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Beeper vs Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation - Android Authority
(www.androidauthority.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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I don’t get it. iMessage is Apple’s service. Why are they obliged to open it up for everyone to use? Would it be nice? Yes, of course. Should Apple be legally required to open up access to their service?
The US Federal Trade Commission puts it this way:
It further explains that "market power" means:
Emphasis added. What the government might argue in this case is that Apple has market power in the online message space because it preloads its own messaging app on its smartphones, which I believe enjoy a majority market share in the USA. One remedy the government could seek is requiring Apple to allow third parties to develop clients for its messaging service.
They aren't excluding competitors. Anyone is free to write a cross platform messaging app that has blue bubbles in it. The preloading thing could be an issue if you can't uninstall imessage. Otherwise it would follow the IE/edge ruling.
But we'll see what the courts say.
We're far from court cases. What we have right now is politicians asking the Department of Justice to investigate. I suspect that's more likely to go nowhere than it is to go to court.
If it did go to court, either side of the smartphone/messenger equation could be argued as anticompetitive use of market power, or both; they could claim that Apple used its market power in smartphones to popularize its messenger service, which it then used to increase its market share in smartphones.
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They'd have to allow any app to replace iMessages as their sms client.
Alternatively, you could argue that their monopoly in messaging is being unfairly applied in hardware. That would have to be brought up by a hardware vendor like One Plus.
Yes, they should be legally required to open up access to their service. No more walled gardens that hold a large number of users hostage.
So by this thinking all cars should have compatible parts.
The world just ain't that way bruh
That would be awesome, wouldn't it be?
Do you think we live in the best possible of worlds where nothing can be improved anymore?
Fun fact, a lot of parts are compatible between cars. But really this is like if they were able to stop a machine shop from creating a replacement part.
Bad analogy. It's more like, Apple has its own roads that are exclusively for their cars.
Like someone’s private property that they can kind of do what they want with? Makes sense.
Damn, the Apple dick sucker's are bad at analogies..
Your analogy, not mine.
Sorry it obviously also applies to understanding analogies.
I’d be more inclined to believe you if you weren’t throwing ad hominems around in what seems to be an amateurish effort to save face for some reason…
I don't think you're interested in reasoning at all, hence my disinterest in doing so. The Apple fanboys believe that everything Apple is good, even if it's against their own interests.
I don't like a company that deliberately manipulates people into recruiting more customers, like forcing them to exclude others from conversations because they have an android phone, but doing absolutely nothing to fix it, in fact, deliberately not fixing it and making the Apple users feel superior because "look what iMessage can do". I mean yeah, I've been able to do what iMessage did since back when a thing called MXit or BlackBerry messenger was around. But of course there's this assumption of superiority from the Apple users, because Apple is just superior right?
I was using a touch screen phone for like a year and a half before the iPhone even came out, but apparently it was Apple who revolutionised the market.
Just look at their shitty lightning cables, used for nothing but extortion.
But, the Apple dick suckers, will suck Apple dick until the day they die, because Steve Jobs, the person who perfected modern day planned obsolescence and has caused millions of tons of unnecessary e-waste, told them that by owning an apple product, they are superior.
I don’t need trollish, outlandish, inflammatory language to make a point, nor will it gain any favorability to any argument I hear. I get that it upsets you, but it also doesn’t affect you in any way. Literally the only people who encounter any side of this issue are Apple users, and anyone can just use a secondary chat app to avoid it. I literally have 6 chat apps installed on my phone, and I only use iMessage for less than ten people. Does that annoy me? Not really. I just keep all chat apps in a folder called “social” and treat that folder as if it’s its own cross-platform message app.
Nobody is being “forced” to do anything. People have options.
Who did what first doesn’t even matter. It’s merely interesting at best, but is beside the point and doesn’t lend any precedence to anything being discussed here.
Here’s the thing, if I had “friends” forcing me out of conversations just because I couldn’t so much as use iMessage with them, I’d question my own standing in that friendship and its actual value to me.
I wasn't trying to argue, that's the point, like I said, I don't bother reasoning with true Apple fans, because they're weird about it. Hence me just going blah blah apple dick sucker. I don't feel like bothering with people obsessed with a corporation that abuses them.
Luckily I don't live in a country where iMessage even matters. But in the US I've heard some shitty stuff about the segregation, and it's working, more people are buying Apple devices, often times not because that's what they originally wanted. That kind of behavior is extremely predatory and generally not okay.
I work with Apple build servers every day, and they're such a piece of shit company that they even punish (read exploit) you for developing for their platform.
