What a joke, I hate those biased generalized articles.
> 1. Early-stage startup teams cannot afford to handle the hardware fragmentation that plagues Android.
You have a full stack of iOS devices, too, maybe even more expensive. It's a point if you develop quite near hardware features or want to do pixel-perfect designs without auto-layout, but that's difficult for iOS, too, these days. A messenger app is really not that device specific.
> 2. Study after study demonstrates iOS users are not only growing in key geographies, but are more valuable customers.
If it's about hype and money, you might be right, but if you just need users with a much more social diversity, Android is likely on your side.
> 3. iPhone 5c and future low cost models will likely steal share from Android relative to yesterday.
Dunno. You say "likely", too, so why is that even considered as a top 3 argument?
Nevertheless, the most important point here is: It's a messenger. For teams. You don't want split between iOS and Android devices and Talko itself sees this as negative point:
> (The corporate beta testers I spoke with sighed wistfully when reporting that a couple of team members could not participate because they didn’t use iPhones.) “We can’t build a business on this until we have all of the above,” says Ozzie, who wanted to make sure his engineers aced the iPhone first; [...]
iMessage's strength is its SMS fallback (still, who wants to send expensive text messages these days), but Facebook, WhatsApp etc. are generally much more used.
For startups it's more important to deliver what they promise. For a startup which boasts to replace telephony, it is about being available to everyone with a phone. iPhone first strategy may have worked for Instagram (an app for phones with a better camera). But times change, smartphones are getting cheaper, iOS is loosing market share, messengers is a crowded business.
