iMessage: so much power that it’s choking competition, or a total failure? It depends on who you ask
Anything with Apple’s name attached to it is a lightning rod for controversy, and lately it’s been iMessage’s turn under the microscope.
Apple’s iMessage service is extremely popular with iPhone users, at least here in the United States. It’s become something of a joke amongst iPhone users to talk about “blue bubble people” (fellow iPhone/iMessage users) and “green bubble people” (people who can only communicate with iPhone users via SMS; typically Android users). Google, a company who has gone from failure to failure in trying to replicate the success of iMessage, recently took to Twitter to whine about the popularity of iMessage. From Hiroshi Lockheimer, a senior vice president at Google:
Apple’s iMessage lock-in is a documented strategy. Using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity as a core part of its marketing. The standards exist today to fix this.
When people use the word “lock-in” they’re generally just trying to take a fairly basic business practice and cloak it in the darkest sounding language. Every business wants to make its products and services so compelling that you don’t want to give them up even if there are compelling reasons to adopt a competitor’s product and service.
The use of “peer pressure” and “bullying” was in response to a piece in the Wall Street Journal that delved into the way kids in school utilize messaging services like iMessage. Kids are going to find ways to give other kids a hard time about all sorts of choices that they make, and there’s really not much Apple can do with that.
What Google is really doing is trying to lobby Congress and the court system to levy the power of the State against Apple to compel it to open iMessage to Android.
These kind of things tend to have a life cycle: one service becomes extremely possible, then is disrupted by a new service, and eventually both are consigned to history. When I was in high school and college, AOL Instant Messenger was extremely possible. If you weren’t on it, you were missing out on a key medium for social interaction with your peers. A decade later no one was using it. I remember sometime around 2008 or 2009 when I was working in Apple Retail, a woman came in to buy an iPhone and brought her high school-aged daughter with her. The daughter was completely uninterested in the iPhone because all of her friends at the time were on Blackberry Messenger. She thought the iPhone was completely uncool. BBM isn’t even a thing any more and high school kids today have probably never heard of it. iMessage is extremely popular now, at least in the U.S. Will it be just as popular a decade from now? That remains to be seen.
Meanwhile over at Macworld, Jason Snell has a piece with the bold title, “Google is wrong. Apple’s iMessage is actually a failure.” Says Snell:
When you look at the messaging landscape today, iMessage isn’t a colossus that dominates the world. In fact, I’d say that iMessage’s first decade is more of a failure than a success in terms of worldwide acceptance, user experience, and innovation.
This just strikes me as curmudgeonly, and I actually think most of the piece is more evenhanded than this paragraph. While it’s true that some of the things Apple has tried to bolt on to the Messages/iMessage experience haven’t caught on (stickers being the first thing that comes to mind), iPhone users love the overall experience of using iMessage. Tapback and media sharing are quite popular, and I think Memoji has been a popular pairing as well. “Success” and “failure” has a lot to do with expectations, as this bit from later in the piece illustrates:
Since Apple made that choice not to support Android, though, it’s probably safe to say that Apple never actually intended for iMessage to compete for instant-message domination over the rest of the world. Its charter was always a bit more limited. The goal was to change Apple’s operating systems so they were no longer dependent on the ancient, carrier-controlled SMS text message system. And by that standard, Apple was successful.
If your standard for failure includes the fact that iMessage is dominant in America, but not really anywhere else for the most part, fine. But as Snell concedes, that doesn’t seem to be what Apple was setting out to do, and they’ve more than exceeded their expectations for the service.
The reality is that iMessage is neither a failure in any reasonable sense, nor is it the anti-competitive monster that Google wants people to think it is. It’s just a really good service for iPhone users that will probably never extend beyond that. And as an iPhone user, I’m ok with that.