There's a lot of things to criticize about Apple, but how on earth are they monopolistic?
The key one is that it’s very difficult to convince an iMessage group to use a different app. iMessage isn’t even objectively better — in many cases, other messaging platforms have faster, less buggy, more secure iOS apps with more features than iMessage. (Speaking from extensive experience with iMessage and other apps.)
As a result, iMessage has a stranglehold on Apple users because of Apple’s design goals and business decisions. It’s designed to feel like you need to use it for texting someone. It overrides standard protocols (SMS), doesn’t implement new messaging protocols (RCS), and doesn’t allow any other apps to process text messages. So iMessage has a monopoly on the default carrier-based messaging solution on iOS.
And its group lock-in makes it very hard to choose to use an android, since you’ll have to spend a large amount of social capital to get everyone into a different messaging app.
I would not consider iMessage to have monopolistic properties if it did the following:
- Implemented modern carrier messaging protocols, like RCS.
- Had good apps for other platforms, including android and the web.
- Allowed 3rd party apps to handle SMS/RCS.
But iMessage is a huge benefit to Apple because it keeps people locked into the ecosystem. Not because it’s an excellent messenger. That’s why it’s monopolistic.
As someone who managed to convince half the WhatsApp group to migrate to signal where we held out for a couple of months, ended up cross posting so the ones who were left behind didn't miss out and eventually abandoned signal and went back to WhatsApp I can tell you this has very little to do with Apple.
There is literally 2 billion month active whatsapp users which is a direct competitor to imessage and is my default group messaging. There aren't even two billion iphone users.
Which other app lets me exchange full quality video/pictures?
Think about airline mileage programs and status. They keep people locked into the airline's ecosystem. But no single airline has a majority market share, and labeling a dozen active competitors in a market "monopolistic" would make no sense.
You can switch between airlines without having to convince everyone else on your flight to do the same. Also, buying two flights on two different airlines to fly to two separate destinations on two separate days makes much more sense than buying two phones to talk to two different people.
U.S. antitrust has a lot of discretion and is pretty political but the core metric they lean on, for good or ill, is consumer prices. Can it be argued that the green bubble is increasing consumer prices?
Making your product better than that of the competition, as Apple did with iMessage (moving between-iPhone data traffic out of the, certainly at the time, expensive and limited amount of SMSes included in many phone plans) isn’t anti-competitive. You could even say they built competition for the SMS network, just as WhatsApp did later.
I also don’t see how signaling, in the UI, which messages are subject to different rules would be a anti-competitive.
And yes, that is useful even today. My smartphone subscription has a limit of 200 SMS per month (any following costs about a quarter of a dollar)
If Apple was a small company, no issue; but they are a $3T company, and conscious decisions taken by such behemoths to increase lock-in should be treated differently. They also have >50% of the market, not a minuscule of it.
Of course they won't do it on a virtue, because they know it will lower the friction of switching. Every big company loves walled gardens that maximize the friction of changing; that's why maybe they should get some scrutiny from a regulator.
What Apple did might have just been a well-intentioned engineering hack but it became insidious: giving the minimum compatibility, meaning you can have non-Apple people in the chats (our hands are clean! plus, disincentivizes groups to look for alternative tools), but everyone gets inferior experience (non-Apple folks get less features, Apple folks get the white-text-on-green-bg which is unpleasant to read), and "blaming the victim" starts.
If Apple wants imessage to compete with SMS, they could have made one app for SMS, and one app for imessage. But Apple doesn't want to compete with SMS. Apple wants to kill SMS, and be the only game left in town. It's similar to the old tactics that Microsoft used to use. Only difference is Apple has a much better marketing department.
I think the anti-competitive part is refusing to make iMessage available anywhere other than on apple products, even though there are clearly users who would like to use it on other platforms
I also think Apple, if they decided to provide android support, should be allowed make that a paid service. After all, it runs on their back-end. I guess even a reasonable pricing scheme would be met with resistance.
Practices that improve your ability to make money are what the market is fundamentally about. Ideally, those are practices that develop the best products/services at the best value, but there are a whole number of ways to make money as a small participant without doing that. Loyalty cards / buy-nine-get-one-free punch cards are a great example of this: the punch card from my local deli serves only to make me decide not to try out other, perhaps comparable delis. Then the other delis all introduce punch cards, and then they maintain their same set of customers, and a marginal improvement in product at one place will result in attracting far fewer customers than it otherwise would. The whole system is, unquestionably, anti-competitive. But what do you do about it? Certainly there's no monopoly. Do we want to make this illegal, and on what grounds?
To be clear, maybe we should make it illegal - but what does that world look like, exactly? Do we also make it illegal to drip-market customers with discounts? To offer them subscriptions (a la Amazon's "subscribe and save", or a la Lyft Plus)? To sell products that are larger sizes so people make fewer decisions about who to purchase from? etc.
Even before we get to the problem of appropriate use of government power, there's the question of what we want society to ideally look like. Is it inappropriate, even if it's legal, to do any of the things above?
Or put another way, the grounds for anti-monopology legislation is that it is one of the rare known failures of the free-market thesis, that competition will incentivize people to offer the best products/services. But if every tiny deli finds themselves incentivized to be anti-competitive, what should we do about it?
I mean, you can't start a FaceTime call, but at least they finally let you join one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29817807
I do agree that defining a market as "cell phones for teenagers" is a bit disingenuous but I definitely feel like there's something really unfair about not having iMessage for Android. The green bubbles are basically a marker of not being part of the in-group even if you have something more expensive than an iPhone.