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Agreed - though at least in my contacts in the UK, everyone uses WhatsApp (and whatsapp groups) instead of FB. People used to make a FB event for a party now ma

Agreed - though at least in my contacts in the UK, everyone uses WhatsApp (and whatsapp groups) instead of FB. People used to make a FB event for a party now make a WhatsApp group which everyone gets invited into. I think what Facebook is very very good at is tracking the market and identifying potential competitors and buying them up. My previous thoughts (and still are) was that FB would become a media holding company, similar to Comcast or Fox/News Corp. The problems I now see for them is they are really starting to piss off regulators, who will probably not look kindly to future acquisitions, especially larger ones. They also have a problem that WhatsApp is IMO cannibalising their core 'social media' offerings and I can't see how they can commercialise that product without eroding the privacy and/or simplicity aspects which make it so popular. In hindsight I think Apple locking iMessage to iPhone was a mistake. If they'd released an Android version Apple would have surpassed WhatsApp in non-US markets where iPhone penetration is lower, and would have dominated the messaging space like it does in the US, as they'd be preinstalled on every iPhone to seed the market.

TAForObvReasons 8y ago
iMessage arguably serves as lock-in for the iPhone user base. If it were supported on android, many people would switch to the less expensive Android + iMessage ecosystem, likely enough to really make a dent in their cash cow
- isostatic 8y ago
  There are many reasons to move off iphone (not least the lack of earphones), but imessage is so integrated with SMS that I don't know anyone who considers it different on any level other than geeks knowing it intellectually. On the other hand there are benefits to the ecosystem - find my iphone for example. Personally I, and wife, and motherinlaw, are on SEs because my mother's android phone is crap. It's just stopped ringing again -- last time required a software update. iphones still Just Work. In my experience of people with half a dozen Androids over the last 6 years, they are Just Shit. People buy them because they are cheap, not because they are good. People buy iphones because they are good, not because of messaging lockin. However that aside, across android and iphone, people constantly use whatsapp though because of groups and simplicity.
  - lol768 8y ago
    >In my experience of people with half a dozen Androids over the last 6 years, they are Just Shit. As some of the other commenters alluded to, there really are a huge variety of different devices. I'd be curious as to whether the folks you knew were buying e.g. Google's Nexus or Pixel devices which IME have generally felt higher quality to use, or whether they were Samsung/HTC/Huwaei-branded devices.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      Are there any devices that have five years worth of OS upgrades?
      - davrosthedalek 8y ago
        While I agree that this is nice, many people upgrade their phones every 2-3 years anyway, just because of the hardware/battery. For them, this is not a selling point.
        nmcfarl 8y ago
        I do think that people buy new phones when they break, or become unusable. And that does seem to be 2-3 years on Android, but iPhones last longer - and with battery replacement, which this year has made very popular, they last even longer. iPhone 4,5 and 6's are still the majority of iphones in my extended family and less techy friends - and they were bought new. Anyhow - the main reason I even commented was that people in the antique iPhone camp /regularly/ say they'll never go to Android cause the phones don't last. I really think people would like to keep their phones for as long as their laptops. And iPhones are the way to do that and that it is a selling point.
        scarface74 8y ago
