[lxgr]

Fully agreed. This seems like the exact type of thing that Apple should be able to break out of, like they did with AirDrop (yeah, there was Bluetooth OBEX before, but it was too slow/clunky to be very useful on most phones) and AirPlay (same story vs. Miracast over WiFi Direct).

Yet the only recent movement in that area was them cutting down on AirPlay to unknown contacts, reportedly due to governmental pressure.

So unfortunately I believe that there is just no interest of Apple to make any move there, despite being in an excellent position: iMessage would solve most problems of spam, discoverability etc. (they could make it so that you can only message preexisting contacts when offline).