Although Apple’s iMessage strategy has long been apparent, internal emails sent by company executives that were surfaced during the recent Epic Games trial confirmed the conscious importance of this strategy.
Google’s intervention here is not purely altruistic, of course: the company would benefit hugely from Apple making iMessage available on Android. Google has also recently been pushing for the iPhone-maker to support next-generation texting standard RCS, which is intended to replace SMS and has already gathered support from major US carriers.
Google is also not well-placed to criticize other companies messaging strategies. What is most interesting is that the search giant is notoriously dysfunctional when it comes to messaging, and has launched 13 separate messaging apps since iMessage came out in 2011.
