Tag: Apple

The Apple – Perplexity rumor that won’t go away

This is a longer think piece from the quick post I had on Mastodon the other day.

Every time someone floats the idea that Apple should acquire Perplexity to “supercharge” its AI efforts, I get whiplash, not just from the sheer strategic laziness of the suggestion, but from the deeper cultural misalignment it completely ignores. The very idea is a perplexing thought.

Perplexity isn’t some misunderstood innovator quietly building the future. It’s a company fundamentally unsure of what it is, what it stands for, or how to exist without parasitizing the open web. It’s been posing as a search engine, an AI-powered Q&A tool, a research assistant, and lately, some vague hybrid of all three, depending on who’s asking and what narrative sounds hottest that week. The only throughline is this: a constant need to justify its own existence, retrofitting its product pitch to whatever the industry is currently foaming at the mouth about.

And then there’s the CEO.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has made a habit of saying the quiet parts out loud, and not in a refreshing, brutally honest way, but in a way that suggests he hasn’t thought them through. Case in point: TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, where he was asked point blank to define plagiarism and couldn’t answer. Not didn’t answer. Couldn’t. That wasn’t just a missed PR opportunity. That was a red flag, flapping violently in the face of a company that scrapes content from other publishers, slaps a “summarized by AI” badge on it, and tries to call that innovation.

When you can’t define plagiarism as the CEO of a company built on other people’s work, that’s not strategic ambiguity, that’s an ethical void. And it’s telling. Perplexity has made a business of riding the razor-thin line between fair use and flat-out theft, and they want the benefit of the doubt without the burden of responsibility.

Which is where the Apple comparisons get absurd.

Yes, Apple stumbled. For more than a decade, Siri was a rudderless ship, a clunky commuter train in an age where everyone else was racing to build maglevs. The company completely missed the LLM Shinkansen as it rocketed past, leaving Siri coughing in the dust. What followed was a scramble, an engine swap mid-ride, and the painful attempt to retrofit a creaky voice assistant into something worthy of generative AI expectations.

That failure — public, prolonged, and still unresolved — gave the impression that Apple had no idea what was coming. That they were too slow, too self-contained, and too arrogant to evolve. And to some extent, that criticism landed. The year-long silence after ChatGPT’s breakout moment painted Apple as unprepared, reactive, even out of touch.

But here’s the thing: while Apple still hasn’t shown much of anything tangible since the Apple Intelligence announcement at WWDC 2024 (Genmoji? Really? Messed up email and notification summary?), the signals are clear. The company has changed course. They’ve acknowledged they’re behind and now they’re moving, quietly but with force. Once Apple has its engineering machine locked onto a target, the company doesn’t need to acquire noisy, erratic startups to plug the gaps. What it needs is time. And direction. And both are now in motion.

Which brings us back to Perplexity. Apple doesn’t need it. Not for the tech — which is just a UX layer on top of open models and scraped data. Not for the team — which seems more interested in testing the boundaries of IP law than building products people trust. And definitely not for the culture — which is allergic to accountability and powered by vibes over values.

Apple’s entire value proposition is control: of the user experience, of the ecosystem, and of the narrative. Perplexity brings chaos. Unapologetically so. It doesn’t have a sustainable moat, a mature product, or a north star. It has hype. It has press. And it has the moral compass of a company that thinks citation is a permission slip to republish everyone else’s work for free.

If Apple wants a better search experience, it can build one, with privacy built in, on-device processing, and full-stack integration. If it wants a smarter assistant, it can leverage its silicon and software in ways that Perplexity simply can’t touch. What it doesn’t need is a cultural virus from a startup that treats copyright like a rounding error and ethics like an optional plugin.

So no, Apple shouldn’t buy Perplexity. Not because it can’t. But because it finally knows what it needs to build, and it’s building it the Apple way. At least that’s what I think they’re doing.

Apple’s billion dollar Indonesian drama

The Apple investment saga in Indonesia highlights the tension between government ambitions, expectations, and the realities of global business strategies.

Tirto published an article about what’s happening with the Apple investment story in Indonesia with quotes and statements from government officials and analysts. It wouldn’t be the Indonesian government if it didn’t generate drama out of foreign relations or commercial arrangements worthy of a telenovela.

