iMessage’s Lock On America—Is This Really The Beginning Of The End?

There’s an even bigger threat to iMessage than the DOJ’s lawsuit, and it has Apple’s US market and its millions of iPhone users firmly in its sights…

5/4 update below; article originally published 5/1.

While all eyes focus on Apple’s struggles in China, where Huawei’s 2024 surge has set fire to iPhone sales, a much quieter battle has just taken a new twist closer to home. There’s no iPhone without iMessage—and Apple’s insistence on keeping its encrypted messenger within a walled garden is front and center in the DOJ’s lawsuit. But it just might be that the bigger threat is coming from an entirely different direction.

Apple puts security first when it comes to iMessage—to an extent. Because while its unarguably an exceptionally secure platform, which is even leading the way on the current flavor-of-the-day science project that is post-quantum cryptography, it has an embarrassingly wide open vulnerability. iMessage is secure between Apple users—but bring an Android device into the mix, and that security literally disappears.

This is why WhatsApp—notwithstanding its Meta masters—is the much better option. Seamless cross-platform, end-to-end encryption that protects messages, voice and video, and a near 3-billion user base that means almost everyone has the app.

Which is why WhatsApp leads in almost all markets around the world—but not in America, especially amongst the young; as The Financial Times explained last year, “Apple has captured Gen Z in the US so thoroughly that younger consumers fear being socially ostracized for not having an iPhone.”

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And iMessage is a key part of that success, as we know—that’s the alleged reason for its lack of cross-platform options. As one quasi youth ambassador told The FT, “a green message—anyone with an Android—throws off the entire chat, because now the whole thing has to be SMS. So the social pressure to get an iPhone is pretty insane.”

But all that could be about to change. WhatsApp has ridden the network effect in all other regions around the world, and now has its sights firmly set on the US in general and iMessage in particular. There’s no love lost between Apple and Meta—per Apple’s crackdown on Meta’s data harvesting; Mark Zuckerberg has personally highlighted iMessage’s US lock as an issue to be overcome. “iMessage is a key linchpin of their ecosystem—which is why iMessage is the most used messaging service in the US.”

Earlier this year we saw WhatsApp’s campaign to unlock America accelerate, with Apptopia reporting WhatsApp US iPhone installs up 5% on last year to 68 million, and 9to5Mac that its daily active US user base was up 9%. “Suddenly, everyone in the US seems to be using WhatsApp,” Alex Kantrowitz penned in Big Technology.

Just a few weeks later and it’s suddenly a much bigger problem for Apple. The US “has entered the chat,” Zuckerberg shared on his WhatsApp channel. “We’re seeing double digit growth in messages and daily users on WhatsApp in the US.”

This has been coming—but it’s accelerating quickly. WhatsApp taking on iMessage in the US was “a once unthinkable prospect,” according to Kantrowitz. “Perhaps this ends with WhatsApp assuming the leadership role in the US that it currently occupies globally. The possibility is less farfetched than it was in even the recent past.”

The issue for Apple isn’t WhatsApp’s US growth, it’s what that growth means for iMessage as a whole. When you wean a user base off blue bubbles and introduce seamless cross-platform messaging as secure as iMessage, with easier voice and video calls, it’s hard to look back. And the network effect amplifies growth, as the DOJ said: “As more people use the app, there are more people to communicate with through the app, which makes the app more valuable and in turn attracts even more users.”

Once that network effect kicks in, it’s very nearly impossible to turn back—especially with messaging platforms that tie together countless groups of users and bilateral chats in an easy-to-use, secure and private enclave.

As I’ve said before, “if iMessage is your main go-to messenger, then I know two things about you. First, you have an iPhone—because Apple won’t let iMessage play nicely with anyone who doesn’t. And second, you’re probably in North America—because the rest of us mostly use WhatsApp. iMessage is seen as SMS texting, which people just don’t do anymore.”

