U.S. moves closer to filing antitrust case against Apple

In my experience, iMessages have far greater delivery reliability than SMS text messages.

I've actually gotten into inadvertent fights with people over undelivered SMS text messages.

It is just standard fare across the modern bigtech world.

Prior to the iPhone / iOS, Apple would have happily built in support for something like Google Cast, because they operated from the idea that their products should be the most useful for their customer.

These days it’s all about forcing people into your ecosystem for increased lock-in. Thus, no baked in support for Cast (except in the Apple Music app on Android). As far as Apple is concerned, if you are visiting a friend and want to play some music on his Chromecast, the solution is to buy your friend an Apple TV for AirPlay.

Maybe, just maybe, technology should serve the user by enabling people to socialize with whom they wish, rather than the opposite.

It can’t be the multi-trillion-dollar company that’s terrible, it must always be the people in your life.

It is nice that it works for you, but do not play stupid here. You know it's huge.

iMessages from the same person will end up in 3 different conversations based on whether they specified (for that conversation) only their cell number as the recipient identifier, only their email address as the recipient identifier, OR BOTH! Which is of course madness. Which is why I tell everyone within earshot to ONLY check off the cell number identifier (even on their non-cell devices) and uncheck ALL other identifiers, for sanity. (This is under iCloud settings somewhere.)

But that explains this. Why is it like this? Well, once upon a time there was the iPod Touch, which had iMessage but didn't have a cell connection or cell radio or cell number (think: kid with an iPod Touch who never had a cell number). Also, Macs have iMessage and don't have those either.

If you tap on the contact at the top of a conversation, then on "info", there'll be a "RECENT" tag on the source of the most recent message.

(Now, admittedly, this won't help much if they're sending from an Apple ID rather than their phone number but it might work sufficiently for you and your conversations.)

It is not.

The only reason it's causing problems is that it is an intentional tool to drive users as OP into the environment through the external pressure from his peer group.

This is a highly anti-social behavior by a company which obviously has to do it because it lacks true innovation or actually good reasons which would draw customers such as OP to their products.

It's nothing to defend or be proud of.

It is currently also creating lots of pressure for people to also buy an IPhone to not be cut out of circles. And once they have an IPhone, they can integrate it better with other Apple devices and once you are inside the walled garden, you will likely stay there, if you can afford it.

I don't see Apple opening up on their own anytime soon.

When you're in a competitive industry, you want to commodify the spaces where your competitors have an advantage, and keep proprietary the spaces where you have the advantage. A good example is Google's early embrace of XMPP. They made their chat system use the open standard and then when they had a strong base, they started to build proprietary things on top of the standard. Then they were diverged enough and it was their way or the highway. It was a page out of Microsoft's book. I think Google really could have owned modern chat if they'd stayed-the-course with one of the chat systems they announced.

Open source is a great philosophy, but whenever you adopt it you're (potentially) funding and doing development work for your competitor. In theory those competitors are going to also contribute, but it's often assumed that competitors are fair players. That you'll both be trying to make the best thing. Your competitor might simply take your work, and undercut you on price. You're left holding the bill for all the work you put in, and they make a profit (Smaller than you would have, but their cost was negliable)

Apple can't sell its watches because of intellectual property theft. So not only did they take features from a smaller potential competitor, but they lock their Watch buyers into the iPhone ecosystem.

Also, Microsoft won that case on appeal and then settled with a much friendlier administration.

Of course, this is all being filtered to us from rumors told to journalists who are not subject matter experts. We can better assess any similarities when the actual complaint is filed.

The courts have been used to chip away at the very simple and straight forward anti trust laws that were established in this country after years of having grappled with the problem in it's unchecked form.

> But antitrust cases are rare to begin with

This is a feature of _recent_ history and does not at all fairly represent the large body of jurisprudence that has been issued on this subject. People really seem to misattribute much of our modern system of commerce to modernity and ignore the laws and decisions that were laid down nearly a century ago.

> try to name one dealing with a company of that nature other than Microsoft.

Iqvia holdings.

