Snippet: iMessage and Phone Numbers as Identifiers ☇

John Gruber:

One last bit of behind-the-scenes follow-up regarding the production of The Talk Show Remote From WWDC 2020. For help with my audio setup, I worked with Zach Phillips. Phillips is local to Philly, an audio engineering ace, has worked with Sandwich before — and, it turns out, I linked to his blog back in April 2012.

Even better, he was right and I was wrong. Although he was wrong too. It’s actually an interesting post worth revisiting.

This has been something that I had long forgotten, but it is an interesting thing to revisit. For me, iMessage mostly augmented SMS (too many friends without smartphones at the time), but eventually blue bubbles took over and it also replaced AIM. Coming at it from the side of phone-based messaging, it made sense to me that it would use a phone number and I still go that route to this day by default.

I also think it might have to do that many of my friends are more likely to have my phone number than email address, and that will still work even if they switch away from iPhones. Still, it’s an interesting consideration and I wonder how many people are email-first for iMessage instead.