        Most of my upgrades except for the 5 were not hardware related - directly. The first iPhone I bought was a 4 in 2010. I “upgraded” to a 4s because I got a much better deal through my employer to use Verizon and the 4 had separate GSM/CDMA versions. My son used the 4 from the time I switched from Verizon to T-Mobile until 2013 and upgraded up until iOS 7. My next upgrade was to the 5 and again it was because of a change of carriers and Verizon wouldn’t unlock the GSM part of the phone for domestic use. The 5/5C were the last 32 bit iPhones. I consider the first 64-bit iPhone to be like the first Core 2 Duos. At that point the phone was “good enough” and fast enough for most people. My first 64 bit phone was the 6s in 2015. My son is still using it now with an Apple battery case. I would have kept it, but I needed a larger screen (iPhone 8 plus) to watch text heavy technical videos and the battery life is much better. I don’t see any reason unless I physically damage this phone that I won’t keep it for another 4 years. I’ll probably replace my 9.7” iPad before I replace my phone and I don’t see myself doing that anytime soon.
- matwood 8y ago
  I think you are over simplifying the situation in assuming that if iMessage was open there would be a mass exodus from the iOS platform. The people looking for the cheapest phone solution have already switched to Android (or were always Android). iMessage may serve as some lock-in, but there are many other reasons that people prefer iOS and Apple devices.
- IggleSniggle 8y ago
  The irony there is I keep iMessage turned off since I want a platform agnostic, lowest common denominator (as in social availability) messaging system, and I can get that with SMS via a Google Voice number.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  As another datapoint, iMessage is probably the least useful thing to me in the whole ecosystem. Apple has nowhere enough market penetration around here (N Euro) for it to be useful as anything more than an SMS app.
  - freehunter 8y ago
    I live in the US but have many friends from northern Europe and I've noticed the same thing. The only thing I use WhatsApp for is communicating with my European friends, and every single one of them prefers it over text or iMessage even though they all have iPhones.
    - izacus 8y ago
      Probably because it lets you communicate with everyone without being That Asshole who judges you over brand of electronics you bought.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  I seriously don't think that that is true. Sure, you'd find some people who would. But not the majority. iMessage is great, but it's not the reason people buy iPhones. It is one of the reasons.
gaius 8y ago
think what Facebook is very very good at is tracking the market and identifying potential competitors Well, they did that with Onavo didn’t they? Snooping VPN traffic to see who else their users were using. It remains to be seen if they can be as astute without that backdoor.
dade_ 8y ago
They just need a leader with ethical qualities. They have always been lacking there, and birds of a feather...
samat 8y ago
iMessage (and more importantly, FaceTime) is the single most important reason why I buy apple devices for my whole extended family, so that we can communicate without ads, with privacy and with proper security in place. So that's pretty decent market strategy on Apple's end, i'd say.
- rhexs 8y ago
  I'd kill for a way to use iMessage on my Windows desktop, so Apple is doing a great, albeit frustrating, job selling the Apple ecosystem. Wish I could at least use icloud.com. Even went as far as to look into how hard it would be to use VMWare to get a OS X desktop going. 4 GB and a processor core would be worth it, but unfortunately it looks difficult.
  - stevewodil 8y ago
    You can do it in virtual box but there's no graphics drivers, so it's not the most pleasant user experience. You wanna buy my MacBook pro from me? Lol
    - firmgently 8y ago
      I feel like this makes it sound worse than it is. I run El Capitan in a VM on a 6 year old ThinkPad with a 3rd-gen i5 and it's fine. I use Safari with developer tools to debug web stuff and I've not noticed any unpleasantness. I don't use iMessage so maybe it's particularly graphics-intensive or depends on a lot of GPU acceleration (would seem strange in a chat app). Video chat might be affected I suppose? Anyway it may well be worth trying so I didn't want people to be unduly put off.