> Maybe it's more like refusing to provide your competitors with delivery service

They have a monopoly on the device and the app store. So, they create their own monopoly over the delivery service. They're not competing with "delivery" in general, but with "apps that are allowed to use these special features on the iphone and are directly approved by apple's own internal process."

This seems exceptionally clear cut.

> Congress pretty much authorized the courts to do whatever they want on this.

No, they have not. Congress has ignored the courts interference int he law and has made no effort to clarify their statues. This is not the same as "authorizing" the courts to "do whatever they want."

And still on the... bleeding edge. Most of the USB peripherals one can go buy right off the shelves at, say, Target are still USB-A.

A typical response was John Breeden's in The Washington Post: “The iMac has only USB adapters, no SCSI port…non-USB devices can’t be connected. Offices that have SCSI- or parallel-port printers will find the iMac an unsuitable replacement for older Macs. It’s odd, because Apple was a SCSI pioneer.”

It's true that AppleTalk was proprietary, but it was introduced in 1985. It was plug-and-play, amazing for its time, and showed what standards-based networking should aspire to.

Apple's MacTCP was the first OS-level, application-independent TCP/IP stack for personal computers, in 1988 — many years before TCP/IP was mainstream. Apple also shipped TCP/IP support by default in 1994, a year before Microsoft.

Note that 3 of those came about long after M.2 was done, and Mini-PCIe/mSATA existed before all of them.

Apple's commitment to standard hardware is at best skin deep.

People were quite upset to have lost their ports in 2016 too. 5 years later Apple added some back.

That’s hard to believe. Apple was rather insignificant compared to the Wintel quasi-monopoly at the time, and Windows 98’s USB support actually slightly precedes Apple’s. Apple also wasn’t part of the initial USB alliance. USB became popular due to digital cameras, USB printers and scanners, flash drives and the like, and with USB 2.0 there was no legacy interface providing the same data rates.

oh? what's a better point? there's such a wealth of choices.

> the Apple iMac is credited with popularizing USB

by whom? And what was the iMac's market share back then?

Apple launders the location features of Apple Maps through platform location service controls. iOS will never, ever prompt you about Maps' own background location access. The controls for Maps' background location access are buried in System Services, and are defaulted on, and do not produce the tracking nag. The fact that the first-party Weather app is not also immune to the nag doesn't seem material.

The whole situation is in stark contrast to Android, where if you throw the phone in a drawer for a few months the platform will automatically revoke all of the privacy allowances of Google's own apps. Which is maybe not great, since resuming the use of such a device is sort of impossible (it will prompt you for shit like whether Phone is allowed to record audio), but you can't say it's anti privacy.

An opinion driven by ignorance. Last I looked Apple doesn’t have a monopoly.

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

I'm not trying to be an Apple defender here. I don't work for them. They don't pay me. It's just that the things you and the person above you said are factually, demonstrably wrong. Not like "well, that's a difference of opinion" wrong, but like "takes a few seconds to disprove, complete with screenshots": https://imgur.com/a/3S03PtW

One can imagine a case of a particular app drawing law enforcement's and/or intelligence services' ire not because it's the best, but because they're seeing a lot more conversations they wish they could read, but can't (easily), going over that channel than any other single one.

But then again, Google paid billions to manufacturers so their store was the only option preinstalled in their devices, which meant that the vast majority of users would just stick with it.

Lack of iMessage essentially breaks group chats. So if you don't have iMessage, and everyone else does, you will intentionally not be added to the chat.

Lack of iMessage also means sending videos to you is going to take additional steps compared to other iMessage users. So they likely just won't send you the video.

Over time, the additional steps required to include a non-iMessage user, means you will receive less messages from your friends.

I don't like the situation, but that's how it is. If the majority of your friends/contacts use iMessage but you don't, then you will be excluded from chats. Not because you use Android, but because it is just more difficult to include you without iMessage.

Not social standing per se, but a 0.01% chance of being excluded isn't going to feel good.

