That's why I like this Beeper mini saga, it breaks the illusion of competition that really doesn't exist between both companies and highlights the enormous power those two companies have.
Edit: just to be clear, I don’t buy the argument that Apple is doing anything wrong with keeping iMessage exclusive to their brand. I only wanted to relay that argument here to discuss in this context
I'd say the opposite, having Android with a 90% market share would be a bad thing for Google since it opens easier antitrust lawsuits. The statu quo is more profitable.
See the "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company" quote from Google execs which is representative of what's happening in the space.
Have you ever heard of an independent car repair shop being allowed access to the manufacturer’s factory floor ? How about factory floors of all car manufacturers? It makes no sense. How about I go use your home’s toilet when I’m nearby?
If a niche enthusiast crowd worth of traffic will absolutely obliterate the underlying infrastructure, allow unchecked flows of spam and undermine the security posture, maybe Apple should just leave it to the telcos who might be marginally more competent.
Car manufacturers used to publish detailed (technical) manuals for all of their cars exactly so mechanics (owners, repair shops, etc) could work on their vehicles.
In modern times though, manufacturers seem to be DRM-ing (and similar) as much as they can in order to capture the repair business for themselves. It's not a good look. :(
Remember the days when you had to pay per text message?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_(antitrust_law)
It's not quite the same because Bundling seems to be about setting a price that is too low, so this isn't a legal precedent but it seems like a morally similar argument?
You are saying that you paid Apple for a device, and that entitles you to access to their services (e.g. Apple bundled their services with their device for free).
If this was Apple's main contention with Beeper, then why not allow people to pay a one-off fee to access their services (whatever fraction of the retail price of a device goes towards services)?
I suspect they can't do this because then you would be fully in Bundling territory: that the one-off price you pay to access Apple's services becomes cheaper when bundled with a device.
The whole idea that you paid a one-off fee and that covers your indefinite access to Apple's servers at a continuous cost to them also seems like a flawed model if that's really what the economics of iMessage are. Of course the contention is that the continuous fee to you is the fact that you are locked in and are therefore helping Apple attract other people to their ecosystem.
There is also another argument going round that somehow the issue is that Beeper is charging for their service. I don't buy that, because I pay for Beeper and I don't use their iMessage integration (because I live in the UK so this whole blue bubble green, bubble thing is just not a thing here and we can just enjoy watching it unfold with idle curiosity) and I pay the same as someone who would. I am paying them on a continuous basis because they are running servers that I want access to that bridge to other services I use and want aggregated in one place.
Of course it does not. The per user cost of delivering imessage is so low, Apple doesn't care about the individual user. In bulk, enough people are buying new iPhones to cover the ongoing cost (and then some).
Whatsapp and Telegram dropped support for Android 4.4 devices, are they emplying planned obsolescence?
The analogy would be for WhatsApp to make it take artificially longer to send messages on Android 4.4, which I think people would have a problem with but they have no good reason to that.
I can't speak for Telegram, but in the case of WhatsApp, they decide to deprecate particular SDK versions when the usage of those SDK versions drops below a threshold, and it's against their interests to do otherwise, because they lose market share and they are making a tradeoff between engineering support costs and users.
Nobody can say that the mobile apps are open markets anymore, the app would have been rejected on the appstore from the start and is now removed from the play store. Effectively the distribution of this app on mobile devices is in practice impossible now.
It also highlights the similar review process and lack of differentiating competitive factor between those two stores. They aren't interchangeable like supermarkets are.
We knew all of that already but I like that Beeper mini made it obvious enough that the PR lies of both companies cannot work here.
I don't know what the legal status of the protocol per se is, but I don't think anyone thought that you would be allowed to utilize Apple's iMessage servers for your own app.
Apple could have said that no other clients really even tried before this case and it would have been true. And that will make a difference in the next antitrust lawsuit, that's one less argument Apple can use to defend themselves.
I'm sure most developers expected them to behave like this but now there's a factual proof valid even outside of our tech developers little circle, it's not just speculation.