Why Messages Isn't More Useful

I imagine that once a week, an eager, new product manager at Apple goes to the Messages team and pitches them on an integration.

Something that would make the iPhone better.

“What if you could add a reminder for a message?”

“What if you could see recent messages and emails in Contacts?”

And a weary Messages team member walks them through it.

"Allowing Reminders to access Messages would be very useful. So useful, in fact, that you have to imagine hundreds have come before you with the same clever suggestion.

"If we open Messages to one of our own apps — even in a way that is clearly great for the users — it opens us to criticism for not opening Messages to other apps. Apps that are also clearly great, apps that are questionably good, and apps that are clearly terrible.

“Imagine apps sending text messages on your behalf without your permission! Or an up-and-coming social network gobbling up all your messages and accidentally exposing millions of texts to the world through a security snafu.

"Imagine how hard it will be to keep password resets from filtering through.

"Email, texts, and phones are already polluted public spaces. We can't entirely stop that, but at the very least we can make it harder.

“People think Facebook ads are creepy already, but imagine Facebook gobbling up all of your messages and actually using them to target ads based on every conversation you’ve had in recent memory.”

With that, the new product manager goes back to their team with the realization that making something awesome in this job is going to be hard.