U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

The green bubbles came first.

iMessage didn't even exist for the first few years of the iPhone's life. All messages were green. Green could not have been chosen to indicate it cost money, because there was nothing to distinguish it from.

Then, in 2011 (IIRC), iMessage was introduced, and the blue bubbles were to indicate both that it doesn't cost money, and that it supports several other capabilities (which have changed over the years—IIRC, it did not start out with end-to-end encryption, so the people boldly asserting that that's the primary reason for the distinction are also wrong).

My general worry is that the entire discussion is shifting “from what’s good for the customer to this other company cannot do something shady because you protect the customer”.

Does Apple enjoy this gatekeeping practice? Of course they do, but so does Google with Android and they abuse the crap out of it.

The RCS standard was is just about as old as the iPhone and older than iMessage. Google began supporting and pushing the standard forward in a way that benefits everyone. Apple could have done the same, or made iMessage an open protocal or any of a number of things. Instead Apple has consistently chosen to go the anti-competitive route.

> Apple's superior implementation

It was 'superior' in some ways inferior in other ways, such as communicating with people without an iphone. iMessage isn't particularly better than any other messaging app, but the benefits of user lock-in, and being the default, replaceable sms app. These anti-competitive behaviors do clearly harm users.

> Now that Apple has announced support for RCS incoming

Perhaps once the support actually lands you'll have more of a point. However, I expect half-assed support and the bare minimum given Apple's previous reluctance.

But Apple's customer is also affected, in two ways:

1. I then have to text the person back, asking them to re-send the video using another chat app, or emailing a link, or something like that. That's annoying for the iPhone user.

2. In the other direction, if I didn't know better, and I tried to send a video to the iPhone user, it would end up looking like crap for them. That's not a good experience for the Apple customer.

> The newer 'standard' was a Google dominated way of trying to make inroads...

Not sure why "standard" is in scare quotes; it's an actual standard, whereas iMessage is just some proprietary thing Apple made. And it's not newer: RCS is from 2008, which is older than iMessage, and almost as old as the iPhone itself. Likely work on the standard started before the iPhone's release.

> ... on Apple's superior implementation

This is of course a matter of opinion, but to me, any protocol that is locked down, with the owners refusing to enable interoperability, is by definition inferior, regardless of its other merits.

> Apple has announced support for RCS incoming

And we'll see how that goes. If Apple works with Google to enable full interoperability, including E2EE, I'll be pleased. Anything less, though, and it'll feel like Apple is just doing the bare minimum to try to avoid regulatory action. It also remains to be seen as to how much Google cooperates in the other direction. The RCS E2EE stuff is a proprietary Google extension; hopefully that gets made into a public standard as well.

The bottom line, though, is that Apple doesn't interoperate until they believe that they're going to be legally forced to. At least if they get in ahead of the regulatory action, they can do their implementation more or less on their own terms. It's a smart move, but IMO is also scummy.

The thing that has always baffled me about Apple keeping iMessage iOS-only, and not supporting RCS, is that they've been hurting their own customers with this stance too. Plenty of iPhone users live with a degraded, less-private experience wen communicating with non-iPhone users, or have to remember to use a different chat app when conversing with certain contacts. This makes a lot of Apple's rhetoric (in general, not just regarding messaging) about protecting user privacy feel a bit hollow at times. Clearly their primary motivation for the privacy stance isn't to protect users, it's because they believe it gives them a competitive advantage.

Yes, but my mother, who wants to text a video to her sons to share a moment from her day, is, and Apple prevents her from doing that. There is no way to spin this as anything but Apple being openly user hostile to anyone who wants to communicate with an android user.

("She can just-" No, she cannot "just". My mother is in her 60s, and she shouldn't have to learn a workaround to use a basic feature of her phone that just works on android.)

iMessage replaced iChat, which was an XMPP client. XMPP supported high-res videos in 2011. (I'm pretty sure it supported them in 2004.)

When a phone call comes in, or I get a notification (text, calendar, app notification etc) - my Apple Watch does a really good job of (quite often) giving me enough info from my wrist that I don't need to pull my phone out of my pocket.

Garmin watches have some of this integration (IIRC you can definitely get texts, I don't remember what else) - but certainly not all of it. I haven't tried smartwatches from other manufacturers.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-dev... and https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2023/04/26/phone...

I assume that this functionality is available to other devices too.

Someone other than Apple tracking you, however, is notable, and so people (at least I) would always want to know if someone other than Apple is tracking me via software operating on the device.

But even the weather app triggers that same location pop up.

The other big one is Apple muscling itself into the music streaming market by converting Music.app into Apple Music. In a fair world, Apple would have been required to show a pop-up that offered Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer etc. in a random order. You can’t unmake an omelette, so I feel Apple should be forced to pay billions to these competing services as recompense.

Totally different markets. The lack of sensor compatibility and lack of battery life make the Apple Watch a non-starter for a lot of the really serious fitness/sports use cases.

If it was a "it worked and then Apple took away this API that we were going to use" that would be one thing. If it was "the iPhone didn't have the functionality for other devices to read messages over BlueTooth until 2015 with iOS 8" - that's a different claim.

https://x.com/ericmigi/status/1770832870870827149

IIRC, when the Fossil hybrid smartwatches first launched, this capability was not enabled, and they got a lot of feedback on it. By the time I tried one a few months later, the capability was live.

It looks like on Garmin you can only roughly affect which apps send notifications through via the "notification center" designation. If you otherwise don't care about the notification center (I don't), then it's a decent way to filter. But if you otherwise would care about what's in your notification center, then it's not great.

I wonder if Garmin thought they were helping people by mirroring the notification center preferences? If so, they should have let people choose between "use my notification center preferences" and "I'll choose my own apps".

