Apple’s iMessage is a free messaging service among its iPhone users. It’s a highly popular feature and for this reason Google and other third-party companies have attempted to create a similar chatting platform for Android devices. Google has partly achieved this with Messages, but it still has a long way to go to reach Apple’s level.

One might reasonably wonder why Apple didn’t develop iMessage for the Android OS themselves. The answer came inadvertently, and probably by mistake! The trigger was Apple’s legal dispute with Epic Games over the Fortnite game, which subsequently turned into a fierce attack against its app store policy.

In the lawsuit, which is expected to start on May 3, 2021, Epic Games will directly accuse Apple’s executive team for restricting the use of iMessage on its platforms. This decision was made in 2013 as the power of iMessage proved to be extremely strong, providing an incentive for users not to leave the Apple ecosystem.

In the past, the Vice President of Apple’s Internet Software and Services himself had stated that a version of iMessage for Android would be feasible from a design and implementation perspective and even suggested compatibility between the two operating systems. This means that iOS and Android users could easily converse with each other. On the contrary, the Vice President of the Software Engineering department and head of iOS, Craig Federighi, had claimed that iMessage on any device would simply serve parents to give Android smartphones to their children and other family members.

Many more Apple executives agree that iMessage is a very strong incentive for keeping users loyal to the Apple ecosystem, so they would not easily sacrifice it. It is clear that this is a strategy of Apple, refusing to share the feature in order to retain its audience. There are no technical or technological constraints. While no one can blame them, it is remarkable that Google, even years later, has not managed to come up with something equivalent to compete with it.