IT Blog

For years, the idea of Apple’s iMessage messaging service coming to Android has felt like an impossible dream.

Tech writers—myself included—have made all kinds of arguments for why Apple’s chat app shouldn’t be exclusive to iOS and Mac. We’ve made the business case, the marketing case, the moral case, and even the emotional case. So far, it’s all been in vain. For Apple, iMessage has been too strategically important for keeping people locked into the company’s ecosystem. Apple executives have even acknowledged this in their own internal communications.

And yet, the case for iMessage on Android is stronger now than it’s ever been. Bringing the chat service to other platforms would both cement Apple’s position as a privacy leader and relieve some antitrust pressure on the company. And at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote this week, Apple—intentionally or not—quietly laid out a blueprint for how it could happen.

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