As for google: I have no idea what is up with the stupidity. What people want is simple: an app that works on the PC and the phone, that can do messaging that falls back to SMS if the other-end isn't capable of "data" based communications, and ideally has encryption as an option and video chat as an option. Hangouts was like 90% of the way there, and then for some reason they went insert offensive analogy here and decided to release allo and duo with half the functionality. And oh by the way, after the release of those two apps, Hangouts started acting goofy for a month (which I struggle to believe is coincidence as much as I hate conspiracy BS).
That said, VirnetX has also sued Apple about iMessage, so it's possible there's something to what you've said (but I've never heard it said before that Apple was going to open up iMessage).
Whether the culture has carried over, who knows.
Even as an iPhone user, I never would have thought iMessage was even in the top 5 or 10 reasons to keep using the platform. But I'm old, don't text all that much, and have unlimited SMS anyway.
I imagine all the cool kids these days are using alternative data-based services anyway. Snapchat, the like. For us old folks, WhatsApp, GroupMe, etc.
Yes and no, because friend groups are fragmented across services and iMessage or text is the common denominator, especially for group messages.
Apple doesn't make money through advertising they make it by selling phones. How does opening iMessages up to Android help them to sell more phones ?
[0] http://scripting.com/davenet/2001/04/30/strategyTax.html
I mean, what was the specific root cause?
I really like the messenger.com [1] version of the client.
Google was in a unique position to deliver a best-in-class messaging client and own the space: they have more users than Facebook or Apple and more good will than either of those companies (based on my own personal opinion and interactions).
Despite that, they've had numerous messaging platforms: Google Talk, Waze (kind of), Hangouts, and Google Voice. I wouldn't call any of them great products - they've all done barely good enough to stay useful, falling short in the areas of cross-platform reliability, group messaging, and multimedia messaging. Meanwhile companies like Slack are eating their lunch. I love Slack (and have in fact moved to using a private Slack team for personal messaging among friends) but it still saddens me a bit that a Google has failed to deliver a solid offering here.
It's pretty confusing and there are so many services that won't take either of my Google Voice numbers.
The libpurple/Hangups projects for chat clients is the work of reverse engineering the existing Hangouts protocol (which apparently heavily relies on protocol buffers).
Finally, it tells me that google still has no idea how to crack the messaging space, and has so no team internally that is taking charge but a bunch of teams with different approaches, all jockeying for executive support.
Google will lose this space because it lacks focus while Facebook is owning it through focus on the messenger platform and the acquisition of whatsapp.