to follow, but the end-user in me is skeptical.
First, Apple being this hard-headed forces a marketplace for third party messaging apps. I don’t want to see Apple (or Google, or Facebook) be responsible for the dominant messaging platform in the US. If iMessage is on Android, the lure of being able to immediately add 50% of the country to your phone becomes compelling and gets rid of the need of third party services for a lot of people. I’d imagine this would cause Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber, etc. to shrink.
Second, as an Apple user, I don’t see the excitement about having iMessage. I have group chats with all iPhone-buddies and mixed Android/iPhone. iMessage isn’t that exciting. The apps built around it and linked in Apple’s Messages app are the actual useful parts of it – Facetime to video chat and Find My to continuously show your friends on a map (great for traveling!). Maybe the games are silly fun from time to time?
I think the RCS adoption is what’ll solve a lot of issues that Beeper is wanting to solve here. Apple is supposedly working with the GSMA to create an E2E standard (vs. relying on Vibe’s proprietary encryption extension), we should be able to exchange higher quality media, and (I think) cross-platform interactivity around messages improves significantly.