      - stevewodil 8y ago
        What resolution do you run the VM at? Also it's possible that El Capitan has graphics acceleration in VM's, whereas the later versions of macOS definitely do not
  - singularity2001 8y ago
ams6110 8y ago
It seems to me that Apple could deploy iMessage and FaceTime versions for Android whenever they wanted to. The only reason they aren't is probably that they don't want to cannibalize sales of their own hardware.
- zimpenfish 8y ago
  That would surely have to imply they trusted the creators of the Android OS to be as security- and privacy-concerned as the iOS creators, no?
  - krageon 8y ago
    This is a company, and as such their core driving force is money. If you are framing them as having different driving forces that will make their behavior on occasion seem really weird.
onyva 8y ago
Agreed about iMessage. Didn’t mind deleteting my Facebook and Instagram accounts (with couple of hundreds of followers) but WhatsApp is almost a requirement in some respects (work, school, family over seas). Would love to get rid of it ASAP for a product from a source I can trust... wish Mozilla were in the messaging business...
- FabHK 8y ago
  What's wrong with Wire or Signal?
  - dimillian 8y ago
    People. Nobody using it. My mom is not on it. What the point?
    - cft 8y ago
      All my programmer / enterpreneural friends are on Signal / Telegram. All business communication is there.
      - parliament32 8y ago
        Ditto, I was pleasantly surprised to see a huge number of people at work / industry acquaintances already on it when I switched it to my default SMS app. I love how SMS/Signal are seamlessly together in one app if you choose to combine them.
  - pseudalopex 8y ago
    Signal requires a mobile phone number. The iPhone app isn't bad, but it's buggier than Messages and doesn't rotate. The desktop app has the usual Electron problems.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
iMessage on Android would be huge. Do that, then introduce a meetup feature and I swear half the people I know who "have to use Facebook" would delete their account. FB would shrivel up in five years.
- parliament32 8y ago
  I feel like this would go about as well as BBM's Android release a few years back. Non-iphone users would use it for a bit then switch back off as the novelty of "yet another ecosystem messaging app" wears off. The proper way to do this is to convince people to switch to an app that integrates other messaging platforms as well: people switch to Signal and stay on it because they send all their normal SMSes run though the app as well. Then as their friends switch to Signal their conversations are painlessly migrated, everything looks the same, you just get a bonus "lock" icon.
fosco 8y ago
isn't whatsapp owned by facebook? and instagram (in parent comment) why do people differentiate them from facebook? to me you are still using facebook just an 'app' under facebook. I feel this is akin to saying I use gmail but not google. am I wrong here?
- distances 8y ago
  The difference is in encryption. WhatsApp has end-to-end, while other FB products obviously do not. Also, the current lack of ads. It's an improvement even if not a perfect solution.
  - fosco 8y ago
    I think what I'm saying is specifically it is facebook whatsapp like it is google gmail or apple messaging. it appears that people often refer to this as different companies and they are not. it being e2e encrypted does not change who owns, makes decisions on where the future of it goes, and if it will continue to exist in 5 years. it is still facebook and not 'whatsapp' by itself above and in many areas people refer to whatsapp and instagram as different entities and they are not, I'm concerned with people acting like it is.
basch 8y ago
>My previous thoughts (and still are) was that FB would become a media holding company, similar to Comcast or Fox/News Corp. Facebook should become a compute platform like AWS/Azure that specalizes in compute services for social services, including but not limited to authentication, spam detection, censorship/moderation tools, social graph, storage, bandwidth, localization, learning, ranking.

