Apple Executive Wanted iMessage To Be On Android To Become ‘Industry Standard’

Epic’s lawsuit against Apple has seen numerous tasty titbits come to light.

Today’s filings show that Apple executive Eddy Cue was worried enough about Google winning the messaging wars that he made a strong case for iMessage to be available on Android systems.

This stems from Google’s $1 billion offer for WhatsApp back in 2013. He wrote, in an internal email: “Do we want to lose one of the most important apps in a mobile environment to Google? They have search, mail, free video, and growing quickly in browsers. We have the best messaging app and we should make it the industry standard.”

Craig Federighi, SVP of operating systems responded with the rather negative: “iMessage is a nice app/service, but to get users to switch social networks we’d need more than a marginally better app. (This is why Google is willing to pay $1 billion — for the network, not for the app.)… In the absence of a strategy to become the primary messaging service for [the] bulk of cell phone users, I am concerned [that] iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.”

An interesting case study in what could have been.