[r3trohack3r]

> iMessage … messaging platform

For me, personally, it’s an SMS app not general messaging. And on iOS there is absolutely no competition for SMS by design.

I suspect iMessage would enjoy far less adoption if the iMessage features were a separate application from the SMS features, or if a 3rd party app could assume the role of handling SMS (I.E. Signal).

If Signal were allowed to handle SMS on an iPhone, ditching iMessage would be one of the first things I’d do when setting up my device.

On iOS, if I want to send a message to a phone number using a cross-platform protocol that (nearly?) all cellphones understand by default without coordinating a separate communication channel out-of-band, my option is: iMessage. That is not organic, it’s Apple using its position as the device manufacturer to force all competition out of the SMS space, and then offering a “progressive enhancement” on top of an open protocol that nobody else can compete with or interopt with.

[dwaite]

Slight correction - you can't (or rather, shouldn't) override the SMS handling on an android phone.

Instead what an app like Signal does is request all the permissions it can from the SMS/MMS handling service of the phone - to read and send SMS entries, and to get events on an incoming SMS, and then request to be the default handler of the `sms` custom URI scheme.

But you can have any number of SMS clients at once. It is likely if Apple Messages ever came to Android, it would do the same thing - otherwise, the fallback behavior (when talking to an android user without the app installed, for example) would be sub-par.