Additionally, when you first make the switch (at least circa 5 years ago), any iPhone-only group chats you were already in will need to be restarted (with some care taken by each iPhone user involved), otherwise you will not receive those messages because iOS will continue to treat it as an iMessage on others' end. It is very easy to miss out on communications this way, and from there it's not all that hard to fall out of touch with people who weren't closer friends to begin with. Either you need to be proactive or your larger social circle needs to be thoughtful and/or really like you.

So with all these issues, there is a bit of extra work involved for everyone when Android phones are involved. Some circles are so iPhone-heavy already it would be a little awkward to be that guy making the whole chat green. Couple it with a false perception that Android coincides with lower socioeconomic status (obviously not true for certain devices anyway) and it's easy to see shallow people being petty about them. Plus less tech literate circles just accidentally excluding people and you get a real fear of social hurdles.

Your wording suggests it's an active decision where they immediately cut someone out because the communication turns green. And for some, it is an active decision. It's a common "joke" to poke fun at people for making the bubbles green too. But the more insidious way it arises is like how you might see patches of grass dying off due to shade and eventually turning to dirt. Someone sends a meme or a video or a picture to the MMS friendgroup, no one can see it as it was originally intended, so the iPhone users create a "sidechannel" (way easier than moving to an entirely different app) iMessage group where they share the memes and videos. Eventually the culture between the MMS friendgroup and the sidechannel friendgroup diverge until they no longer associate. The blue grass grows while the green grass turns into a patch of dirt.

One friend in a group chat has an android, and that hoses the messages I send out, because Apple will default to SMS. It is quite maddening.

The main complaints from other seem to be about high def videos, pictures etc, which I don't personally care about.

(I would love to firewall my phone - especially against apple)

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/854515#specs (...keeeeeep scrolling, or page search "android")

It's been that way since the first Pebbles: your non-Apple watch will not be replying to texts when paired to an iPhone.

That's worlds worse than just making sure your app is the most convenient option, while other options can easily be installed.

1. 15 years ago everyone in the US just used SMS to text between cell phones.

2. When iMessage came out, it wasn't like "Switch to iMessage!" Instead, it just was the default texting app you used with iPhone. So it replaced an existing, open standard with a closed one, but in a way where 99.9% of people didn't realize it.

3. In true "embrace, extend, extinguish" fashion, Apple added a lot of features to iMessage, but also didn't totally exclude Android users, but just made it seem to iOS users that when they got crappy photos or messages that randomly wouldn't deliver or crappy emoji responses "it was Android's fault".

Everything about the iMessage tactics (including getting teens to bully other teens for an out-group bubble color) is from the worst part of "protect the monopoly" playbook. Almost regardless of the legal nuances, I'm shocked when I hear anyone's broken logic trying to defend what they've done from a consumer utility perspective.

(One side note, yes, I fully know the situation outside the US isn't comparable due to the high cost of SMS in the late 00s in other countries that forced a migration to WhatsApp, etc. earlier. That still doesn't give Apple a break for their monopoly-preserving tactics in the US).

I was under the impression that Microsoft won in the sense that the punishment was undone, but merely due to procedural issues in the trial: that they seemed to have done the thing they weren't supposed to have done stood after the appeal.

> Ultimately, the Circuit Court overturned Jackson's holding that Microsoft should be broken up as an illegal monopoly. However, the Circuit Court did not overturn Jackson's findings of fact, and held that traditional antitrust analysis was not equipped to consider software-related practices like browser tie-ins.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....

Apple, people have choice. I can buy an Android phone, I can buy one of the open source phones like PinePhone, Fair Phone or Librem 5. Consumers have lots of choice. As for not being able to uninstall default apps, You can use other messaging apps. Consumers have a choice. I am willing to bet money, that 80%+ of IOS users have no desire to change apps. I am also willing to bet most IOS users don't want iMessage to work with other messaging apps. I am in that boat. Forcing Apple to open up iMessage is anti-consumer.

For example, if the United States says that the iPhone is an arbitrary computer and as such is subject to thus and thus regulations, why wouldn't that include other arbitrary computation devices like the Nintendo Switch, Steamdeck, TV, or Alexa device?