TAForObvReasons 8y ago

iMessage arguably serves as lock-in for the iPhone user base. If it were supported on android, many people would switch to the less expensive Android + iMessage ecosystem, likely enough to really make a dent in their cash cow

isostatic 8y ago
There are many reasons to move off iphone (not least the lack of earphones), but imessage is so integrated with SMS that I don't know anyone who considers it different on any level other than geeks knowing it intellectually. On the other hand there are benefits to the ecosystem - find my iphone for example. Personally I, and wife, and motherinlaw, are on SEs because my mother's android phone is crap. It's just stopped ringing again -- last time required a software update. iphones still Just Work. In my experience of people with half a dozen Androids over the last 6 years, they are Just Shit. People buy them because they are cheap, not because they are good. People buy iphones because they are good, not because of messaging lockin. However that aside, across android and iphone, people constantly use whatsapp though because of groups and simplicity.
- lol768 8y ago
  >In my experience of people with half a dozen Androids over the last 6 years, they are Just Shit. As some of the other commenters alluded to, there really are a huge variety of different devices. I'd be curious as to whether the folks you knew were buying e.g. Google's Nexus or Pixel devices which IME have generally felt higher quality to use, or whether they were Samsung/HTC/Huwaei-branded devices.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Are there any devices that have five years worth of OS upgrades?
    - davrosthedalek 8y ago
      While I agree that this is nice, many people upgrade their phones every 2-3 years anyway, just because of the hardware/battery. For them, this is not a selling point.
      - nmcfarl 8y ago
        I do think that people buy new phones when they break, or become unusable. And that does seem to be 2-3 years on Android, but iPhones last longer - and with battery replacement, which this year has made very popular, they last even longer. iPhone 4,5 and 6's are still the majority of iphones in my extended family and less techy friends - and they were bought new. Anyhow - the main reason I even commented was that people in the antique iPhone camp /regularly/ say they'll never go to Android cause the phones don't last. I really think people would like to keep their phones for as long as their laptops. And iPhones are the way to do that and that it is a selling point.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        Most of my upgrades except for the 5 were not hardware related - directly. The first iPhone I bought was a 4 in 2010. I “upgraded” to a 4s because I got a much better deal through my employer to use Verizon and the 4 had separate GSM/CDMA versions. My son used the 4 from the time I switched from Verizon to T-Mobile until 2013 and upgraded up until iOS 7. My next upgrade was to the 5 and again it was because of a change of carriers and Verizon wouldn’t unlock the GSM part of the phone for domestic use. The 5/5C were the last 32 bit iPhones. I consider the first 64-bit iPhone to be like the first Core 2 Duos. At that point the phone was “good enough” and fast enough for most people. My first 64 bit phone was the 6s in 2015. My son is still using it now with an Apple battery case. I would have kept it, but I needed a larger screen (iPhone 8 plus) to watch text heavy technical videos and the battery life is much better. I don’t see any reason unless I physically damage this phone that I won’t keep it for another 4 years. I’ll probably replace my 9.7” iPad before I replace my phone and I don’t see myself doing that anytime soon.
matwood 8y ago
I think you are over simplifying the situation in assuming that if iMessage was open there would be a mass exodus from the iOS platform. The people looking for the cheapest phone solution have already switched to Android (or were always Android). iMessage may serve as some lock-in, but there are many other reasons that people prefer iOS and Apple devices.
IggleSniggle 8y ago
The irony there is I keep iMessage turned off since I want a platform agnostic, lowest common denominator (as in social availability) messaging system, and I can get that with SMS via a Google Voice number.
Sharlin 8y ago
As another datapoint, iMessage is probably the least useful thing to me in the whole ecosystem. Apple has nowhere enough market penetration around here (N Euro) for it to be useful as anything more than an SMS app.
- freehunter 8y ago
  I live in the US but have many friends from northern Europe and I've noticed the same thing. The only thing I use WhatsApp for is communicating with my European friends, and every single one of them prefers it over text or iMessage even though they all have iPhones.
  - izacus 8y ago
    Probably because it lets you communicate with everyone without being That Asshole who judges you over brand of electronics you bought.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
I seriously don't think that that is true. Sure, you'd find some people who would. But not the majority. iMessage is great, but it's not the reason people buy iPhones. It is one of the reasons.

gaius 8y ago

think what Facebook is very very good at is tracking the market and identifying potential competitors Well, they did that with Onavo didn’t they? Snooping VPN traffic to see who else their users were using. It remains to be seen if they can be as astute without that backdoor.

dade_ 8y ago

They just need a leader with ethical qualities. They have always been lacking there, and birds of a feather...

samat 8y ago

iMessage (and more importantly, FaceTime) is the single most important reason why I buy apple devices for my whole extended family, so that we can communicate without ads, with privacy and with proper security in place. So that's pretty decent market strategy on Apple's end, i'd say.

