Any phone carrier call center employee can check your inbox, supposedly that's an audited procedure but having worked in a call center I would tell you that I'd believe that nobody's watching anything. Just like email, SMS is a poor protocol/medium that has been contorted to doing way more than anyone ever intended originally.
But there is definitely a need for a commodity, cross-platform secure messaging protocol that can be implemented by anyone. It hardly seems like there's anyone incentivized to do that though -- why would Apple, for example, want to ferry traffic to/from non Apple phones. And why would they want to step aside and let someone else replace their seamless, secure-ish messaging experience with something else? None of the other messaging apps can achieve the level of integration with the rest of the phone that iMessage can.
The mere facts that iMessage is a) so good (integrated so well into the OS by way of unfair advantage) and b) closed, are probably sufficient to make sure that there won't ever be a common, secure messaging platform. It couldn't penetrate far enough into the iOS user base even if every Android user installed it.
I agree. But, the carriers love charging for text messaging bundles, so I can't imagine them pushing for something else, unless its equally as bad like MMS. So we are left with this crappy state of fragmented and proprietary messaging systems.
We even have standard messaging protocols (XMPP), so it is not a technical hurdle. Merely there is no business opportunity to commoditize messaging, so it hasn't happened.
Any phone carrier call center employee can check your inbox, supposedly that's an audited procedure but having worked in a call center I would tell you that I'd believe that nobody's watching anything. Just like email, SMS is a poor protocol/medium that has been contorted to doing way more than anyone ever intended originally.
But there is definitely a need for a commodity, cross-platform secure messaging protocol that can be implemented by anyone. It hardly seems like there's anyone incentivized to do that though -- why would Apple, for example, want to ferry traffic to/from non Apple phones. And why would they want to step aside and let someone else replace their seamless, secure-ish messaging experience with something else? None of the other messaging apps can achieve the level of integration with the rest of the phone that iMessage can.
The mere facts that iMessage is a) so good (integrated so well into the OS by way of unfair advantage) and b) closed, are probably sufficient to make sure that there won't ever be a common, secure messaging platform. It couldn't penetrate far enough into the iOS user base even if every Android user installed it.