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Comment by joshmanders | Hacker News Reader

Now apply this logic to any other company product, maybe even your own or the company you work for and tell me if this sounds as ridiculous to you as it does me.

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Most companies don't have network effect with lock-in, and especially those we depend to live our everyday lives: I can send money to my buddy who uses a different bank, I can send emails to gmail users from my yahoo account , I can also refuel my car at any station and not be tied to one brand. Imagine being locked in to any of those.

There are of course a lot of companies with lock-in out there, but none with such big network effect deeply intertwined with peoples' communication and personal lives (in the US).

The thing is: it is not locking in. At the moment through SMS and it will support RCS next year.

And RCS will solve it all. If group chats and high quality media work, people will only complain about the one thing they hate most:

The bubbles will still be green.

But I am from Europe, we don't care around here and I don't like iMessage that much. Compared to Telegram/Whatsapp, it's slow at loading old messages, has sync issues and only gut swipe to reply this year.

1. You cannot opt to use SMS on Apple Messages when talking to someone. If they are registered on iMessage, you are forced to use it. This happens transparently, automatically, and for the most part, silently. This helps to create the illusion that Apple devices are just better at texting, and anything else is old and shitty. When in reality, Apple itself only supports their own proprietary messaging system, and an ancient texting protocol that is bad.

2. I hope you are right that RCS will solve everything once Apple implements it, but I don't have confidence it will. The biggest problem is how they handle group chats: If iMessage group chats cannot seamlessly convert into RCS group messages (without duplication or splitting) then it will solve it well enough. This is unlikely to happen unfortunately

You absolutely can disable iMessage for yourself and text anyone using regular texts (SMS) only, you are never forced into iMessage. You can deregister your phone number on Apple's website without any Apple device.

Also, where is the "illusion" about "being better at texting"? Apple is literally coloring the bubbles differently to tell you that _iMessage is not the same_. How much more explicit can it get?

> And RCS will solve it all.

If the deployment is anywhere close to how it went in Australia, RCS will be a bumpy road with many people turning it off to get messages delivered. My usual experience for months now is: send a message, get a "can't deliver" notification an hour later, resend by SMS, next message delivers through RCS and switches the conversation, repeat.

You can send a text to any user, regardless of service. I don’t understand your analogy.

We're talking here about literally the most valuable public company in the world and a product (iPhone) used on average dozens of times and several hours daily by nearly 50% of the US population. I'm generally a free market kind of guy but even I admit that at this scale it is OK to apply different standards.

Speaking as a life-long Apple user who mostly thinks the rampant attacks on Apple are basically the same as the ones people have been throwing for 30+ years, just with "Apple is dying, no one should use their stuff" replaced with "Apple is too big/tyrannical, no one should use their stuff"...

I agree.

But.

The solution to that is to get antitrust regulators to step in and use the force of the law to change things.

Not to cheer on a third party using security vulnerabilities to piggyback onto Apple's service and charge a subscription for it.

There is no security vulnerability, that is FUD. They're charging a subscription to fix Apple's bugs that intentionally cripple communication communication with Android phones for Apple's own benefit and nobody else's.

Now apply this logic to any other company product

Ok...third parties should be able to sell ink that works in your HP printer, or coffee pods that work in your Keurig, or tires that work on your Ford.

tell me if this sounds as ridiculous to you as it does me

It sounds not ridiculous at all. The only difference with Beeper is that there is some marginal cost to handling messages, but we all know that's not Apple's real problem with it.

  …third parties should be able to sell

To take that analogy a step further: third parties can sell messaging apps for iOS.

Any other company using network effect to force lockin should have the same logic applied, yes. That feels like a pretty sane philosophy to me.

To turn it around, which company do you see this not applying ? What services with a strong position do you see justify to abuse it to lock users ?

I'm curious, before (and even while!) they do their assigned thought exercises, would you mind explaining to the rest of us how ridiculous it is?

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