iMessage for Android | Elizabeth Holmes's schedule

Dec 2, 2021

Apple execs on iMessage for Android

From: Ian Rogers
Date: March 3, 2016 at 3:49 AM PST
To: Eddy Cue, Steve Gedikian, Frank Casanova
Subject: The Android test

Gents,

As you know I carried an Android phone before the acquisition. Google sent me a great phone in an attempt to win me back. I tried for two months and gave up. I thought you might like to see the practical list of reasons.

Short version — don’t make mail, calendar, and iMessage work on Android and it’s impossible to switch. And make sure G-apps work perfectly on iOS and it will be easy for Droid users to switch. Obvious but true.

Enjoy.

ian

ian c rogers

LVMH

____________________

Google friends,

Thank you again for the excellent phone. The phone is very impressive. I loved it. I used it as my main phone for two months. Unfortunately it’s costing me too much productivity and I need to go back to the iPhone. I thought it might be helpful to explain why:

First, the things that are better:

SwiftkeyX murders the Apple keyboard

The panoramic features on the camera are super fun

Notifications on Android are much more useful than the ones on iPhone

Having access to settings (bluetooth, wifi, etc) from the notifications pulldown is oft-used

As you know, I used an Android phone for two years before joining Google. I think I had a great time with it because Beats Music was a Google Apps house and the Google mail/calendar/etc integration is perfect on Android. But since I’m using a combo of Apple Mail (personal mail) and Outlook (work mail), productivity is a real hassle:

MS Outlook is barely usable. A long list of frustrations:

Search doesn’t find things you know are there. I can search for the same thing in Outlook on Android and iOS Mail and iOS mail will find it instantly, Android will not.

No inline attachments.

15 wait to load your inbox

No ability to click phone numbers to call

You have to context switch inside of the Outlook app to see your calendar

Calandar entries difficult to create

Can’t click on an address in a calendar entry to get to mail.

Gmail wasn’t reliable. For some reason I never figured out my me.com mail would update every few hours instead of every few minutes as I had it configured to.

Google Calendar doesn’t pull in my Outlook calendar.

The Android calendar just plain didn’t work.

Apple Music won’t download songs for offline use (I get an error every time — I’m following up with the Apple Music team on this).

Google Play music hasn’t improved at all. Very vanilla, boring recommendations, integrated with my mess of old MP3s.

And the #1 most difficult to leave the Apple universe app is iMessage. Moving to Android my family was forced to move to Facebook to message me, I used WeChat, WhatsApp and Slack for work, but I missed a ton of messages from friends and family who all use iMessage and kept messaging me at my old address. iMessage amounts to serious lock-in.

I will keep a working SIM in it so I can test our sites and apps on Android (Thank you again, this alone is very helpful) but without fast, reliable access to my mail, calendar, and music I can’t use it as my daily phone anymore. I tried!

Thanks again. I hope this is helpful. See you soon.

From: Greg Joswiak
Date: March 3, 2016 at 10:03 AM PST
To: Eddy Cue, Craig Federighi, Darin Adler, Phil Schiller
Subject: Fwd: The Android test

FYI - we hear this a lot.

Joz

From: Phil Schiller
Date: March 3, 2016 at 10:09 AM PST
To: Tim Cook
Subject: Fwd: The Android test

FYI - note Joz and I think moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us, this email illustrates why

From: Tim Cook
Date: March 3, 2016 at 4:28 PM PST
To: Eddy Cue, Craig Federighi
Subject: Fwd: The Android test

Sent from my iPad Pro

[This document is from Epic v. Apple (2021).]

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