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And so it looks like 2024 will be just as interesting as billed. WhatsApp’s push is coming at the wrong time for Apple, with the DOJ lurking the other side of this debate. “By rejecting solutions that would allow for cross-platform encryption,” its lawsuit claimed, “Apple continues to make iPhone users less secure than they could otherwise be.” The lawsuit cited various claims from the last decade that Apple’s refusal to share iMessage with Android commercial and counter user interests.

“The world loves WhatsApp and other texting apps,” The New York Times has reported, “Americans are chatting in their own bubble.” With iMessage’s dominance and its normalization of SMS, that has been understandable. And while next-gen SMS RCS technology is coming this fall with iOS 18, it’s not a full integration and it won’t—we understand—kill the green bubbles or bring encryption cross-platform.

Apple has pushed back hard against the DOJ claims, just as it has with Europe’s DMA. And where the push is a wider dismantling of its walled garden, I agree. iPhone is different to Android, more secure, more locked down, and it should stay that way. But when. it comes to messaging, the argument is much harder. Users are not well served reverting to SMS now and RCS absent full encryption shortly, when alternative cross-platform, full encryption is so readily available.

“In many other countries” The Times reported, “text messaging happens over a smartphone app like WhatsApp from Meta.” Now that belated change is fast approaching the US, and WhatsApp has shown it’s a one-way street.

And so, is Apple ready…

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Update 05/04: The battle between WhatsApp and iMessage in the US, targeting the millions of GenZ users that have forged the blue bubble hierarchy, is as mainstream a challenge as you will find in the world of messaging.

But WhatsApp plays en entirely different role in other parts of the world, and there its separation from either of the core phone ecosystems—iPhone and Android—has proven an advantage. While Telegram generates headlines for being the subversive network of choice in parts of the world where communications are under threat, in reality WhatsApp operates as a quasi phone network to an event greater extent.

I have reported before on the critical value of WhatsApp’s voice and video call ecosystem, which is also end-to-end encrypted and which offers a lifeline in parts of the world more susceptible to unauthorized or casual call monitoring than we see in the US and most parts of Europe. This is every bit as critical as messaging.

And comments made by WhatsApp’s boss Will Cathcart to BBC News this week hammer home the point. “Tens of millions” have found ways to access the app, he said, even in countries which fully or sporadically seek to ban its use. “You’d be surprised how many people have figured it out.”

We’re talking places like Iran and North Korea, but also parts of Africa, Asia and the wider Middle East. And while in most of those locations the requirement is just the use of a VPN to mask WhatsApp traffic and routing, the Meta platform also offers a proxy service—as of last year, which allows in-country middleman servers to be deployed, meaning that the first routing from a device is benign, and only then does the connection hop to WhatsApp itself, with its full security intact.

Cathcart told the BBC that the platform monitors numbers of connections from those parts of the world where it is banned, but where local phone numbers are actively in use. “We have a lot of anecdotal reports of people using WhatsApp and what we can do is look at some of the countries where we’re seeing blocking and still see tens of millions of people connecting to WhatsApp.”

For US iPhone users of iMessage—who are the focus of WhatsApp’s US growth surge, the concept of relying on a messaging app for secure comms will seem bizarre. But travel across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and your business contacts will use such platforms for calls by default. The local networks are not trusted.

“We take a lot of pride in the fact that we’re providing secure private communication that is free from surveillance of authoritarian governments,” Cathcart explained, “or even censorship from government, to people all around the world who otherwise wouldn’t have it—But it is a constant threat and a constant battle.”

In some places the complications get much worse, of course. China has banned WhatsApp—as well as some other secure messaging platforms, and it’s not available on Apple’s local App Store. Users with overseas iPhones can use the app over a VPN, and Android users have side loading options, iPhone users do not.

WhatsApp remains my recommended go-to daily messenger for many reasons—it’s free and secure communication philosophy and somewhat petulant distancing from parent Meta when pushed for tighter integration or data sharing is one reason why.

It’s clear that WhatsApp is a secure comms platform first and foremost. It’s an embedded philosophy. “That’s one of the reasons we’ve had to communicate so much about it,” Cathcart says, “to be really clear about what it means and what’s at stake.”