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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Apple is writing their own death sentence here. Beeper Mini's case will definitely be used against them when their anti-monopoly case inevitably comes about:

1. Forcing a monopoly when they force-migrated their users to iMessage

2. Maintaining said monopoly by keeping third parties out

Best thing they could do is put third party clients into a MFI like program and loads of red tape.

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Why do you think an anti-monopoly case will ever come? Europe has dropped it, and US pretty much everyone in power (and all their families/friends) is an iphone user. They're probably completely unaware that there's a problem, and even if made aware they have positive vibes for Big Gray

The EU hasn't dropped it. The consultation period is still ongoing, the news was that the EU is only tending towards not regulating iMessage, but it is not set in stone yet:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/06/imessage-will-reportedly-g...

It is very much possible that the current kerfuffle has some bearing on future regulation.

That said, iMessage is not really big in Europe, Whatsapp is, so it's more interesting for the EU to regulate that.

A case against a monopoly with a minority market share. Good luck with that!

As far as I know, Apple has the majority of the market in the US where iMessage matters most.

Even if you limit it to the US, they have 56% which is only a very small majority. Are you trying to argue that that 44% of users not on iOS can’t message others because of that terrible Apple monopoly? Frankly, that’s just ridiculous and your fantasy case is so hopelessly going nowhere nobody is going to even start it.

1. No one is "force-migrated to iMessage". Have you never used an iPhone before?

2. Requiring an application made by the company to access the servers owned by a company has never in history been called a monopoly before. The precedent that'd set would be pretty laughable. It'd basically make it law that everyone has free access to private servers of any company if they can reverse engineer the protocol. You could say goodbye to anti-cheat systems that block third party clients from online games.

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