I haven't seen a convincing argument yet that would say this definition stops at "phones and tablets". So now you're not just regulating phones and "opening them up" and instead you're regulating broad swaths of trade with not just American companies but global companies as well and that has much more important considerations than whether or not you can install a 3rd-party app store or access a manufacturer-only API. Even if you are just regulating phones and tablets, you still have to consider more than the American companies.

What isn't a computer nowadays?

* https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/

I think this entire situation has been blown out of proportion. There are a few “loud” voices lobbying for stuff that are of no consequence or just false.

Epic seems to do just fine charging 12% on their PC games store, vs Valve's variable (maximum of 30%; lower for big rich game studios) cut on Steam.

Apple and Google have also both put in place a lower cut for independent developers, which is further evidence that 30% isn't the 'right' number. It's just a number the market has no choice but to put up with.

I certainly don't blame them for wanting to pocket 30% of the filthy billions of dollars kids and gambling addicts pump into stuff like Genshin Impact. That's free money for Apple.

How about we go by European credit and debit card interchange fees capped at 0.2%. Credit Card CEOs seem reasonably happy, healthy and well fed. Maybe we'll get some cultural surplus value out of it if Valve is actually forced to make a video game again, Half Life 3 might actually happen, or maybe we'll get a new Portal or Team Fortress out of it.

Maybe someone can explain how the selling/labor costs of digital goods are twice that physical goods and justify 2-3x the commission. I would like to hear it because I am admittedly ignorant when it comes to the costs of content delivery - all I know is that egress can get expensive.

I don't know if this is true or not; but regardless, that's the whole point of this. The US won't be moving to file sweeping anti-trust cases against failing companies.

We need more competitors, we need more diverse tech companies. A few large players that are siphoning all the value and dictating how technology evolves isn't optimal for the things I value.

The growth will happen regardless, don't worry.

Microsoft profits are over $150bn.

The barrier is inventing and organizing the logistics of delivering the most cutting edge technology and the accompanying software and support to hundreds of millions of people around the world every year.

If anyone else could do it, they would do it. Samsung and Alphabet come sort of close.

IMO they don't have competition. Nobody's actually directly attacking them at the specific thing they do.

I really, really wish they did. The current situation makes it hard to get away from them when they release (relatively speaking) dud products like certain MacBook revisions.

Samsung posted $3.2B profit in Q4 2022. Extrapolate that to $12.8B yearly. And they're one of several Android device makers, with about 1/3 of that market share. Apparently Samsungs profits fell dramatically in 2023 because just over half of their business is structured towards memory chips, and they have too much inventory and not enough demand. Meanwhile, Apple in-housed their CPU design and their new chips are crushing it.

Are these numbers not big enough to qualify as a "slice"?

> I feel like there must be anti-competitive barriers somewhere

That's not a very compelling argument. By all means look for them, but show results, not hypotheticals alone.

It could also be that Apple is just competing much better, and each X gained per year leads to X+n gains the next year, compounding. They're vertically integrated from end user software services to OSes to devices to ISA's, and they have decades of experience in each. You don't just go out and raise a series A and knock them out of the lead.

Why would one assume this when Chrome took over on non iOS and ipadOS machines?

> Instead they decided to go it alone, making iOS a Safari-only territory, which helped establish Chrome's dominance due to their shared technical foundations and common nonstandard features.

Logically, the fact that the only place Chrome did not dominate is iOS and ipadOS means making those Safari only is the only thing that stopped Chrome’s dominance.

Android Firefox only added support for WebExtensions recently, like within the last few months.

Safari on iOS has had support since 2020.

I would argue that Firefox and Chrome are not being restricted in any ways that harm users.

Firefox likely wouldn’t have added support for web extensions even with access to Gecko.

Chrome wouldn’t ever add support for extensions since Google is actively trying to fight against ad blockers.

The only outcome of opening up iOS to other browser engines, would be an increase in Chromium marketshare.

Which is in essence forbidding competing browsers. If if quacks like a duck and etc. I.e. if it's using Apple's JavaScript engine, it's Apple's browser.