One of the best things about iMessage—aside from the beloved blue texts—is that your conversations are encrypted end-to-end. That means only the sender and receiver can see the actual contents of a message, and anyone who tries to intercept it in between is out of luck, even Apple.
However, that’s only true if you’re texting with another iPhone user. If you’re chatting with one of the hundreds of millions of people who has an Android phone, iMessage sends out your chats in regular, unencrypted SMS, an ancient format that’s rife with security concerns.
Google, the maker of Android, has been trying to collaborate with Apple to solve this problem by adopting a new standard for texts. But so far, Apple has refused. A reporter asked Tim Cook when Apple was going to fix the issue, he quipped that, if you’re worried about it, you should “buy your mom an iPhone.”
Apple could also just make an iMessage app for Android, but it probaly won’t. If you’re wondering why, there’s a simple answer: competition. A lawsuit accusing Apple of monopolistic practices uncovered emails between executives discussing the potential change. They make it clear that part of Apple’s iMessage strategy is to trap iPhone users.
In an email, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, said, “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.” Another Apple employee said elsewhere that “the #1 most difficult [reason] to leave the Apple universe app is iMessage … iMessage amounts to serious lock-in.”
Addressing this issue would be an easy way to make a dramatic privacy improvement for Apple users, some of whom have spent tens of thousands of dollars on the company’s products. Instead, Apple seems like it’s intentionally perpetuateing the problem.