A few things about this drama. Apple has yet to deposit or realize the last $14 million of its $100 million investment commitment made in 2016. It’s chump change for the company but necessary to unlock the permit for the latest iPhones and end the sales ban which the government enacted last year because of it. Only Apple knows definitively why they haven’t delivered on this. Meanwhile there’s been no update on the status of the Bali Apple Academy, announced by Tim Cook in April on his visit to the country. This fourth Academy in the country is likely to be part of the unrealized investment.

Indonesia has also been on Apple’s sales performance radar for a few years now having posted consecutive quarterly sales increases and mentioned specifically during multiple financial calls, so it’s in Apple’s best interest to keep the momentum going. The country makes roughly 50 million Android phones a year mainly for the domestic market, and 85% of phone imports in 2023, or 2.3 million of them, worth around $2 billion, were iPhones. The government is keen to reduce this foreign spending by getting Apple to make phones locally.

Armed with this information and situation, the Indonesian government decided to increase pressure on the company to make good on their promise and weaponised it to force them to eventually offer an investment worth a billion dollars late last year.

Political ego meets business reality

Expecting companies to invest in Indonesia just because they’re doing well in sales ignores the realities of running a sustainable business. Sure, it’s fair to want businesses to contribute to the markets they profit from, but investments can’t be driven by sales numbers alone. They need to make sense, whether it’s about supply chains, regulations, or long-term viability. Pressuring companies to invest without considering these factors often leads to rushed, unsustainable decisions that end up costing everyone in the long run.

That said, there’s room for a balanced approach. Instead of tying investments directly to sales, Indonesia could focus on creating conditions that make investing worthwhile, like improving infrastructure, offering clear incentives, and ensuring regulatory stability. This way, companies can contribute meaningfully without being forced into decisions that don’t align with their business goals. Fair contributions are important, but they should come from partnerships built on mutual benefit, not pressure. Otherwise, it’s just a short-term fix with a long-term price tag.

Apple’s Vietnamese success

Indonesian officials and analysts love to compare Apple’s meager investment in the country with the $16 billion Apple already spent in Vietnam since 2019. The company has 26 suppliers and 28 factories in the country as of 2022 and they announced in April that they will spend much more.

Apple didn’t invest in Vietnam because the market loves the iPhone so much, they’be been investing for years and each time increasing their commitment because the government offer attractive investment opportunities and incentives, provide a stable and consistent environment for businesses, deliver the necessary labor force, and ensure long term investment and production sustainability and security despite political upheavals. Not to mention the factories are mostly located near China which allows them to maintain a streamlined supply chain operation. Indonesia doesn’t have that advantage.

Vietnamese mobile developers also took up the Apple platforms because they saw opportunities, not because they were pushed or coaxed into the platforms. They didn’t need an Apple Academy to get developers going. Most Indonesian developers and companies only see opportunities based on local sales numbers and market size. They don’t see beyond the domestic market. That’s why it was a struggle to find quality Mac and iOS apps and developers from Indonesia before the Academies opened.

By the way

The article also mentioned about the Ministry of Industries spokesperson saying that Apple submitted their investment proposal over WhatsApp. It sounds like the government wants to shame Apple for sending such an important document over a chat app but the country runs almost entirely on WhatsApp. Comms within and across government ministries and agencies are done almost exclusively on the platform, with letterhead documents for official records.

What are the chances that they sent it that way because they were told to submit the document ASAP and the paper doc would follow after, and that they haven’t managed to schedule the meeting with the Ministries because November and December are holiday months for the company? I mean, if it’s that important, Tim Cook could get a few execs to drop their holiday plans and make the meeting but it seems that the urgency of this deal has yet to reach that critical level.

Indonesia’s big tech dream among broken systems

Bloomberg has a piece criticizing the way the Indonesian government has forced Apple to invest a billion dollars and make a commitment to build a factory or two in the country.

Using a protectionist playbook to get companies to build factories could end up sidelining Southeast Asia’s largest economy when neighbors are rolling out the red carpet for investors who are relocating from China ahead of Donald Trump’s potential tariffs, analysts said.

What Indonesian policymakers, officials, and ultranationalists refuse to acknowledge isn’t just the shortsightedness of protectionist policies, but the recklessness of enforcing them without the infrastructure to support a modern tech manufacturing ecosystem.

They cling to the illusion that forcing tech giants to build products locally is enough, ignoring the fact that manufacturing doesn’t happen in isolation, it’s an interconnected ecosystem dependent on robust infrastructure, not just financial sticks and carrots.

