Google's senior vice president says Apple's iMessage lockout system is designed to entice customers to switch to the iPhone
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| Hiroshi Lokheimer |
For the existence of iMessage, most iPhone users switch to Apple phones. Unfortunately, the service is not available on any other platform, and according to a senior vice president at Google, Apple uses this locking system to entice customers to switch from an Android smartphone to an iPhone.
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Hiroshi Lockheimer believes Apple's iMessage lock system is a well-documented strategy designed to force customers to switch from Android to iOS. He also mentioned in an article in the Wall Street Journal that in iMessage, the green text shown to recipients helps them purchase an iPhone. Apple's strategy seems to be very successful among teenagers, with an earlier survey saying that 87% of American teenagers own an iPhone.
The WSJ report highlights Apple's color-coding system as a way to ridicule teenagers who own Android phones. In an interview, a student was asked if he was dating someone who had an Android smartphone. He responded by saying the following.
"I was, 'Oh my God, her song is green' and my sister literally said, 'Uh, that's awful.'
Grace Fang, another student at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, said users don't like green text bubbles but don't understand why.
"I don't know if it's Apple promotion or just an intragroup vs. outgroup thing, but people don't like green text bubbles very much and they seem to have a negative gut reaction. "
In 2013, Apple's Eddie Q was considering bringing iMessage to Android, but the decision was overturned, after the former senior vice president of global marketing, Fir Sheila, said that bringing the service to Android would do more harm. That's good.
Looking at the interactions between teens who have an iPhone and those who don't, do you think Apple has a deliberate system that forces people to switch from Android to iOS to avoid ridicule, or do you think someone else does? The reason for that? Tell your thoughts in the comments.
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