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Comment by innagadadavida | Hacker News Reader

Apple should port Messages app to Android and other platforms, this is a great opportunity for them to capitalize on. It is unlikely though, as the strategy is to get people to buy iPhones to get Messages.

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There is already so much shame directed to the one family member that forces everyone else to use something other than iMessage. Sometimes they just get left out of conversations. Apple's taking this even further with improved photo sharing in iOS 12 (moving more families off Facebook/Instagram), and group FaceTime.

As a user I wish that these apps were widely available because I prefer them to alternatives, but as a shareholder I'm not at all upset by this. At least Apple is charging for these privacy-protecting apps, which is the most important detail about WhatsApp: it was already profitable charging users $1/year before acquisition. If Apple ever does release FaceTime and iMessage for Android I hope they charge subscription fees for both.

Yeah they’ve done a great job with the different colors. I hate it when I see those green clouds. I made some of my friends on Android message me via Signal (they refused to use WhatsApp) because I hated the green clouds so much.

Blackberry and BBM went this route already, and we know what happened to them. I think it is high time for Apple to jump the ship and get messages into Android. :)

Apple has a pretty good market share and in their home market (because it's viable there, many other countries have insane prices) iMessage is compatible with Android users by SMS. This may be good enough, plus iMessage is just one of the features they sell with their devices. I doubt these cases are very comparable.

Why? Having messages be iOS only, is working out perfectly for them.

Most iOS users get annoyed at the android users when they get green bubbles, instead of getting annoyed at Apple.

As long as that continues to be true, I don't see iMessage ever coming out for Android.

I just don’t see the "why". It would be a purely US feature, and would have limited appeal even there. iMessage on android isn’t going to sell any more iPhones, and I can’t see how it’s going to meaningfully change people’s behaviour. Everywhere else in the world just doesn’t use iMessage.

That would just be a jump from the frying pan into the fire. The real solution to all these problems lies in the use of decentralised services, e.g. XMPP+OMEMO connecting to a private server. This could be the same server as the one hosting any other privacy-sensitive services, e.g. Diaspora or GNU Social or something along those lines. It could also host a private mail server, a private "cloud" server, a private (meta-)search engine and any other services which you'd rather not have data-mined.

...and all that would fit on something like a Raspberry Pi 3B+ nowadays...

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