The Indonesian government isn’t just using the wrong policy, they’re operating with the wrong mindset entirely. They also haven’t squared the collapsing textile industry and the falling demand in the auto industry with their tech ambitions. Apple manufacture devices for the global market regardless of their origin while Indonesia’s manufacturing industries tend to be dominated by domestic sales.

Local content requirements cover a range of industries, from cars to medical devices. Together with decades-old problems such as red tape, high taxes and a less productive workforce, Indonesia’s manufacturing growth has slowed to a crawl.

In contrast, neighbors like Vietnam and India are offering tax incentives, swift approvals and the freedom to source their components from across their global supply chains, Gupta of the Center for Indonesian Policy Studies said.

That makes them attractive for companies looking to produce for export and explains why Apple can invest a much larger $15 billion in Vietnam despite the nation having a smaller domestic market than Indonesia, he said.

Five years of iPadOS: A Promising Start, but More Work Ahead

When Apple announced the separation of iPadOS from iOS in 2019, it felt like a watershed moment for the iPad. As someone who has been using and writing about the iPad since its inception, I was excited to see Apple acknowledging that the device deserved its own distinct operating system. The iPad had long outgrown its roots as a mere “big iPhone,” and it was time for its software to reflect that.

Key innovations and enhancements
Now, nearly five years later, iPadOS has indeed made significant strides. The Scribble feature enhances the handwriting and note taking ability of the Apple Pencil by letting people write directly on text fields which improves the text input experience. The Files app improvements have elevated the iPad’s file management capabilities, albeit not quite to desktop level. With Universal Control you can work on a Mac and an iPad simultaneously using one set of keyboard and mouse or trackpad.

Similarly, enhancements to multitasking in recent versions of iPadOS have made it easier to work with multiple apps simultaneously. Split View and Slide Over changed the way people use the iPad by allowing them to work with multiple apps much more easily. Stage Manager, though still a work in progress, takes this ability even further and shows the bigger potential of iPadOS.

On the hardware side, the debut of the M1-powered iPad made it truly a desktop computing class device allowing many other features to be unlocked or introduced. While the Smart Keyboard Folio allowed the iPad to serve as a laptop replacement for many, the Magic Keyboard which comes with a trackpad drives this even further even if it adds quite a bit of heft. Each new version gained brighter, sharper, and more precise display to deliver greater color accuracy and enhanced visual experience and specifically on the Pro line, thanks to ProMotion, True Tone, Retina XD, and P3 color gamut.

The introduction of the Pencil transformed the iPad into a robust tool for creative individuals across many fields and the new Pencil Pro only enhances that further with gyroscope support, haptic feedback, squeeze, and barrel roll capabilities. The iPad can also work with popular game controllers, by the way.

macOS on iPad is not the answer
Despite these improvements, iPadOS still has a long way to go before it can truly rival the functionality and flexibility of desktop operating systems like macOS. The file management system, for example, still feels clunky and limited compared to what’s available on a Mac. And while the multitasking features have improved, they can still feel confusing and unwieldy at times.

While there are calls for the iPad to run macOS altogether due to its clearly capable hardware systems, that’s ignoring the fact that it would take a mammoth multi-year effort to turn the macOS into not just a touch-capable platform but one that can actually feel at home with a touch interface. The macOS was never designed to be a touch-interaction system while the iPadOS was, so it would take comparably less effort to deliver enhancements to the iPadOS.

Part of the challenge lies in Apple’s own apparent uncertainty about the iPad’s role in its ecosystem. Is it meant to be a laptop replacement or a complementary device? After all, it is entirely possible to use the iPad without having a conventional computer in many use cases and situations but at the same time it still lacks a number of “desktop” system capabilities to convince people that it’s what they need as opposed to a traditional computer. On the other hand, Apple Vision Pro is looking more like the future of personal computing than the iPad now.

At the D8 All Things D Conference in 2010 the late Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs likened PCs to trucks, suggesting that in the post-PC era, only a minority would need the full range of capabilities offered by conventional computers. However, perception may be the iPad’s biggest hurdle.

Is the Mac holding back the iPad?
There’s also the question of whether the recent resurgence of the Mac, driven by the success of Apple Silicon, has shifted Apple’s priorities away from the iPad. The iPad is 13 years old now but the introduction of the M1 chip brought incredible performance and efficiency to the Mac lineup, potentially leading Apple to refocus more resources on its traditional computing platform. However the company’s latest and most powerful and capable chip, the M4, debuted on the latest iPad Pro with Mac deployment of the chip still further down the line.

