Apple’s incoming CEO John Ternus steps into the chief executive role in less than two months. He’s got some massive Tim Cook-sized shoes to fill. The outgoing CEO is leaving with Apple stock (Nasdaq: AAPL) currently near an all-time high of over $300 per share and a massive market cap of more than $4.5 trillion, largely driven by its stellar hardware products that are irresistible to consumers.
Apple’s once-lauded software, however, has struggled in recent years. Ternus will need to make Apple competitive again on this front—an area where the company is increasingly lagging behind competitors. This weak spot is most evident in Apple’s Messages app, arguably the most important piece of software Apple makes.
Apple’s Messages app is critical to fending off Android
Modern smartphone operating systems—I’m talking about iOS and Android, mainly—have been around for almost two decades. In the first few years of their existence, there was a clear winner: Apple’s iOS. It was user-friendly, looked great, and had more advanced features.
But as the decades have passed, iOS has lost most of its competitive advantage. For the most part, whatever iOS can do, Android can now do, too.
Feature parity is great for consumers. It lets them choose from a wider range of competing options. But it also means that platforms need to work harder to create features that customers love, so that they stay loyal instead of jumping ship.
This is where Apple’s Messages app has long played a vital role. Messages is the app that handles Apple’s widely popular iMessage protocol—the blue-bubble text messages that hold cultural cachet, especially in the U.S. market. It’s hard to overstate just how important iMessage is to Apple’s business, despite the company not charging users for the service.
iMessage’s popularity is one of the major factors consumers consider when choosing an iPhone over an Android phone. iMessage creates brand loyalty because the Messages app and the protocol itself don’t operate across different platforms. Apple is aware of how valuable this is. Back in 2021, court documents came to light in which high-profile Apple executives confirmed that iMessage’s proprietary nature gives the company a competitive advantage.
Those documents showed that, in a 2016 email, Apple’s App Store chief, Phil Schiller, wrote that “moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us” in response to another Apple employee’s email stating, “the #1 most difficult [reason] to leave the Apple universe app is iMessage… iMessage amounts to serious lock-in.” In another email, Apple’s software chief, Craig Federighi, said: “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.”
The problem for Apple is that iMessage is no longer the only game in town, nor is it the best. In addition to Android’s Google Messages, there are plenty of other cross-platform alternatives to iMessage, including Meta’s WhatsApp and the privacy-focused Signal. If they begin to draw iMessage users away, it would negate a major source of friction that iPhone users currently face when considering whether to switch to Android at their next upgrade.
That’s bad news for Apple. Increasingly, even ardent iMessage fans like myself are seeing the benefits of defaulting to WhatsApp or Signal as our messenger of choice, since those apps offer a wealth of features that Apple’s decade-and-a-half-year-old Messages app still lacks.
WhatsApp and Signal are eating iMessage’s lunch
I love Apple’s Messages app because any iMessage I receive syncs instantly across all my Apple devices, and I can pick up my conversations on any of them. But I’d be lying if I said iMessage offers the best features. Hell, it still doesn’t offer many of the basic features that other messaging apps have had for years.
One of the biggest drawbacks of iMessage is that you still need to share your phone number or email address with someone who wants to text you. Both Signal and (soon) WhatsApp allow users to create a username that they can give to people instead. This username approach allows you to hold onto more of your privacy. It’s baffling that Apple, a company that builds its products around privacy, still has not added the ability to iMessage.
But then again, I guess this isn’t too shocking, as iMessage and the Apple Messages app lack many of the features that competitors like WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram offer.
Those features include the ability to lock individual chat threads so that you can keep them private from others who have access to your phone (while still allowing those people, say, your children, to access select threads), the ability to bookmark favorite messages so you can quickly return to them later (like the code your friend texted you three weeks ago that disables their home alarm system when you come over to watch their house), and the ability to archive messages, which lets you declutter your main messages window.
It’s the lack of these simple features that increasingly has me turning to Apple Messages competitors—making it easier for me should I ever choose to jump ship from iPhone to Android.
Ternus’s Apple needs to give iMessage users a reason to stay
I’m not sure why iMessage and the Messages app still lag so far behind other cross-platform messengers, but their continued lack of basic features is only going to weaken iMessage’s dominance and give users a reason to jump to other, cross-platform messaging apps.
And if that happens, a major reason to stick with Apple’s devices and platforms goes out the window. To counteract this threat, Ternus’s Apple needs to double down on making iMessage and the Messages app the best texting solution out there.
And they shouldn’t stop at messaging. Many of the company’s other default apps are severely deficient in basic features. The TV app, for example, is so lacking in basic functionality (e.g., there’s no easy way to organize your movie library into collections) that it’s almost laughable. Other apps, like the Contacts app on iPhone, Mac, and iPad, are so buggy and have such a poor user interface that it’s almost a necessity to seek out a third-party solution.
Thankfully, Apple has recently shown that it seems to be taking its well-documented software troubles seriously. This year, its upcoming major operating system updates, including iOS 27 and macOS 27, seem to be focused on optimizations, bug fixes, and improving basic functionality.
Let’s just hope that Ternus’s Apple extends its system-wide improvements to its individual apps, giving iPhone and Mac users a reason to remain in its ecosystem the next time they shop for new hardware.