>Beeper will fight it either way.
That sounds nice and all, but what happens when the first bill comes due from their legal team?
That sounds nice and all, but what happens when the first bill comes due from their legal team?
I think if it comes to it, Apple will wind up looking very bad in a trial. Their behavior here is deeply anticompetitive. iMessage is just too important to modern text communication to be as locked down as it is.
If Apple doesn’t want to make an Android app, they should at least make an API so other developers can.
What do you mean; if a private company creates something, and enough people buy/use it, at some point it becomes a common good? I like the idea of iMessage being open, but I don't like the idea of forcing Apple under government threat to open it
iMessage is so important today, especially to young Americans, that its exclusivity to iOS has become a significant barrier to Android or other operating systems from being competitive.
It’s up to regulators and the court system to decide whether that is a violation of antitrust law. But if it is, then yes, the government should force them to open it. That’s what it means to enforce antitrust law.
Honest question, I've been texting since t9 and have never owned an Apple device.
Of course many other messengers offer most of these features too, but for some reason, no alternative has been able to establish itself in the US.
The share sheet just shows my most-frequently-used messengers, as well as direct contact names for my most important contacts, no matter what messenger they're actually on.
The only thing I can't yet do on my third-party messenger is initiate messages from my Apple Watch, but that's presumably due to a lack of a native watch app more than anything.
The problem is when you have one person in a group that is on Android when everybody else is on Apple. This causes the iMessage conversation to use SMS instead. To signify this in the app, texts appear as green bubbles instead of blue, so it’s obvious when it happens.
This is bad because SMS is totally obsolete. It causes images and videos to be shared in extremely low resolution, along with problems of messages not getting delivered reliably and other missing features.
So effectively to the iPhone user, Android users very visibly cause group chats to be super crappy in iMessage.
This is not the fault of the Android user really, because it’d work way better if Apple supported RCS like Android phones do, but many people have a very strongly negative impression of Android due to this.
In fact, some iPhone users put social pressure on people with Android devices due to this in the form of excluding them from group chats or complaining about how they cause problems.
Apple has been perpetuating this problem because it suits them. People know this, but it’s Android and Android users that suffer regardless due to Apple’s dominant market position.
The fact that lots of people prefer to use iMessage -- despite myriad easily-accessible alternatives -- doesn't feel anticompetitive in the slightest; in fact making a product that people freely choose over similar alternatives is the definition of winning competition.