Where did they say it would be an open protocol? I went and found the WWDC 2011 announcement [0], and they described it as a "new messaging service between iOS users" (big bold text from the slide). I watched all the way through the end of the demo, they never said anything about it being an open protocol. In fact, right at the end he said they were "building this on the push notification system that we built", which implies that it's using internal iOS systems, not something they ever intended to make public.
Even if they had said it would be open, changing their minds later wouldn't be a lie, it would be... changing their minds. I'm not an Apple user or fan, and I dislike iMessage's weird half-baked integration with regular SMS, but this feels like an overreaction even if there was a place where they claimed it would be open.
Even if they had said it would be open, changing their minds later wouldn't be a lie, it would be... changing their minds. I'm not an Apple user or fan, and I dislike iMessage's weird half-baked integration with regular SMS, but this feels like an overreaction even if there was a place where they claimed it would be open.
[0] https://youtu.be/LPMjUtfQPks?t=4296
The link above will take you right to the part about iMessage.