Business

Apple needs to learn to love Android and Windows

Apple is now spending billions of dollars per quarter on R&D, and it needs to spend some of that cash on expanding beyond macOS and iOS in order to move the iPhone, iPad, and Mac forward.

Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Senior Contributing Editor May 12, 2017 at 4:50 a.m. PT

Apple is now spending billions of dollars per quarter on R&D, and it needs to spend some of that cash on expanding beyond macOS and iOS in order to move the iPhone, iPad, and Mac forward.

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One service that Apple desperately needs to expand to Windows and Android is iMessage. While the service is awesome if you exist purely in the Apple ecosystem, for those of us who revolve in mixed environments the limitation feels artificial, punitive, and annoying.

Given the myriad of ways that people can choose to communicate with each other these days, and the fact that little separates the platforms in terms of performance and usability, Apple is risking alienating users because it wants to punish those who dare to work outside the Apple ecosystem, and making them look elsewhere for a platform that doesn't have artificial boundaries.

Keeping iMessage locked to iOS and macOS is akin to Apple's initial decision to make the iPod only compatible with Macs (fun fact, the iPod only became a big hit when Apple opened it up to Windows users). At a time when there are 500 million PCs running Windows 10, and over 80 percent of smartphones running Android, Apple is not only missing on a chance to cement the dominance of iMessage over the competition, but also making life needlessly difficult for iPhone, iPad, and Mac users that also have to use Windows and Android.

As someone who does exist in that limbo between platforms, I'm increasingly finding myself moving away from iMessage because it's just not convenient to carry on a conversation using a Mac or iPhone when I'm working with another platform.

So Apple, learn to love Android and Windows and make iMessage a truly universal messaging platform.