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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

I'm baffled by the claim that Apple locks users into iMessage. I use iPhone and Macs and I haven't used iMessage in years.

Apple doesn't lock anyone into messaging apps (they have pretty great system intergration for alternate apps!) - social groups do.

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Fair enough, agreed that social groups dominate the dynamic more-so (e.g. any country other than US). But being the default, pre-installed, and only app with SMS integration on iOS is an unfair position to compete from, especially when iOS is now slowly gaining dominant market position in the US.

It's not really how it works for a lot of users in the US. As I get it with the more social demographics, most use different apps for messaging for different contexts. social media like twitter or instagram for more public casual chatting with strangers, maybe private messages on said apps for growing relationships, then for more personal stuff some mutual messenger app.

social demographics just use the chat that is closest to whatever they like to do online. iMessage is more of a "it's always there if I need it" thing as I get it, not so much something chosen out of confusion -- the social demographic is quite good at compartmentalizing their lives across many apps.

I agree. Something other people aren't mentioning - the default iOS Contacts app will automatically switch your messaging and voice call shortcuts to use an alternate platform, per-contact. There's no user interaction required to do this. A lot of people in these threads conflate iMessage, SMS, and MMS - the idea that iPhone users are "locked into" iMessage is absurd. This feature has been in place for many years. [0]

IMO, the buy-in for iMessage is an iPhone. If you contrast a $429 new iPhone with the buy-in required for other mainstream apps (share and license your private data + metadata with advertising companies in perpetuity), $429 doesn't seem unreasonable at all; but if you prefer to pay with your data instead, all platforms (including the iPhone) provide an option to do so via options like FB Messenger[1] and WhatsApp[2].

If Apple were to remove these alternative options, along with SMS/MMS, and support only iMessage communication - there would be a much better support for the claim that they "lock in" their users.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/PuPIrvf.png

[1] https://bgr.com/tech/app-privacy-labels-facebook-messenger-v...

[2] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/whatsapp-instagram-facebook-...

iMessage is competing unfairly, as the default, pre-installed, SMS-integrated app on iOS. Being hardware-attested and limited to the dominant US smartphone OS exacerbates this.

Most other countries are using some other messaging app, so clearly these aren't super significant hurdles. I agree "lock-in" is strong wording that probably doesn't apply to iMessage. But you cannot argue that iMessage is competing fairly with the likes of FB Messenger / Whatsapp / Telegram / Signal.

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