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Comment by marinhero | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this means Apple will bring iMessage to Android in a year or two just to mess with Facebook Messenger.

Apple could have brought iMessage to android at any time. They explicitly choose not to because of the social pressure to buy an iPhone this places on youth. This was pretty explicitly laid out in the Epic v Apple case.

That plan only worked in the US though, and it spectacularly backfired everywhere else, where iMessage is mostly irrelevant.

I know a guy that never set up iMessage on his iPhone - when I asked him why he didn't, he just told me he only uses SMS for OTP which he reads from the notification, so it never occured to him to open the Messages app at all.

It worked exceptionally well in the US though. You are a weird teenager if you have “green texts” - anecdata of course.

Doesn't seem like much of a "backfire", it gave Apple big strides in the US market and at worst resulted in less people using a free service Apple has to pay to operate in other markets.

Yeah, green means kick whoever isn't using Apple out of the group chat. Apple basically promotes bullying of kids who don't have an iPhone.

I agree. This seems like Apple is finally conceding it needs to bring FaceTime and Messages to Android and Windows, but it wants to do it slowly so that it looks like they don't care much.

BTW outside of the US, Whatsapp is (AFAIK) the most popular messenger. At least in the Western world. I don't know about China.

Western EU, yes. Eastern, not sure, Messenger and Viber seems more popular around Balkan for example

WeChat is the most popular chat app in China. It's a domestic messaging app with a lot of other apps built in.

I think Whatsapp and other E2E encrypted chat apps are banned.

In east Asia; China uses WeChat, South Korea uses KakaoTalk, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand uses LINE

ignorant q: does Messenger still hold much of market share? over the last few years almost all of my contacts transitioned to WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal. Messenger is just way too bloated.

My impression is that teenagers just use Instagram chat these days (or Snapchat).

Even better, have Apple adopt RCS.

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