rhexs 8y ago
I'd kill for a way to use iMessage on my Windows desktop, so Apple is doing a great, albeit frustrating, job selling the Apple ecosystem. Wish I could at least use icloud.com. Even went as far as to look into how hard it would be to use VMWare to get a OS X desktop going. 4 GB and a processor core would be worth it, but unfortunately it looks difficult.
- stevewodil 8y ago
  You can do it in virtual box but there's no graphics drivers, so it's not the most pleasant user experience. You wanna buy my MacBook pro from me? Lol
  - firmgently 8y ago
    I feel like this makes it sound worse than it is. I run El Capitan in a VM on a 6 year old ThinkPad with a 3rd-gen i5 and it's fine. I use Safari with developer tools to debug web stuff and I've not noticed any unpleasantness. I don't use iMessage so maybe it's particularly graphics-intensive or depends on a lot of GPU acceleration (would seem strange in a chat app). Video chat might be affected I suppose? Anyway it may well be worth trying so I didn't want people to be unduly put off.
    - stevewodil 8y ago
      What resolution do you run the VM at? Also it's possible that El Capitan has graphics acceleration in VM's, whereas the later versions of macOS definitely do not
- singularity2001 8y ago

ams6110 8y ago

It seems to me that Apple could deploy iMessage and FaceTime versions for Android whenever they wanted to. The only reason they aren't is probably that they don't want to cannibalize sales of their own hardware.

zimpenfish 8y ago
That would surely have to imply they trusted the creators of the Android OS to be as security- and privacy-concerned as the iOS creators, no?
- krageon 8y ago
  This is a company, and as such their core driving force is money. If you are framing them as having different driving forces that will make their behavior on occasion seem really weird.

onyva 8y ago

Agreed about iMessage. Didn’t mind deleteting my Facebook and Instagram accounts (with couple of hundreds of followers) but WhatsApp is almost a requirement in some respects (work, school, family over seas). Would love to get rid of it ASAP for a product from a source I can trust... wish Mozilla were in the messaging business...

FabHK 8y ago
What's wrong with Wire or Signal?
- dimillian 8y ago
  People. Nobody using it. My mom is not on it. What the point?
  - cft 8y ago
    All my programmer / enterpreneural friends are on Signal / Telegram. All business communication is there.
    - parliament32 8y ago
      Ditto, I was pleasantly surprised to see a huge number of people at work / industry acquaintances already on it when I switched it to my default SMS app. I love how SMS/Signal are seamlessly together in one app if you choose to combine them.
- pseudalopex 8y ago
  Signal requires a mobile phone number. The iPhone app isn't bad, but it's buggier than Messages and doesn't rotate. The desktop app has the usual Electron problems.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

iMessage on Android would be huge. Do that, then introduce a meetup feature and I swear half the people I know who "have to use Facebook" would delete their account. FB would shrivel up in five years.

parliament32 8y ago
I feel like this would go about as well as BBM's Android release a few years back. Non-iphone users would use it for a bit then switch back off as the novelty of "yet another ecosystem messaging app" wears off. The proper way to do this is to convince people to switch to an app that integrates other messaging platforms as well: people switch to Signal and stay on it because they send all their normal SMSes run though the app as well. Then as their friends switch to Signal their conversations are painlessly migrated, everything looks the same, you just get a bonus "lock" icon.

fosco 8y ago

isn't whatsapp owned by facebook? and instagram (in parent comment) why do people differentiate them from facebook? to me you are still using facebook just an 'app' under facebook. I feel this is akin to saying I use gmail but not google. am I wrong here?

distances 8y ago
The difference is in encryption. WhatsApp has end-to-end, while other FB products obviously do not. Also, the current lack of ads. It's an improvement even if not a perfect solution.
- fosco 8y ago
  I think what I'm saying is specifically it is facebook whatsapp like it is google gmail or apple messaging. it appears that people often refer to this as different companies and they are not. it being e2e encrypted does not change who owns, makes decisions on where the future of it goes, and if it will continue to exist in 5 years. it is still facebook and not 'whatsapp' by itself above and in many areas people refer to whatsapp and instagram as different entities and they are not, I'm concerned with people acting like it is.

basch 8y ago

>My previous thoughts (and still are) was that FB would become a media holding company, similar to Comcast or Fox/News Corp. Facebook should become a compute platform like AWS/Azure that specalizes in compute services for social services, including but not limited to authentication, spam detection, censorship/moderation tools, social graph, storage, bandwidth, localization, learning, ranking.