> Opening for third party developers This is basically going to involve a lot of initial engineering effort no matter how you slice it. Cleaning up and opening

> Opening for third party developers This is basically going to involve a lot of initial engineering effort no matter how you slice it. Cleaning up and opening a codebase, or turning a private protocol into a for-public-consumption interoperable multi-platform messaging protocol is a huge undertaking. Possibly even bigger than maintaining a second closed Android-only implementation of iMessage. Second, there is a ton of design decision that needs to be put into that, too. What do you do with iMessage iCloud backups of users who switch to Android? From Android? Do you interoperate with other backup providers? Does this change the fundamental nature of iCloud backups? How do you interoperate with forks? > Apple could fall back on a more modern MMS version, like RCS They could. But that is also significant engineering effort and not something they get "for free." If it doesn't make the iPhone-to-iPhone experience any better, they aren't likely to invest heavily in it I don't think there's an intention to make people unhappy, I just very much doubt that there are many Android users working at Apple who want to see this in their day to day lives, and Apple tends to build products for themselves first. Lots of other people just happen to buy them