Apple Messages Engineer Bhaskar Sarma explains at WWDC in June how developers can extend their... [+]
If you’re like most people, you’ve got dozens, maybe even hundreds of apps clogging up the home screen of your smartphone. For iPhone users, some of those apps will soon be jockeying for position inside their main texting service, iMessage.
The opening of iMessage to other third party developers through what Apple calls app extensions, will be one of the most significant changes to iOS when it rolls out to the public within the next week, following Wednesday’s widely-expected launch of the iPhone 7.
Much of the coverage around the latest revamp of iMessage — since it was first unveiled at Apple’s annual conference for developers in June — has centred around cosmetic upgrades to the chat service, including animated stickers, “invisible ink” that you can scrub with your finger, and predictive emoji.
Yet opening iMessage to third party developers may one day be as significant to Apple's bottom line as when the company first allowed other, non-Apple developers to create apps for iOS.
That's not because of any vision that Apple specifically has conceived, but because of the business being trail-blazed in China, by Tencent’s wildly popular messaging platform WeChat.
WeChat has helped turned messaging into a fully-fledged business, by deriving money from payments, games and advertising by app developers on its platform - a platform built fundamentally around messaging.
It’s often said that WeChat has become so popular in China that it’s usurped the role of the larger mobile operating systems like iOS or Android, itself. Smartphone users are just as likely to open WeChat to order a taxi, make a payment or order food, as they are to open a separate app to do the same.
Jeremy Allaire, the founder and CEO of payments app Circle, which will be available on iMessage, says he expects “hundreds” of apps to have extended onto Apple's messaging platform when iOS 10 rolls out to consumers.
Allaire’s payments service is more likely to be part of a second wave of apps related to payments and commerce that could become as popular on iMessage as their counterparts on WeChat. The first wave are more likely to be fun features focused on creative expression, with things like emojis and GIFs.
Circle is a money-transfer service that works across multiple currencies, using blockchain protocols. “We’re in the early stages of the social payment app category, in the West,” says Allaire. “When we started the company three years ago, we were really inspired by what was happening in China.”
Facebook also has a peer-to-peer payments service, but WeChat’s is far more popular, with the explosive popularity of its "red envelopes" a case in point.
It’s a tradition in Chinese New Year for friends and family to exchange so-called red envelopes with cash to one another. WeChat has turned this tradition into a digital phenomenon: In February of this year WeChat users sent more than 8 billion red envelopes on WeChat, up from 1 billion a year earlier.
“In China up until four years ago, there was no such thing as a privately-owned bank,” explains Allaire. “Four years ago they opened the banking system to private companies and the first two charters went to AliPay and WeBank from Tencent.”
WeChat doesn’t charge its users to send payments, but the service is a natural place to launch other financial products for consumers, Allaire adds.
Circle is on track to exceed $1 billion in transaction volume this year and it will allow users in the U.S. and Europe to exchange money with one another through iMessage. Square Cash is another payments app that is integrating with iMessage, but with it, users can only send money within the U.S.
It would seem that building an app for a texting service would pose some significant limits to design and functionality, but Allaire says developers have had “a great deal of creative freedom” in creating services for iMessage.
Users will be able to use the full screen of their phone to use an app in iMessage, for instance, while the area where the keyboard traditionally lives will become an interactive surface.
Other apps that are launching services for iMessage including food delivery startup DoorDash and entertainment app JibJab, apps that are betting on the opportunity for chat to become the next platform on which other startups could one day turn into multi-billion dollar companies.
The big question for Apple CEO Tim Cook is whether, in the pursuit of the messaging platform vision pioneered by WeChat, iMessage will inadvertently become bloated with stickers, third-party services and gimmicky emojis, to the annoyance of iPhone customers.
Apple is also late to the game in building out a messaging platform, as Facebook has been pursuing the same vision with Messenger for well over a year, while Kik Messenger, a popular chat app with teens, has been doing the same for longer.
The difference is that iMessage is one of the most popular chat apps in the world, particularly in North America, and Apple also happens to own the operating system that underlies the platform itself.
That puts it in a strong position to control how people experience the expanded platform, though of course it also puts a lot more at stake.
