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:
a firm with market power cannot act to maintain or acquire a dominant position by excluding competitors or preventing new entry
It further explains that "market power" means:
the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors
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.
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".
Bad analogy. It's more like, Apple has its own roads that are exclusively for their cars.
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.
Apple is not stoping anyone from using them.
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.
School kids are getting bullied for using Android phones
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.
Why would they need to look into Apple's conduct here? Investigate Beeper for CFAA violations since they cracked into Apple's internal APIs and ignored large chunks of their ToS in the process.
Of course Apple is going to shut down unauthorized access to their messaging system. They'd lose all customer trust instantly if they didn't.
Reverse engineering for interoperability is legal, is it not? This is interoperability.
Australian legal case on Reverse engineering.
https://www.dundaslawyers.com.au/reverse-engineering-of-software-what-are-the-legal-boundaries/
ToS have almost universally been shown to be unenforceable in court. I'm also not sure what the hell you mean by customers would lose trust. It's not as if they had access to information they shouldn't, all they did was reverse engineer the protocol. They still had to have an account and a login and they still only had access to the data that account should have. There's nothing to lose trust over the only thing beeper was doing was emulating being an iMessage client
At the root of this issue is that Google never built a messaging service that could survive Google's management shuffle. I understand people want Apple to bend the knee, but this is not their problem. It's perfectly fine for them to intercede Beeper's reverse engineering.
If you're an Android user and you need a messaging app, Signal is 100% open source, secure, and it works on iOS too, so tell your friends!
And you assume your apple-using friends will listen to you? They are really a part of the problem at least. Google would need to create an app they would want to install by themselves, and this is not exactly easy, if possible at all. Google users are mostly fine with having many apps for communication, apple users are mostly not.
I am fully in the Apple ecosystem, including my phone, work laptop, personal laptop, and an Apple watch. I pretty much exclusively use telegram, and sometimes Discord, not iMessage— and that’s not a niche or unpopular opinion in my experience either. This is absolutely because Google can’t stick with one app or product long enough to gain any market share. Each time they have tried, it’s lasted barely a year or so before they killed it.
I think this is highly dependent on whether you’re still in high school or not. I recently switched to iPhone within the last couple years and everyone I know has an iPhone but almost none of them use iMessage. Facebook messenger, Telegram, Snapchat, hell even IG DMs. It’s all over the place. This sample of people is like 16-60 year olds too, I can’t even find a pattern.
More like senators are trying to make another show trial of BS they really have no plans to do anything about, and probably shouldn't be getting in the middle of, to make it seem like they are being productive in some way.
Answer me yes or no, If I stand in this room and use my phone can I send a message to your phone? — some senator to Tim Apple.
Tim: “No,.. because I blocked your number.”
Yeah good luck with that. It's very much a dick move but I don't think you'll have success arguing in court that Apple is obligated to open their personal messaging system to competitors.
You'd have much better luck arguing that they need to open up SMS use to other apps, and that that they need to allow sideloading and other app stores. These are the REAL anticompetitive concerns.
Man... Some of the Apple fans in this thread are making me lose faith in humanity. They have no idea how technology works, but they are defending an objectively shitty behavior from the world's most wealthy corporation based on... I don't know... their feelings?
I wonder if this case affects the tug of war Apple has with the EU about opening gatekeeping services up. I wonder if it occurs to some power that be that they might use this case (no matter how stupid it is) to argue Apple is a gatekeeper and has to open up iMessage at some point.
Likely won't happen though since it's not an EU problem really. The thing that's more possible is that California or some other progressive-ish US state follows the EU's lead in busting monopolies as they did with the GDPR, and does something about this in two decades.
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