Regardless of the reasons behind it, iPadOS still feels like a work in progress. This is a shame because the iPad hardware has never been more powerful or capable. The M4 chip in the latest iPad Pro models is a marvel of engineering, and the Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard add even more versatility to the device.

Maybe if they let the iPad run macOS there won’t be too many reasons left for people to buy the Macs? Although back in 2010 that was probably where the company was heading, trying to disrupt their own product before someone else does it for them. These days, though, sales of the Mac have been as strong as ever while iPad sales are not as big as they could have been.

iPad’s apps and perception problems
For the iPad to truly live up to its potential, Apple needs to continue pushing iPadOS forward. This means building on recent improvements but also thinking more boldly about what a modern tablet operating system should be capable of because with every release the iPad Pro has been the most cutting edge tablet computer on the market bar none. The hardware is always second to none while the software consistently leaves much room for criticism and improvements. Maybe it’s by design to prevent it from cutting into the Mac sales? A more robust file management system and a more streamlined multitasking interface seem to be what many people are crying for.

Additionally, Apple should strive to attract more developers to create apps optimized for the iPad’s larger screen and unique capabilities. Developers are keen to create best in class apps for the iPhone but on the iPad that enthusiasm doesn’t seem to be as high, perhaps understandably due to the significant difference in device popularity and also in complexity given the different capabilities and interface requirements carried by the iPad, and therefore the effort needed to create them.

There are apps for just about every category on the iPad. After all, the most popular apps on the iPad have been productivity or note taking apps such as Notability, Good Notes, and Microsoft Office, creative apps such as Procreate, Canva, and the Adobe suite, entertainment or streaming apps like Disney+, HBO/Max, Spotify, and Netflix, and education apps like Duolingo and Coursera. Despite this, people are still saying the iPad line doesn’t have the app they want or the apps do less than their desktop versions.

Google’s and Microsoft’s suites are examples of such apps. While their apps are popular on the iPad, people still resort to the desktop versions to be or feel more productive or to work faster and more efficiently thanks to certain missing features or capabilities, or because the workflow is different.

It’ll get there, one day

The good news is that Apple has shown a willingness to iterate and improve iPadOS over time. The past few years have brought meaningful changes to the platform, even if they haven’t always gone as far as some might have hoped. With the iPad’s hardware continuing to evolve rapidly, there’s every reason to believe that iPadOS will eventually catch up.

In the meantime, the iPad remains an incredible device for a wide range of tasks, from drawing and note-taking to video editing and music production. It may not yet be the laptop replacement some are hoping for but it remains an essential part of many people’s computing lives.

The potential is there for iPadOS to become a truly great operating system, one that fully unlocks the power and versatility of the iPad hardware. It may take longer than some of us would like but Apple will get there eventually.

Why Apple debuted the M4 on the iPad Pro instead of the Mac

I’m working on a longer piece about iPads but I just want to put this out first. Fast Company’s Harry McCracken sat down with Apple Senior Vice Presidents Greg Joswiak and John Ternus to talk about the latest iPad models that just came out this week.

I’ve been wondering why Apple decided to launch the M4 with the iPad, breaking “tradition” with previous M series chip releases. Apple did mention previously that this generation of iPad Pro wouldn’t have been possible without the M4 and there’s been plenty of dicsussions about the M4’s capabilities and significance, but for some, the M series had unofficially stood for “Mac”. It’s a high performance class chip designed to do deliver the most power but also incredibly long battery life. While it does make sense for it to eventually make it to the iPad, I didn’t expect a brand new version to debut on the iPad. It had debuted on a Mac and new versions had been showcased first on Macs, until now.

According to Joz, Apple’s engineers were able to incorporate in the M4 the capabilities they need to support the technologies they want to include in the latest iPad Pro, which was why they went with it.

That Apple is in a position to incorporate the technologies it needs into the chips it designs doesn’t just explain how it was able to build the thin, powerful iPad Pro. It’s also why the M4 is showing up first in the iPad Pro rather than a Mac: Rather than being a Mac processor repurposed for an iPad, it was conceived from the start to drive the iPad Pro’s new OLED screen.

“Our chip team was able to build that controller into the road map,” explains Joswiak. “And the place they could put it was the M4.”

