I postulate people would gladly pay a cup of coffee's worth for a first party app and/or subscription. Certainly easier than shelling out a few hundred bucks for an iDevice.

That’s kind of what I think. Make an iCloud subscription tier that includes access to messages and then include it in the web-browser version of iCloud and make an Android app for messages. I can’t imagine it would have to cost much more than $10-$15.

This would be an Apple service. It'd cost $99/month to view the text of messages on non-iPhone devices, and an additional $99/month to view any photos/videos/emojis attached to messages.

The base plan for iCloud+ is 99 cents a month and the next tier is $2.99, they're pretty reasonable about these services.

If I had billions of dollars and a yard the size of a small country I probably wouldn't mind...

> Who pays to run the servers? Who pays for the bandwidth?

I f%$@ing do. I paid when I bought an iPhone, Mac and iPad.

And even if it’s not enough - provide it as a service for a fee.