Now my analogy was pretty succinct I thought. We have the general roads where all cars can travel on, and then we get apple roads that only Apple cars can travel on, and sure you can build 2 driveways at your house, one for the apps that everyone else uses, and one for your apple car, but going by the posts any time anything like this comes up, people would rather have their apple driveway and apple roads and only visit friends who also are on apple roads. And it's BS manipulation.
And when some developer comes at you and shows how they did some work to make a part compatible with your cars, you go "fuck it, redo all existing cars to make all 3rd party incompatible!" instead of "ok do that at your own risk".
You can argue that they're unfairly using monopoly power. Same reason why MS was forced to allow windows to switch browsers.
Monopoly on what?
How would you argue that? There’s plenty of other options and iMessage falls back to MMS, which all phones are capable of.
I think the problem is that it's unnecessarily hardware locked. They shouldn't have to "open it up" insofar as anyone can access it from whatever app like beeper is doing. But it's only fair that they support other operating systems. They can still control it or even charge a fee to access it from other OSes.
I wish this kind of thing was more spotlighted when Palm and Windows Phone developers were trying to use Google API’s to make apps for their OS’s and got shut down at every turn, eventually killing off the Palm and WP because of device lock-in on apps.
I still miss what Palm could have been before Google bent them over a barrel with their massively anti-competitive bs.
Palm terrified them.
Palm apps were tiny, took trivial resources, and could provide a lot of what was done with new apps on Android. Dictionaries, calculators, games (I played monopoly on a Treo, it looked great). I watched Mp4 movies on a Treo.
Imagine Android with a Palm Subsystem so all those old Palm apps could run. It would've majorly slowed Android app adoption, perhaps even giving enough support to allow PalmOS architecture to develop into a competitor to Android.
When imessage was announced they planned to bring it to other platforms. That died when they realized how much of a lock in it was
Because their practices are anti-competitive. School kids are getting bullied for using Android phones because they're "green texters" in iMessage. But most importantly iMessage's connection with SMS causes all interaction to be very low quality images and videos. And when people complain to Tim Apple about the experience, his only response is "Get your grandma an iPhone". Our only saving grace is that the EU is requiring Apple to support RCS, which should solve these issues, except they'll probably find some new way to be anti-competitive about it.
How is creating a proprietary service anti competitive? There are many other methods of messaging and Apple is not stoping anyone from using them.
Kids being bullied in school has nothing to do with being anti competitive.
You can't change your default messenger on iOS, so they're not making it easy to stop using iMessage completely.
You can turn off iMessage in settings and disable the phone number from messages. Then use whatever messaging service you want with the phone number.
Still not sure how it’s anti competitive to not allow others to use your own proprietary software when there are alternatives available, and they are not being restricted.
TIL, I did not think it was possible to use SMS with another app on iOS.
I don't think you can use a different app for SMS on iOS. Messages only.
But u can disable iMessage functionality (iMessage is the network-based instant messenger component).
There’s a toggle to turn off iMessage, and the phone asks you when you set it up if you want to use iMessage or not.
But will you still receive SMS messages in the iMessage app? AFAIK, there's no way to move SMS to another app, like Whatsapp, and delete iMessage from the phone completely.
You won't receive SMS in the "iMessage app". Messages is the iOS messaging app, it has the ability to send messages via SMS or iMessage.
If the iMessage service is enabled and the recipient has an iMessage address/account, it'll send the message via iMessage. Otherwise Messages falls back to sending a message via SMS.
I know, we don't usually make a distinction about Messages the app, and iMessage the service, and just say iMessage.
That’s a people problem, not a market-share problem. From experience, kids will always find something to bully others about — if it’s not the colour of the bubbles, it’s something else: the brand of shoes they wear, the suburb they live in, the sport they play (or don’t play). Bullies will do what they do.
Apple should 100 percent support RCS and Tim's "buy your grandma an iphone" response was stupid and does show that they don't give a shit. However the Beeper situation is something different entirely, if the reports I've read are too be believed it was a security vulnerability or a blatant disregard of apples terms. Also the kids being bullied thing is very overblown, and almost certainly a regional thing. I live in buttfuck no where and I not one kid gives a shit they just want to talk to their friends. My kid has an android and his friend group is like 50/50 on iPhones. Its weird adults and parents who inadvertently say things or give their children the idea that green bubbles are bed. Kids don't give a fuck unless they've learned it somewhere.
Kids don't use imessage, they're on fucking discord
If they're going to default message service to it then yes.