The Serval Project did not choose the Apple iPhone as the smart-phone platform for the original Serval Mesh (app for Android) because:
The Mesh Extender device was conceived in 2013 as a way to provide Serval to non-Android devices using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi Direct. The idea was to develop an iOS app that delegated all Wi-Fi Ad Hoc or long-range communications, encryption, Rhizome storage, Mesh Datagram Protocol (MDP), and other core Serval services to the Mesh Extender, and simply acted as a rich front-end to these services. To date, such an app has not been developed.
Serval Chat (app for iOS) was conceived in 2014, not as an “iOS port” of Serval Mesh (app for Android), but as a completely new app focussed exclusively on secure, resilient text messaging – both one-to-one and in groups – with a far simpler and more polished user interface than Serval Mesh.