Apple’s incoming CEO John Ternus steps into the chief govt position in lower than two months. He’s bought some huge Tim Cook-sized shoes to fill. The outgoing CEO is leaving with Apple inventory (Nasdaq: AAPL) at present close to an all-time excessive of over $300 per share and a large market cap of greater than $4.5 trillion, largely pushed by its stellar {hardware} merchandise which can be irresistible to shoppers.
Apple’s once-lauded software program, nevertheless, has struggled lately. Ternus might want to make Apple aggressive once more on this entrance—an space the place the corporate is more and more lagging behind rivals. This weak spot is most evident in Apple’s Messages app, arguably a very powerful piece of software program Apple makes.
Apple’s Messages app is crucial to warding off Android
Trendy smartphone working methods—I’m speaking about iOS and Android, primarily—have been round for nearly 20 years. Within the first few years of their existence, there was a transparent winner: Apple’s iOS. It was user-friendly, regarded nice, and had extra superior options.
However because the a long time have handed, iOS has misplaced most of its aggressive benefit. For essentially the most half, no matter iOS can do, Android can now do, too.
Function parity is nice for shoppers. It lets them select from a wider vary of competing choices. Nevertheless it additionally implies that platforms have to work more durable to create options that prospects love, in order that they keep loyal as an alternative of leaping ship.
That is the place Apple’s Messages app has lengthy performed a significant position. Messages is the app that handles Apple’s broadly standard iMessage protocol—the blue-bubble text messages that maintain cultural cachet, particularly within the U.S. market. It’s exhausting to overstate simply how essential iMessage is to Apple’s enterprise, regardless of the corporate not charging customers for the service.
iMessage’s recognition is among the main components shoppers think about when selecting an iPhone over an Android cellphone. iMessage creates model loyalty as a result of the Messages app and the protocol itself don’t function throughout totally different platforms. Apple is conscious of how helpful that is. Again in 2021, court documents came to light through which high-profile Apple executives confirmed that iMessage’s proprietary nature provides the corporate a aggressive benefit.
These paperwork confirmed that, in a 2016 e mail, Apple’s App Retailer chief, Phil Schiller, wrote that “shifting iMessage to Android will damage us greater than assist us” in response to a different Apple worker’s e mail stating, “the #1 most tough [reason] to depart the Apple universe app is iMessage… iMessage quantities to severe lock-in.” In one other e mail, Apple’s software program chief, Craig Federighi, mentioned: “iMessage on Android would merely serve to take away [an] impediment to iPhone households giving their children Android telephones.”
The issue for Apple is that iMessage is now not the one sport on the town, neither is it the very best. Along with Android’s Google Messages, there are many different cross-platform alternate options to iMessage, together with Meta’s WhatsApp and the privacy-focused Signal. If they start to attract iMessage customers away, it could negate a serious supply of friction that iPhone customers at present face when contemplating whether or not to modify to Android at their subsequent improve.
That’s unhealthy information for Apple. More and more, even ardent iMessage followers like myself are seeing the advantages of defaulting to WhatsApp or Sign as our messenger of alternative, since these apps supply a wealth of options that Apple’s decade-and-a-half-year-old Messages app nonetheless lacks.
WhatsApp and Sign are consuming iMessage’s lunch
I like Apple’s Messages app as a result of any iMessage I obtain syncs immediately throughout all my Apple gadgets, and I can choose up my conversations on any of them. However I’d be mendacity if I mentioned iMessage affords the very best options. Hell, it nonetheless doesn’t supply most of the fundamental options that different messaging apps have had for years.
One of many largest drawbacks of iMessage is that you just nonetheless have to share your cellphone quantity or e mail deal with with somebody who desires to textual content you. Each Sign and (quickly) WhatsApp allow users to create a username that they may give to individuals as an alternative. This username method permits you to maintain onto extra of your privateness. It’s baffling that Apple, an organization that builds its products around privacy, nonetheless has not added the flexibility to iMessage.
However then once more, I suppose this isn’t too stunning, as iMessage and the Apple Messages app lack most of the options that rivals like WhatsApp, Sign, Fb Messenger, and Telegram supply.
These options embody the flexibility to lock particular person chat threads so as to maintain them personal from others who’ve entry to your cellphone (whereas nonetheless permitting these individuals, say, your kids, to entry choose threads), the flexibility to bookmark favourite messages so you possibly can rapidly return to them later (just like the code your good friend texted you three weeks in the past that disables their house alarm system while you come over to look at their home), and the flexibility to archive messages, which helps you to declutter your essential messages window.
It’s the shortage of those easy options that more and more has me turning to Apple Messages rivals—making it simpler for me ought to I ever select to leap ship from iPhone to Android.
Ternus’s Apple wants to offer iMessage customers a motive to remain
I’m unsure why iMessage and the Messages app nonetheless lag thus far behind different cross-platform messengers, however their continued lack of fundamental options is barely going to weaken iMessage’s dominance and provides customers a motive to leap to different, cross-platform messaging apps.
And if that occurs, a serious motive to stay with Apple’s gadgets and platforms goes out the window. To counteract this risk, Ternus’s Apple must double down on making iMessage and the Messages app the very best texting answer on the market.
And so they shouldn’t cease at messaging. Most of the firm’s different default apps are severely poor in fundamental options. The TV app, for instance, is so lacking in basic functionality (e.g., there’s no simple option to set up your film library into collections) that it’s virtually laughable. Different apps, just like the Contacts app on iPhone, Mac, and iPad, are so buggy and have such a poor person interface that it’s virtually a necessity to hunt out a third-party answer.
Fortunately, Apple has not too long ago proven that it appears to be taking its well-documented software program troubles significantly. This 12 months, its upcoming main working system updates, together with iOS 27 and macOS 27, appear to be targeted on optimizations, bug fixes, and enhancing fundamental performance.
Let’s simply hope that Ternus’s Apple extends its system-wide enhancements to its particular person apps, giving iPhone and Mac customers a motive to stay in its ecosystem the subsequent time they store for brand new {hardware}.
