Given iMessage's incredibly low user numbers outside the US, Apple should have just bought Beeper and required an iCloud+ plan for it to work on Android outside the States.

It wouldn't have hurt their sales figures because iMessage just isn't a selling point in the non-US market. Heck, Apple used this very arguement to sidestep EU regulations! But even say 1m Android users paying a minimum of $3 a year to use it is $3m they would otherwise not have had.

I know thats chump change but still, they'd do well to remember that the iPod and the Mac only really started to take off once Apple brought iTunes to Windows and a hundred-million upsales were born.

An iMessage (and iCloud) user on Android is more likely to consider a Mac as their next computer and then may well just buy an iPhone at which point there is no escape.