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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

> their iMessage shenanigans is classic monopolistic bully behavior.

These "monopoly" accusations are pure nonsense.

Apple doesn't have a monopoly in the smartphone market, they don't even have a majority market share (less than 30% globally, in fact).

And Apple certainly doesn't have a monopoly in the (secure/rich/whatever) messaging market. In most countries, WhatsApp is vastly more popular than iMessage, even on iPhones.

Saying that Apple's behavior here has anything to do with a monopoly is like claiming WhatsApp has a "monopoly" on sending WhatsApp messages, or Facebook has a monopoly on publishing Facebook posts.

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So, a few iOS versions back, Apple changed “Music.app” into “Apple Music.app”, and everyone that opened it got a pop-up to try their new fancy pants streaming service.

That instantly unlocked a big previously-unaddressed portion of the US music streaming market, likely apprehensive or lay-people. It’s what made Apple Music viable and rocketed up its market share.

The pop-up did not include an option to try Spotify (or Tidal or Deezer) instead.

With a couple hundred million iOS users out there in the US.. yeah. Not okay.

The only reason Apple was able to do this because they own half of an extremely quintessential market. Monopoly (well, duopoly) behavior pur sang.

I don’t really see what’s not okay? My credit card company doesn’t send me offers from other companies alongside theirs, even though the networks are a duopoly. When I pull up to McDonald’s they don’t ask me if I’d like to order sides from Burger King instead. Not seeing how consumers were harmed.

Umm... please review the Microsoft anti-trust cases from late 1990s & early 2000s with US and EU. At the height of MS Windows, Microsoft could crush any competitor by including a poor substitute for any software with their OS. Eventually, this was ruled multiple times as anti-competitive.

You’re missing the primary reason: they controlled pricing. What price could other operating systems makers charge in the late 90s, early 2000s? It didn’t matter, Microsoft had forced OEMs to only sell PCs with Windows or not be able to sell Windows per-installs at all.

If Apple said to Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile that they could only sell iPhones if they only sold iPhones and _then_ used that position to bundle other services they would look like Microsoft. I could see potentially on the supply side (buying all of TMSCs most cutting edge capacity) Apple has that power, but on the consumer side they have no price control in any market (Apple products are not a market).

This is conflating two issues identified with Microsoft's practices during this time. Both of which got them in trouble. Microsoft abused it's dominant position in the PC OS market to (A) lock out competition in the OS market and (B) gain footholds in other markets and extinguish competition (such as for the web browser market).

It's a strained argument to say that if they hadn't have put the OEM agreements in place that they would've been completely unchecked by the antitrust authorities in the browser market.

Apple has not reached the market share in any category that Microsoft had at its peak with Windows

Say there are only two places in the world that you can get groceries (apps): MegaMarket and Grocery King. Alongside that, these supermarkets offer amenities like shopping carts to make your visit more comfortable.

One of the amenities that MegaMarket offers is a water cooler (music app). Then, one day, they decide to change the water cooler into a house brand coffee machine (music streaming) that has the water tap function stuffed away on its back.

All the other coffee brands are in the back of the store in a rack, all next to eachother. Meanwhile, MegaMarket’s coffee is front and center right as you walk into the store. And a bunch of people who’s store route never took them to the back of the store now also try coffee and get used to buying it each month.

See how that horribly disadvantages the singular coffee brands? And none of them have the capital needed to start their own supermarket. And even if they did, their new grocery platform could never build enough marketshare before MegaMarket coffee entrenches itself in the coffee market.

There are not a couple hundred million iOS users in the US.

iPhone alone is used by about 60% of the population, which is about 198 million people out of the 331 million who live here.

This is assuming every person has a phone, which they don't. Looks like that metric is about 85% of the population. If you factor that in, it's about 160 million iOS users. Is it less than 200 million, yes. But "couple hundred million" sufficiently implies an estimation.

And this is just looking at iPhones, not factoring in users who use iPads or anything else.

They own half of a market sure, but that is not in question in your statements. In the market of music streaming services available for iOS phones, they used their platform owner position as the manufacturer of iPhones to give themselves a competitive boost in music streaming services.

    they don't even have a majority market share (less than 30% globally, in fact)

This is a spurious argument. The article wrote: <<They control more than 50% of the US smartphone market>> It only mentions US market. Even if it was 40% (less than half), most highly advanced nations with strong competition regulation would consider this sufficient for strong regulation.

And, regarding market share from the perspective of competition regulation: Who cares about global. It's all about local (state/nation level).

The reason why WhatsApp does not face any regulatory scrutiny in any highly developed countries with strong competition regulation: It is free on all platforms, including the desktop web browser. Time and time again, we have seen that free and non-free products and services are treated differently by competition regulators. For example: "Free" mobile games that are stuffed with adverts and use deceptive advertising techniques to attract more downloads.

> The reason why WhatsApp does not face any regulatory scrutiny in any highly developed countries with strong competition regulation

I mean we’re talking about text messaging. Practically everyone on the planet has myriad options. It’s really hard for me to see any consumer harm.

