Google is about to try, yet again, to compete with iMessages, this time by supporting RCS (the successor to SMS/MMS) in their native texting app. As in their previous attempts, their solution isn’t end-to-end encrypted—because honestly, with their business model, how could it be? And as with Google’s previous attempts to unseat a proprietary Apple technology, I’m sure they’ll tout openness: they’ll say that this is a carrier standard while iMessages isn’t, and attempt to use that to put pressure on Apple to support it—never mind the inferior security and privacy that make the open standard a woefully…erm, substandard choice.

So here’s my suggestion to Apple: you’ve got a good story going on right now that you have the more secure, more privacy-conscious platform. If you want to shut down Google’s iMessages competitors once and good, while simultaneously advancing your privacy story for your own customers, why not have iMessages use Signal when the recipient doesn’t have an iOS device? Existing Apple users would be unaffected, and could still leverage the full suite of iMessages features they’re used to. Meanwhile, Android customers on WhatsApp or Signal would suddenly have secure communication with their iOS brethren, not only helping protect Android users, but also helping protect your own iOS users. And you’d be doing all of this while simultaneously robbing Google of the kind of deep data harvesting that they find so valuable.

I doubt Apple will actually do this in iOS 12, but it’d be amazingly wonderful to see: a simultaneous business win for them, and a privacy win for both iOS and Android users. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.