Many, many years ago when FaceTime was officially announced, Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs then announced that they had plans to make FaceTime an open standard, meaning that it would be less of an Apple-exclusive feature and more available to anyone else who wanted to take advantage of what Apple had created.
However why is it that nearly 8 years after the initial announcement is FaceTime still not yet an open standard? According to the folks at CNET, they think they might know why, or at least one of the reasons why, and that is an ongoing lawsuit that Apple is having with a company called VirtnetX.
The latter alleges that Apple had infringed upon their patents for FaceTime, meaning that Apple was forced to change the way that FaceTime works. This meant that instead of the phones talking with each other directly, they had to go through a relay server, meaning that adopting FaceTime would no longer be as easy as Apple had hoped it would be.
Of course there are other possibilities, such as Apple wanting to keep the feature exclusive to themselves to encourage adoption of iOS and macOS, but since Apple has yet to comment on CNET’s article, we guess we’ll never know. In the meantime there are plenty of apps that have since launched video calling features, so we guess there are plenty of alternatives out there.