“I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident that everything they say to each other remains secure and that their messages and content won’t be stored forever,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post last week, detailing the platform’s privacy-focused future. The shift comes after the company was hit by a series of privacy scandals.
This means Facebook will compete with Apple like never before.
iMessage is Facebook's "biggest competitor"
As Facebook’s growth has slowed in recent quarters, the company is turning its attention to messaging. “Today, we see that private messages, stories, and small groups are by far the fastest-growing areas of online communication,” Zuckerberg wrote. Facebook had already made a huge leap into messaging with its acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014. But Facebook has struggled to grow the revenue from WhatsApp, which is necessary to justify the exorbitant price tag it paid.
At the same time, Facebook plans to unify all of its individual messaging services: Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram Direct. The unification of all of these messaging services is “going to be a long-term project” that will likely be implemented in 2020 or later.
It’s also worth remembering that in October, Zuckerberg said that “our biggest competitor is iMessage.” In markets where the iPhone dominates, such as the U.S., Facebook has struggled to get consumers to use any of its messaging services, given that iMessage is the default texting app. “In countries where there’s more competition between iOS and Android, like a lot of Europe, people tend to prefer our services,” Zuckerberg added.
In recent years, Apple has been trying to expand its services business and bring them to other platforms. The Mac maker has focused primarily on bringing its Apple Music service to other platforms. It has long been available on Android.
iMessage now includes Business Chat, connecting consumers with businesses for a fee. There are peer-to-peer (P2P) payments, which don’t generate revenue for Apple but drive Apple Pay adoption and brand recognition. iMessage has become an extension of the App Store. Users can buy stickers and other items.
Apple could bring iMessage to Android, which would help grow its services and could potentially encourage users to switch to iOS, while undermining Facebook's impending focus on privacy.
