Hacker News Reader

Comment by rufius | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don't understand the argument. I'm not saying there isn't one - but it's not as though any other tech company is clamoring to allow unauthorized third party access to their services.

Without a drastic overhaul across the entire industry around the definition of service providers "interface" and requirements around documentation, it'll just open an exciting new can of worms and pain for customers. Support will be hell, experiences that work seamless will be difficult to achieve.

Again - that's not to say it's a bad idea, it just seems like we'd need a real rethinking of how we're doing things as an industry. That could be good, or we end up with a tragedy of the commons.

View on HN

> I honestly don't understand the argument. I'm not saying there isn't one - but it's not as though any other tech company is clamoring to allow unauthorized third party access to their services.

I think the argument is the bundling of iMessage in with SMS. Yes, there's lots of third-party chat services too, and yes, no other tech company is clamoring to allow unauthorized third party access either.

But iMessage gets to intercept and pretend to be SMS (or more accurately, iMessage exists to block the RCS your phone line always already had) and it's pre-installed, uninstallable, and with special access exclusive to apple, which is where I think the argument could land.

A case could be argued of iMessage + iPhone is really similar to the late 90s era Microsoft Windows + Internet Explorer, in that they both break Sherman Antitrust Act: Section 2, in very similar ways, for very similar reasons.

(to be clear, I don't think they'd win, but I could see a strong argument there)

You can disable iMessage altogether. Sure you can't uninstall it, but you can choose to simply not have it enabled on the phone: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203042

Basically no user would do this but it's not somehow magically forced on the user.

You could also disable internet explorer - the antitrust comes in when you pre-empt any competitive consumer choice by forcibly bundling the application, iirc.

iMessage is an entirely separate service. It’s inactive until you activate it. It costs nothing to not enable. My dad refused to turn it on until last year but his iCloud account functioned without issue so he wasn’t “punished” or dark patterned into turning it on.

Is the Camera app an antitrust issue too? Any bundled application?

Not an iPhone user, but if iMessage is also the sole permitted SMS client for iOS, how would you send or receive SMS messages when iMessage is disabled?

iMessage is a service. Messages is the SMS app, that will send iMessages to people who have it enabled.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com