Comment by ponker
6 years ago
Apple built iMessage and FaceTime to move Apple devices. Why would or should they open it? Not to mention, it is probably tied into the hardware at a deep level — it clearly works much better on more modern phones, and better on iOS than MacOS.
> Why would or should they open it?
They said they would make it an open standard. People took them on their word.
https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/06/make-facetime-an-open-standar...
Then they got hit with by a patent troll.
I'm sure that the ~richest company on Earth could have consumed VirnetX without a hiccough.
Dealing with patent trolls is the rite of passage. It shouldn't be a deterrent if you really cared about open sourcing your software
My recollection is that FaceTime isn't open beyond the Apple ecosystem because of patents. I believe Apple had to pay millions in a related lawsuit.
Because Apple has signalled an intent to become more service oriented instead of device oriented.
Because theres a limit to how many physical devices they can sell and would like to keep growing after they hit that limit.
Its why Apple Music works on Android and has a Javascript SDK
Sure, Apple could sell FaceTime as a stand-alone paid service but with so many free video chat tools I’m not sure they’d have many takers.
As services grows to become a larger portion of Apple’s revenue, extending it to other platforms is an interesting idea. They already make Apple Music available as a paid service on Android. I could see an Apple TV+ app being developed as well. They could bundle those together with FaceTime and iMessage for a single monthly fee.
It may not have too many takers (I’m willing to bet that most people currently using Apple Music on Android devices are iPhone users with Android tablets), but it would help families or groups of friends who have that one person on Android, and those folks would bear a visible monetary cost that they could partially recoup by switching.
Remember how surprising it was to everyone when Apple announced a windows version of iTunes in 2003. Jobs resisted the idea, and then publicly acquiesced, standing in front of a slide that said “Hell froze Over”. Aside from the additional iPod and iTMS revenue, the halo effect of widespread iPod exposure likely sold a lot more macs than platform exclusivity would have.