14 DAY TRIAL // Apple’s iMessage is said to be experiencing an outage, though right now, very little information is actually available.
While iMessage appears to be working correctly on my devices, there’s a chance the service is down only in some specific regions.
Apple has confirmed on its service status page that iMessage is currently unavailable, though the company hasn’t shared any specifics on what exactly went wrong.
However, users apparently can no longer send messages to contacts, while others are said to be provided with a sign-in screen when opening the app.
The investigation is under way, so there’s no ETA as to when iMessage to could be up and running again.
iMessage still exclusive to iPhone
Needless to say, only iPhone users are affected by the glitch because iMessage is an Apple-exclusive feature. The company has previously refused to bring the service to Android devices, with the legal fight against Epic revealing that the Cupertino-based tech giant believed that expanding iMessage to Google’s platform would have hurt the company.
On the other hand, there’s no doubt that iMessage launching on non-Apple platforms would be quite a big hit that would make more people committed to Apple’s ecosystem and introduce them to a world they could eventually embrace by getting an iPhone and therefore receiving the native experience.
At this point, for example, the battle for the world’s number one messaging platform is dominated by WhatsApp, but the Facebook-owned company is struggling to maintain its userbase after a controversial privacy policy update that has pushed users en-masse to rival platforms, such as Telegram and Signal.
Of course, the lack of iMessage on Android doesn’t allow Apple to benefit from the WhatsApp exodus, especially because its service is locked to its very own ecosystem with no cross-platform expansion in sight.