I guess it's still in investigation, and being fair, it's not as popular a messaging application as it is in the USA where it would absolutely needs to be forced to open up. Just not as bad an issue in Europe I guess.
It's probably in part because of the fact that iOS isn't as big in Europe; outside of the Netherlands (where iOS controls about 70% of the smartphone market) it tends to be pretty equal in market share with Android and there's of course no iMessage on Android. People want to talk to each other, share photos and WhatsApp was cross-platform with Android basically from the start.
Telegram is a bit of a late arrival comparatively, and I couldn't tell you why it's big in East Europe, it just... is. Probably something to do with the remaining Russian influence in those countries?
It makes total sense why WhatsApp is designated a gatekeeper but iMessage isn't.
I think those are things that someone could be legitimately concerned about from a competition standpoint without considering iMessage to be dominant across the entire market.
The iMessage dominance is a uniquely American issue. In the most of the world people don't use it. Instead, multiplatform apps are the norm. It's not realistic to expect that most of the people around you will have an iPhone to use iMessage because iPhones are just too expensive to justify the purchase when you can get away with a much cheaper android device.
However, FaceTime is often used when possible.
The only time i explicitly use iMessage is when I want to send a photo as unaltered as possible - wapp recompresses them for size.
Are you sure about this? I usually send images/videos via WhatsApp because, AFAICT, they are sent unchanged (unlike Facebook messenger, for example), and know multiple people who do the same thing.
I never checked the file hashes, though.
I generally don't care about my photos THAT much to figure out how to send them completely unmodified.
But in EU it doesn't really (yet) have such a big market share.
Although I do hope they conclude that iMessage needs to be an interoperable service - basic human communication services shouldn't be constrainted to a single electronics device brand.
You also conveniently leave out just how much Apple degrades experience in those cases.
You might not like how they’ve implemented it, but it is interoperable.
much clearer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoperability
> Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems.
yeah, that's supported across the world via SMS. what exactly is the problem here?
you go to your messaging app that comes pre-installed on your phone and you send a text message. the other person, no matter the device, will receive it.
looks interoperable to me.
But, like I said, it's not a big of a deal in Europe where most people use whatsapp or facebook messenger over native messaging. At least that's what Apple has claimed. Probably because iMessage is not fully functional on android and so people just can't communicate with others effectively.
But in the USA, everyone has iPhones, so everyone uses iMessage. The same messaging platforms exist in the USA as in Europe; but it doesn't matter, it's all about where your friends/family are. If everyone is on iMessage then you gotta be on iMessage and if the only way of getting iMessage (effectively) is having an iPhone then you just have to have an iPhone.
This is now entering personal experience territory but I know plenty of Americans who have android phones and are thinking of getting an iPhone because of iMessage, particularly now that the iPhones are going to come with usb-c (thanks, Europe). On the other hand, I know people who have iPhones and want to switch to android but are held back due to everyone they know using iMessage.
I mean, it's possible to survive without it, sure. But it's a significant boulder on the road of migration. So that's why I think it should be open up.
I would like to see iMessage on other platforms, but I don't think I'd want the protocol itself opened up. That would lead to much more spam (I saw this starting to ramp up on google chat before they cut off XMPP).
Even for one-on-one conversations you and the other participant immediately lose a lot of QoL features that you took for granted.
Obviously there are crossplatform apps that offer those features but now the friction of switching to Android includes trying to convince every iPhone user you interact with or will interact with to download another app and set up an account or both of you have to deal with a pretty miserable chat experience.
Its definitely not the end of the world but if your goal is to promote competition then lowering switching friction has to be a big part of that.
The most evident is that if you're running iMessage on Android your messages will show on an iPhone as a green bubble (as opposed to a blue one if you were using an iPhone). This might not seem like a great a deal, but it is, specially in young people... there is a lot of cultural baggage against "green bubble". You might get bullied in school for it. Apple basically "brands you" to set you apart.
There's also limited reactions (when you "heart" or "thumbs up" a message) and some types of messages are just not supported in the android version of the app.
So, in reality, apple kind of goes out of its way to make the app just not fully compatible in android precisely because they want people to feel left out if they're not using an iPhone.
I think it's important to think of this issue from the perspective of a first-time phone buyer. Which at this point might be a 10-12yo, if all their friends are texting on iMessage and you're the only one that's different... well, I think a lot of us know that's not a feeling you necessarily will enjoy.