If you just want to lobby the government to make Apple do stuff, that’s fine.

> And Apple certainly doesn't have a monopoly in the (secure/rich/whatever) messaging market. In most countries, WhatsApp is vastly more popular than iMessage, even on iPhones.

From an antitrust perspective, this is the whole point. The antitrust argument would be that Apple is leveraging its dominant position in smartphones/smartphone OSes to gain market power in the messaging market.

And from a semantic perspective: one of the key definitions of Monopolies (from Wikipedia) is they are characterized by a lack of viable substitute goods.

It's pretty clear to me that blocking Beeper is an attempt to ensure that iMessage doesn't have a viable substitute.

But iMessage does have a viable substitute.

And not just one, many of them.

The iMessage substitutes often offer more features, work on more platforms and are widely adopted across the globe.

At the risk of making a sweeping statement, and with no data to support it, I’d guess that no one outside of the USA seems to care about Blue Bubble vs Green Bubbles.

Being on iMessage vs SMS isn’t a conversation in my world.

Teenagers that I know all have iPhones, but use Discord or SnapChat for messaging.

It doesn’t have a viable substitute for me. So… seems like they’re successfully exerting monopoly pressure on some people.

I use iMessage for conversations where everyone is on iPhones and Signal for mixed groups. iMessage isn’t the only reason I use Apple products, but it is a reason.

They don’t need to have 100% market share to be behaving monopolistically. And whether you feel the impact of the monopoly is also irrelevant.

> It doesn’t have a viable substitute for me.

> I use iMessage for conversations where everyone is on iPhones and Signal for mixed groups.

I thought you said there isn’t a viable substitute? Who knew Schrödinger’s messenger is a thing?

> It's pretty clear to me that blocking Beeper is an attempt to ensure that iMessage doesn't have a viable substitute.

That's not really how that works. That's a company blocking unauthorized access to a service they provide. BBM used to be only available on blackberry devices as well, they never got sued over blocking attempts from others to use BBM outside of their devices (that I'm aware of).

I am aware BBM is no longer platform locked. Didn't know they shutdown BBM...

Disclosure: I love Apple products and all my devices are Apple.

This is absolutely monopolistic shenanigans.

Complaints about monopolistic behavior in the smartphone market from Apple are always met on HN with “Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in the global market” - who cares? Apple is from California, the Bay Area is famously self involved, Apple has a majority stake in the US and certainly in California.

But regardless - trying to rebut the argument “this looks like monopolistic bullying” with “but they aren’t a monopoly” isn’t a good argument. Debate why it doesn’t seem like monopolistic behavior, the debate about whether Apple is a monopoly is whataboutism.

> trying to rebut the argument “this looks like monopolistic bullying” with “but they aren’t a monopoly” isn’t a good argument.

It’s a great argument because a monopoly is a very clearly defined thing, not whatever you want it to be.

Even if it's a duopoly that counts for something.

In the USA, which is where this case matters; Apple has a monopoly on messages. iMessage is the most popular chat platform there.

Considering both iPhones and Macs represent minority positions in their respective markets in the US, how can iMessage be the most popular chat platform? What’s App handles an order of magnitude more messages per day than iMessage. Telegram handles double. Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and SMS all handle more messages.

What happens when you try to write a client for What’s App? https://austinhuang.me/barinsta.html

> Considering both iPhones and Macs represent minority positions in their respective markets in the US

A 54% market share, compared to Google’s 46% market share doesn’t seem like a minority to me. It’s not a large majority, but it’s definitely not a minority market share in the US. And just for context, the Justice department filed an Antitrust suit against Google in 2020 for controlling 80% of the market share in search[1].

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...

[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/the-u-s-dept-of-justice-to-file...

I stand corrected. I hadn’t realized iPhones had made that much in roads. iMessage still is dwarfed by several other messaging services.

I find it odd to argue that the 4ᵀᴴ most popular (likely less) messaging platform should be forced to open (primarily due to a huge misunderstanding of what monopolistic and anti-competitive practices actually are).

Do you have a source that says it's 4th in the US? Because from my research that is not the case by almost any metric. And if you consider "texting" as understood by most consumers (grouping SMS, RCS, and iMessage usage together), it seems to be overwhelmingly dominant in the US.

You might wonder why you'd group those three together without including other messaging apps. There's a few factors:

- Every phone comes with a texting app. It's the one that sends text messages to phone numbers

- Within a user's texting app, the underlying technology chosen by the app (SMS, RCS, iMessage) is mostly transparent and automatic. It is not a conscious choice by the user, nor is it something the texting app goes to pains to ensure you understand. And in Apple's case, it is not an option to choose a technology for a specific conversation, you can only configure the entire app to use one technology versus another.

- End users consider it to be an overall unified platform, despite the technology mess. Consumers say "I'll text you", they don't say I'll SMS you.

I don’t have specific metrics for the US, but estimates for What’s App globally are 100B per day, Telegram 16B per day, SMS 23B per day, WeChat 45B per day, and iMessage 8.6B per day. I couldn’t find estimates for Signal, Google Chat, or Facebook Messenger.

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