This to me is a sign that Apple remains faithful to the iPad line despite years of seeming neglect in terms of the direction of the product. At some point the iPad was going to be the future of Apple’s computing, potentially replacing the Mac, at least for the masses, but with the release of Vision Pro and the resurgence of the Mac thanks to the M series chips, that plan isn’t so clear anymore. Maybe now the plan is to offer different devices for different types of consumers. I’ll get into that and more in the upcoming piece.

People are spreading unfounded rumors of Apple cancelling their investment in Indonesia

Apparently people are spreading misinformation that Apple has backed out of its Rp1.6 trillion ($100 million) investment in Indonesia and canceled plans to build a resource plant after Tim Cook’s visit to Indonesia last month, based on a clickbait headline.

First of all, that plant cancellation story was lifted from news coverage from early 2023 when an official from the Maritime Affairs and Investment Ministry claimed that Apple approached the government in 2016 about building a lead processing plant but the company reportedly said that the government must get rid of illegal mining operations and meet the company’s environmental, social, and governance guidelines. The government’s failure to comply with that request meant that plans to build the plant were shelved, the official said. That is old story, nothing about that is new. There was also no investment amount mentioned because it never came to that point.

Secondly, the $100 million investment has been spent gradually since 2018 on establishing and running three Apple Developer Academy sites with another one expected to open in Bali next year. It’s an ongoing investment as part of regulatory compliance to meet the local component requirement necessary continue selling 4G and 5G smartphones in the country. Back in 2016 Apple reportedly committed $44 million on establishing an Apple Developer Academy in the country within three years, the first of which opened in 2018.

This investment is indeed small compared to the amount of money spent by Indonesian consumers on purchasing iPhones in 2023. Figures from the Ministry of Industries revealed that out of the nearly 2.8 million smartphones imported by Indonesia last year, 85% of them had been iPhones because despite domestic manufacturing of 50 million smartphones a year, Apple’s smartphones are fully imported.

Apple supplier Pegatron was once reported to invest $1 billion to open an Apple manufacturing plant in Batam in 2019 but that report was either inaccurate or that the company drastically changed its plans in short order. While Pegatron’s consumer electronics plant did open in Batam, it has yet to manufacture Apple products to date.

Certain government officials and critics have pointed out that the amount invested by Apple in the country is minuscule in comparison, especially when other Apple products are included. Additionally, with Apple’s newly announced $250 million investment in Singapore to expand its original campus in the country and the company’s increased investment in Vietnam, where the company has spent nearly $16 billion since 2019, Apple’s Indonesian investment numbers and plans are incomparable.

It’s for this very reason that President Joko Widodo has assigned his most senior aide, Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investments Luhut B. Panjaitan, to ensure that not only will Apple’s investment plans come to fruition but that the country can play a bigger role in Apple’s manufacturing and development operations.

In short, it’s simply not true that Apple already canceled its recently announced $100 million investment. All the commotion came about due to the conflation of a government official’s statement in early 2023 and the recently cited investment figure for Apple’s Developer Academy.

Super Apps in America might be different from the Asian ones

In this Vergecast episode they keep saying Apple doesn’t allow super apps on iOS so they won’t have to concede the market to something like WeChat which made the hardware mostly irrelevant. They also said the banks are prevented from using the payment feature directly so they have to sign a deal with Apple to use Apple Pay.

I get that it’s an American perspective but don’t publish misinformation. China’s WeChat and Southeast Asian “super” apps like Grab, Gojek, and Air Asia all work on iPhones with no problems whatsoever. We use these apps daily to book a car, a bike, order food, arrange for courier deliveries, pay for stuff, etc.

Highlighting that last part, we use these apps to pay for things. The retail finance world in Southeast Asia is probably a world away from the American one. We don’t just use our bank accounts to make payments, we often send our money to multiple digital wallets and other finance-enabled apps allowing us to pay for utility bills, insurance, car registration, installments, paylaters, and many other payments, and earn ourselves points or cash back just like credit cards.

Our shopping apps are also payment apps. Imagine using your Amazon, Uber, or Temu app to pay for your city ordinance, cable, neighborhood services, and many other bills.

Most banks and digital wallets in Southeast Asia skip Apple, Android, or Samsung Pay altogether because Android is dominant so they all adopt QR payments in their respective markets.

