Stop being anticompetitive and give me access to your infrastructure. I should be able to sell a service running code on your hardware.
Right now a Verizon iPhone customer can't securely send a message to a Verizon Android customer without forcing their customer to download a third-party app and agree to its terms, and the carrier has no recourse to change that on their iOS devices they are selling to their customers.
Vaguely reminds me a little bit of the web browser antitrust days. Regulators will catch up soon. At least Apple is planning to adopt RCS finally, even though they missed their chance to be part of the formation of the standard.
Edit: Or Apple could release iMessage for Android and for web.
And thank goodness... I can only imagine the resulting flood:
(1) ads in your messaging app; and
(2) messages being scanned for targeted advertising (by the "less scrupulous", of course).
They can just not sell those devices? I find this argument pretty twisted. It’s also based on a false premise. Verizon is also free to implement whatever they want on top of their @vtext.com endpoint.
How is the @vtext.com endpoint any more secure than MMS? Default, secure transfer using your carrier phone number through the built-in messaging app on Verizon iOS devices is restricted only to Apple's servers, and the recipients MUST be Apple users.
Especially if your thing is the "everything" thing.
There’s nothing anticompetitive or even out of the ordinary going on here. You can install competitive services on an iPhone at any time.
There's not really much other system integration with iMessage either, other than some Siri stuff I doubt sees much use. It's surprisingly disconnected from the rest of the operating system.
Edit: Vote me down, but that's a fact.