They didn't spend much time building this feature.

It was an acquihire involving a 16 year old who was doing it for fun.

Except they didn't hire him? He gave them some kind of info about the sms verifications, which they then had their devs implement.

The Github page for the iMessage hack said something about Beeper "acquiring" it. Not entirely sure what that means in practice since it was open source code on Github.

They contracted him

But what kind of attention did it garner? Now, we all know that these folks are pretty delusional. They spent time developing an app that everyone except them knew was not long for the world. A rational company would realize that it wouldn't live long enough to recoup any money. Releasing such a still born product doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy about it. Hell, Google releases products that live longer than this.

Besides the obvious attention play, he might be going for an acquisition play... "Why bother writing our own iMessage for Android when we can just buy this little company that's already done it?" There's obvious issues with that plan, but that doesn't keep delusional founders from being delusional.

Apple chose not to support Android on purpose. They know iMessage exclusivity drives hardware sales. The emails have come out proving as much.

It's the same reason they dragged their feet supporting RCS, until regulatory pressure started mounting.

exclusivity is all Apple runs on after it's tech succeeds

As much is apparent to anyone who has used Xcode or has encountered the special appeals process behind the official appeals process behind the ostensibly fair and evenly-applied public AppStore review process.

> They know iMessage exclusivity drives hardware sales. The emails have come out proving as much.

I find this incredibly hard to believe. And just because the Apple marketing department believes something is true, doesn't make it so.

Maybe I run in a weird crowd, but I've never met anyone who cares whether "text messages" are delivered over SMS or iMessage. In general most messaging I do happens over Signal, WhatsApp, Discord, or (in a few unfortunate cases) Instagram messenger.

Hard for you perhaps. Disclosures from the Apple v Epic litigation indicate it's true.

https://www.thurrott.com/apple/248931/apple-didnt-bring-imes...

I must be an idiot. Never even heard of iMessage before this debacle - I wouldnt even know I was using it.

On a more serious note regarding the Hardware sales- Apple inc does not make that much profit based on "what" they sell, its "who" they are selling to.

iMessage is the former name for Apple's Messages app on macOS and iOS. Some people still use the former name as it's a bit more distinct than the current name and/or it's what they're used to. See also iTunes/Music and iCalendar/Calendar, or people who still call macOS "Mac OSX/MacOS X/MACOS X" and so on.

iMessage is Apple's proprietary chat protocol. It's still named that -- for instance in iMessage apps and iMessage stickers. "Messages" is the current name of the user facing app that speaks both iMessage and SMS, which was formerly named "Text" when it just used SMS. I think you're thinking of the defunct iChat message client on macOS.

Ah, maybe I got my wires crossed. Was the app really never called iMessage or iMessages? My bad.

Actually not quite. iMessage is the protocol/service used by the Messages app to communicate between two iPhones. Conversely when you send a message between an iPhone and any other kind of device it uses SMS.

It’s possible that the GP is unfamiliar with iMessage because they don’t live in NA. I have neither sent nor received an iMessage for several years. I use the Messages app for receiving SMS OTP codes only and pretty much nothing else.

> It did buy them a whole lot of attention.

Ding ding ding! We have a winner!

Continue to watch this space, remember - He created the pebble. The cost of this "Experiment", to put forward a point at a super simple level. reverse engineering architecture and providing a service on top of this would be a huge space, if it were allowed.