Right now a common QR payment is being rolled out across almost all of Southeast Asia so whichever Southeast Asian bank or wallet you use you’ll be able to use your account to pay for almost anything anywhere in the region that accepts QR payments.

I regularly use my Singaporean UOB account to pay for things like groceries and gasoline in Jakarta by scanning the QR code on the merchant terminal and it’s as seamless as using your card. Sure it’s not as fancy as tapping your phone or watch to pay for stuff but in terms of financial inclusion, it’s so much wider since cheap Android phones are on board.

There’s also no good reason why Uber and Uber Eats have to be different apps! If anything Uber is one of the few American companies that know everything about super apps because they competed with Grab and Gojek in Southeast Asia before retreating and merging their local ops with Grab. They were also in China, the original super app market.

Apple is not preventing super apps from existing or working on your phones. Is anyone even trying it in the US? It’s not Apple who’s actively preventing it, it’s the “western” digital culture, the market, it’s Americans who don’t want them. What you might prefer to have instead in the US are integrated services or features around a specific theme or category.

Like Google Maps gives you direction but also information about venues and locations including place reviews, prices, photos, opening times, transit and traffic information, and so on.

Right now Spotify is trying to be some sort of a super app by offering not just songs and lyrics and information about musicians and bands but also music videos and podcasts, and now they’re trialing online education courses in the UK.

Who knows maybe Netflix will also add education courses or classes or live sports and events aside from streaming movies, series, documentaries, and games because those are things you do on your TV.

Think of what you can do in Fortnite or Roblox already and expand that outside the narrow boundaries. I mean Fortnite and Roblox already hosted concerts, Duolingo added maths and music courses.

See what I’m getting at? The category expansions app developers are trying in the “western” markets are not all encompassing like in Asia but they grow out of a central theme.

FWIW, you can lump Instagram into this category because it’s a photo and video sharing app that has direct and group messaging, audio and video calls, online shops, and gives you information about venues and locations. Who knows what else will Meta be adding to Instagram in the near future?

iPhone Design Chief Joins Jony Ive’s LoveFrom

Losing 20 designers to Jony Ive must be a significant blow to Apple but it’s certainly a testament to Ive’s leadership as a design executive. And now the tech giant loses another senior design executive. 

What Ive and his team built at Apple are unquestionably iconic, from the groundbreaking original iMac and its weird puck mouse to the oddly designed Magic Mouse and Lightning Apple Pencil, but with Ive’s and his former team members’ departures, Apple has to rebuilt the design team with new leadership and direction.

With almost none of Ive’s former charges left in the company, Apple’s award winning Ive era is over and if they want to return to that level, it’s going to take a lot of work.

It’s unfortunate that Apple is no longer a design focused company the way it used to be in the 90s to the 2010s having reorganized the team under Operations instead of its own vertical under the CEO but they’ve decided to take this path following Ive’s departure.

This is already a new era at Apple where product design is more iterative and functional than inspirational and if they aim to reclaim their crown as one of the most iconic industrial design companies, it will require a new batch of outstanding designers and design leadership.

Senator Elizabeth Warren Targets Apple for Shutting Out Beeper

Sorry Senator, nobody is stopping anyone from using alternative messaging apps such as Signal, WhatsApp, Messenger (which apparently had just been rebuilt using Signal’s end to end secure messaging protocol), Telegram, Snapchat, or any other cross platform ones that are available on both the App Store and Google Play. Shutting out Beeper from iMessage isn’t anti-competitive.

It may be inconvenient that many Americans are on iMessage while their Android friends and colleagues are being shown as unsecured green bubbles but the rest of the world don’t have this problem because they use other messaging apps.

There is no antitrust problem here. Just because people refuse to use clearly available alternatives doesn’t make it an antitrust problem.

If the Senator thinks iOS and Android users should be able to communicate securely without having to download other apps, maybe the Senator should consider finding out why the RCS protocol is not inherently secure? Google only recently made RCS secure on Android and it’s had a complicated past.

Will the Senator admonish Microsoft for not allowing Google Docs users to collaborate directly on Office docs and vice versa, or am I giving her a terrible idea?

Nothing is Bringing iMessage to its Android Phone

This is also called introducing MITM (man in the middle) attack vector into your Apple ID and iCloud accounts thereby opening up potential breaches to your account.

“Would you like to compromise your account privacy security? Tap here to let your account be accessed by some random authentication server not maintained nor authorized by Apple somewhere”