Working with carriers proved to be harder than thought

Oct 22, 2018 06:37 GMT  ·  By

iMessage is without a doubt one of the reasons that many people stick with iPhones, and while in Europe WhatsApp is the preferred instant messaging platform, there are regions, like the United States, where Apple’s service is insanely popular.

This makes iMessage one of the main reasons not to move to Android for many customers, as a potential switch would technically set a communications barrier that’s considered to be too much of a setback to be worth the effort.

However, iMessage not coming to Android isn’t necessarily something that Apple planned from the very beginning. In an analysis of how important iMessage is for iPhone customers, Joanna Stern of the WSJ reveals that the Cupertino-based company initially got in touch with carriers in an attempt to bring at least some of its features to the standard text messaging service.

“We approached the carriers to pursue adding features to the existing texting systems and removing the additional customer costs. For various reasons, from the difficulty of extending the existing standards, to challenges with interoperability between texting systems and carriers, to the desire of carriers to protect a significant revenue stream, these explorations didn’t pan out,” Scott Forstall, Apple’s former senior vice president of iOS software, has been quoted as saying.

No chance to see iMessage on Android

While this doesn’t necessarily mean that Apple wanted to bring the full iMessage package to all phones, it’s a sign that the company may have offered some sort of compatibility if carriers agreed with it.

In the last few years, there have been several attempts to bring iMessage to the Android ecosystem, but all of them have either been blocked by Apple or stopped working following changes that the company made to the service.

As things are right now, using iMessage on an Android device is impossible and given how essential it has become for the iPhone, it’s unlikely Apple plans to do anything about it.