Wishes for a unified instant messaging system in iOS may be answered, if some lines of code are to be believed. iOS developer John Heaton discovered some code in iOS 5 that mentions Jabber and AIM in addition to existing iMessage and Facetime protocols. While this certainly doesn't mean anything concrete yet, it's at least a sign that Apple might continue to expand the messages app's functionality beyond its current SMS and iMessage limits. Enabling deeper chat integration at the OS level would help bring Apple's messaging up to speed with the competition. For now, Android's integrated chat implementation has iOS beat.

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