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Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

What problem would Apple be solving and why would they want to solve it?

They'd be providing a higher-quality and more reliable messaging conduit to non-iPhone users.

They might not want to solve it, but I don't think we should accept unethical business rationales.

I am somewhat resentful of Apple because as a currently-Android but formerly-iPhone user I am now unable to text some iPhone users in some situations because of iMessage. I guess fucking me with their bugs is a positive business outcome for Apple, especially because they create a environment where their bugs appear to be Android bugs. But that's an unethical stance on the part of Apple.

I had iphones from the 3G on up to about 2 years ago, when I thought I'd try android. I was surprised when group txt messages stopped working for me, even after I did whatever apple told me to do to disable iMessage after the fact. The whole time I thought we were using txt messages as a kind of least common denominator, but really it wasn't sms. I doubt if more than 50% of ppl using it realize they're locking themselves in when they start. To me, now that I'm used to Android, it's a reason not to go back to iOS.

Now I just need to convince my spouse to switch

Agreed. When others continue using old threads you’re left off entirely. Everyone has to stop using the old thread (usually be deleting it) for messages from them to reach you. That’s nuts. I’m honestly surprised Apple isn’t been sued for it.

Giving their users a better experience when messaging their friends and family who are not using iPhones. As the WSJ article points out in Apple's monopolistic thinking, this is an anti-goal.

> Giving their users a better experience when messaging their friends and family who are not using iPhones.

That's literally the opposite of what Apple wants.

In any decent world: not being curb stomped by antitrust law.

I'm genuinely curious how this is an antitrust thing?

Apple phones can send texts and communicate with any other phone on any other network and vice versa. They just don't use iMessage to do so. I can't DM my discord friends from my work Slack, for example.

The SMS fallback experience in iMessage is pretty bad. Some of it may be because SMS is bad itself (the unreliability), but the way iMessage features get downgraded to SMS creates a terrible experience for everyone. Add MMS in the mix and it gets even worse. To be fair this can be ascribed to technical limitations; in Apple's view iMessage works great and it's too bad you're using something crappy like SMS/MMS. But then Apple hasn't put any effort into making the non-iMessage experience better.

As for why it's anti-trust, it's right there in the WSJ article. Apple executives are explicit in the lock-in being useful for their market power.

Also it may have been years ago but I'll never forget the way Apple originally captured phone numbers into iMessage. Once a phone number was registered in to iMessage no Apple system would ever send SMS to it again. That created a major problem if the owner of the number had stopped using Apple phones. They were sued over this lock-in and finally implemented a way to release your number from iMessage jail. It's still kind of awkward though.

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