Here at CES, Apple has trolled the entire electronics industry with a giant banner that reads: “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.” It’s clever and designed to spark discussion, but it’s also important because it once again establishes that Apple wants to be known as the company that’s most dedicated to protecting your privacy.

If Apple really wants to establish that identity, it should bring iMessage to Android.

Before you rattle off a tweet, let me be crystal clear about a few things. I understand that:

It will likely never happen. It’s not in Apple’s business interest for it to happen because it would hurt Apple’s iPhone profits. There’s a myriad of options for people on Android who want to have secure, end-to-end encrypted chats. Really, only people in America care about iMessage. Everywhere else in the world, people use alternate texting apps. There are (usually, vaguely stated) technical reasons why iMessage on Android wouldn’t work or wouldn’t be fully secure. It is better to have people standardize on [insert your favorite secure messaging app here].

I have heard all of the above points before, and I agree with many of them. The loudest and most common argument is that of course Apple will never do it because a lot of people wouldn’t buy an iPhone because iMessage is the only thing locking them into Apple’s ecosystem. It also happens to be the most compelling argument against doing it.

But that’s an argument about Apple’s best interests, not humanity’s. I am not making a business case for iMessage to come to Android. I am making a moral case. Every time I hear Tim Cook talk about privacy as a human right, I think about the biggest thing his company could do to help ensure that privacy: spread the ability for people to have conversations that are safe from government snooping across the world. And the largest, most impactful way Apple could do that is to release iMessage on Android.

Apple wants to defend people’s privacy, and iMessage is its strongest tool for doing that

There are other apps that enable end-to-end encrypted chats on Android, but each comes with particular compromises. I could go down the list on all of them, but just as one example: WhatsApp is the most popular in some regions, but it is owned by Facebook, and, as a result, it’s facing a growing trust problem.

I don’t want to name them all, but I do want to point out that Signal and Wire, in particular, are good options. But again, there’s a particular problem: getting all of your friends and family to switch over to another app is hard. Getting them all to agree on one app and stick with it is nearly impossible.

This is especially a problem in America where the iPhone has more market share than in other countries and where people will just default to, well, the default. And the default on the iPhone is iMessage. The way iMessage works is seamless, and (much to switchers’ chagrin) it hijacks the core SMS app. It’s so convenient and easy that getting iPhone users in the US to use something else just to talk to their Android-using friends is a slog.

I bring up this switching cost problem for a specific reason: adding iMessage to Android would end up being a huge benefit, not just for Android users, but for iPhone users. How many iPhone users inherently understand that when they text an Android user, those green bubbles can be easily subpoenaed by multiple governments around the world?

RCS texting won’t help defend anyone’s privacy

If you have heard of the upcoming RCS texting standard, which makes regular text messages work like iMessage, you should know that it is not encrypted. So even if Apple decides to support the new standard, that won’t help. I will also note that Google abandoning Allo means that it will not offer an end-to-end encrypted chat to consumers at all, which is terrible.

There are reports that Apple has been in discussions to support RCS, by the way. So here’s an idea for Apple’s crack negotiators: agree to support RCS, but only if carriers promise not to exact any revenge on Apple for releasing iMessage on Android.

I would like to say that I could also make a business case for iMessage on Android. It’s something about how Apple needs to lean heavier into services, and it could theoretically charge a service fee for iMessage like WhatsApp used to. Heck, it could even create a bundle of Apple cloud services that could also be included.

Hey Apple if you need a hammer to break the glass covering the emergency “charge Android users $5 a year for iMessage” to make some quick short term revenue I will be there with a hammer so fast. — Dieter Bohn (@backlon) January 2, 2019

But I don’t know if I can make that business case in good faith: I’m sure Apple has a cadre of actuaries who have run the numbers and who know that it will be an overall drain on Apple’s revenue based on declining hardware sales — which aren’t doing all that hot in the first place right now!

So instead of talking about money, let’s go back to the moral case. Here’s Tim Cook, speaking at a privacy conference in Brussels last October: “We at Apple believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. But we also recognize that not everyone sees things as we do. In a way, the desire to put profits over privacy is nothing new.”

“We at Apple believe that privacy is a fundamental human right.” —Tim Cook

I am not quite willing to argue that Apple has a moral responsibility to offer encrypted end-to-end messaging to Android users. There’s a case to be made, though, that global corporations have taken on the scale of governments and work across nations. So, at some point, they ought to bear the burden of responsibility that should, in a moral society, go along with all the power they’ve acquired. It’s easy to make that case for Google and Facebook, but less so for Apple. Then again, as one of the few major tech companies operating at scale in China, let’s just say that argument is coming for Apple, too.

All I know is that Apple has done important work in protecting the privacy of its customers — including standing up to the FBI in circumstances that might have made any other company blink. Increasing the circle of people it protects beyond iPhone owners might not make business sense, but it makes moral sense.

It especially makes sense for a company that wants to be known for privacy so much that it’ll plaster the side of a giant hotel with a banner telling the entire consumer electronics industry that privacy matters.