besides being immoral and a literal F-U to your consumers, it can bring anti trust cases when you are as big as Apple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in
But other than that, well, just go celebrate your $2 gain on your APPL stocks despite the fact you were prohibited to call 50% of your friends just so someone couldn't save a few bucks when buying a phone for their teenage kid. Go you!
They have no moral obligation at all to extend their own first party services to Android, that's an absurd idea.
Of course they prefer people to buy iPhones for their kids, there is nothing wrong with that, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with not actively working to make the experience of mixed Android-iPhone families slightly better.
There are literally dozens of cross platform messaging and video calling apps. Banning these would have been wrong, and possibly illegal, but they are not doing that.
This is such a great rubric!
Anticompetitive behavior is illegal for companies with a monopoly, and based on the leaked emails, it seems Apple's intentions were clear. The "monopoly" bit is still up in the air, but it's becoming increasingly clear the "anticompetitive behavior" bit is not.
This FaceTime news shows that Apple's lawyers are probably worried.
They also don't have any kind of monopoly on TV or music streaming, so there would be nothing wrong (and certainly nothing illegal) with keeping Apple Music and Apple TV exclusive to their platforms, so clearly they believe they will make more money by making them cross platform. Presumably it's the same with Facetime.
I think it's funny because Apple left a decade-long opening for Google to build equally good Android alternatives to iMessage and FaceTime and dominate in cross-platform communication. Instead, twelve chat platforms later, I'm not entirely sure if Google has finally released something that won't be superseded next year.
Before you say, "just don't use it", here are some examples. My kids parents/school group uses WhatsApp, same as my kids sports club to organize matches/training. I'm a volunteer for a local association -- WhatsApp group. I really have little choice in using it.
I don't get the impression that Android users are angry at all. It's me as an iPhone user who is pissed about never being able to use any of these supposedly fantastic services.
I have never used FaceTime and probably never will if it is true that Android/Linux/Windows users cannot initiate FaceTime calls on this new FaceTime web app.
> because Apple left a decade-long opening for Google to build equally good Android alternatives to iMessage
is simply not true. No one but Apple can integrate SMS and messaging on iOS as Apple can; others do not have entitlements for that. You could do it on Android (and Google did for a brief period with Hangouts, and so did Signal), but you can't do it on iOS.
i think it is a closed solution that sucks just like all the others.
i think every single one of those lock-in-for-profit platform only attract idiots (in the original greek work meaning of the word) and makes true open solutions that will ultimately help everyone slower to show up. Because eventually they will.
Why? As an iPhone user, I am the one who paid for the development of FaceTime, but I can't use it because communications tools require network effects that FaceTime doesn't have. I can't even use it with my wife.
I'm not saying it's somehow illegitimate or even illegal for Apple to do this, but what it tells me is that Apple cares more about hurting competitors than about providing a useful service to its own paying customers.
But it's still a shitty thing to do. I have a tremendous amount of respect for companies that do things that are contrary to business objectives because they're the right thing to do. In this case, Apple chose to do the shitty thing.