Funnily enough, that's exactly what they did do, back in 2008 :) Originally Android included an XMPP API that applications could use to connect to Google and o

Funnily enough, that's exactly what they did do, back in 2008 :) Originally Android included an XMPP API that applications could use to connect to Google and other XMPP services. This got replaced by a Google Talk-specific API at the same time they switched to a proprietary protocol. E.g. http://blog.kosmokaryote.org/2008/02/google-cannot-be-my-champion.html http://blog.kosmokaryote.org/2008/02/google-cannot-be-my-cha...