As I mentioned in another comment, the inability to reply from third party watches is a bummer.

I also want alternate web tech, WebAssembly, Javascript implementations.

And as a developer, to be able to create tools that use the memory allocation/permissions API for JIT compilation.

No it wouldn't, because you could argue that they should allow competing OSes on their hardware platform.

> I don't think they take "there's no hard line" as an excuse to do nothing to enable competition.

I'm not saying they should. You're not responding to what I said. They didn't need to enable apps at all. They did, and allow things like Whatsapp to compete with their phone and messaging apps. They've enabled competition. Courts don't do anything like that.

Microsoft, by comparison, OWNED desktop computing in the 90s. Apple was on the ropes badly, and Linux wasn't viable for most people. And they used that dominance to attempt to strangle the open web in its crib. People literally had no where else to go.

Apple has nothing like that control today. Android enjoys a healthy chunk of the market. A host of other messaging tools exist if you don't like iMessage. You can avoid using Apple's tech at every turn if you like (and I know many people who do, as a matter of personal policy).

This is not a situation that warrants governmental intervention. This is a situation where the government is overreaching, and if they succeed the precedent will be set that Washington gets to decide what features a vendor can control on their own platforms. That's not a good place to be.

Simply asserting that doesn't make it true. Even if the app-store related claims in US v. Apple were identical, legally and in alleged facts, to those in Epic v. Apple, the ruling in the latter is not binding precedent for the former because Circuit Court decisions don't bind Districts in other Circuits. And, they aren't identical, anyway.

> Not to mention, several companies have some version of this, including game consoles.

So what? “Other companies do similar things” is not an argument against it being part of an illegal monopolization scheme when others do it. Like browser/OS bundling with Internet Explorer, its not the act in isolation, but its function in context and in conjunction with other business practices that is at issue.

Its not a question of whether an app store fee is on its face illegal, its a question of whwther Apple’s app store fee is part of a broader anticompetitive effort to defend and extend monopoly intthe smartphone and/or performance smartphone markets.

The big competitors like Samsung removed the jack too once they started selling their own wireless earbuds. They realized they could use Apple's strategy too.

Innovation comes from many sources and while vertical integration does assist in some cases, your assertion steps so far past plausible that it is simply ridiculous.

My AirPods frequently hop between my MacBook and iPhone without asking though, because the other device played a split second audio clip.

Strong YMMV I guess.

There are corner cases that cause annoyance, and those corner cases are indeed around where Apple is adding on top of Bluetooth: The ability to instantly switch the connected device without needing to disconnect from a previous device, and the ability to pair just by having the devices close. Those features are replicated in the Android ecosystem but are not standard.

If those two features are what you mean by "sucks" then fine. But that doesn't imply that Bluetooth doesnt work reliably, just that it doesn't have these two features broadly supported.

A difference here is that fast pairing and device switching on Android, while not a standard part of the protocol, is open for device manufacturers to support, unlike Apple's versions of these features.

I wonder if they are using a proprietary configuration API that is deliberately kept secret or if no Android devs have figured out how to reverse engineer it yet (seems very unlikely).

If the likely former, I'd like someone to address this as well as it almost feels like if they're getting into hearing assistance features, then accessibility becomes important.

Not really, I don't particularly have a problem with how Airpods went, except that Apple could have moved to standardize or at least open up fast pairing and instant switching, but they didn't.

But I'm doubtful of this, it seems more likely that some Apple users have an outdated view of how reliable standard Bluetooth actually are, even when paired with their iPhones.

I'd put my money on buying cheap devices and painting your experience with them in broad strokes on the technology as a whole. After all, if you have no faith in the tech, why spend money on a good experience? After all, why would $5 earbuds from Walmart have a different experience to a quality pair of headphones for a few hundred dollars to pair with your nearly thousand dollar smartphone?

I don't mean to gatekeep good Bluetooth, because try as I might I can't get my mom to stop getting her own and let me buy the expensive stuff for her, but she still manages to reliably get her Bluetooth paired, connected and working at the start of the phone call whenever I call her despite using budget headphones.

She does have a Pixel though. But it's just the budget one.

Many years ago I knew an ex-microsoft engineer. Microsoft had poor interoperability with something, and I speculated that engineers in microsoft didn't know what 3rd parties were doing and accidentally broke things.

He told me, "don't be naive - microsoft would have meetings saying 'how can we own this?'"

  it is in fact a technical limitation.

thank you for posting!

FYI for those others who don't know: click on a video in your photos app. click share --> "Copy iCloud Link"

EDIT: Tried it on my iPhone and it does not require an Apple account, kudos Apple. It does show my full real name as others have mentioned.

  That is, indeed, a technical limitation of MMS.

The last time folks got worked into a frenzy over RCS I ended up looking at the MMS specs. If memory serves 3GPP recommended an upper bound of at least 5 megabytes. American carriers typically limit attachments to like 3 megabytes or less and they mandate ancient video codecs.

John Sircacusa (from ATP.fm) pointed out years ago that the heart of Apple's biggest issues is business relationship management. This was when Apple only had a handful of issues with a few companies and made some poorly received statements about developers. Their ability to build mutually agreeable relations has only gotten worse in recent years.

Sony and Microsoft have kept their relations with third parties tough but ultimately agreeable. They promote practically all of their third parties (unlike the App Store which has so many apps that its like winning the lottery to be promoted). Consoles have stores which are probably more curated but which third party publishers/developers actually like.

IMO, DoJ, EU, etc. are acting primarily because they have received so many complaints from Spotify, Microsoft, Epic Games, Google, Meta, Tile, etc. Governments don't take action for the "public" interest on its own.

Sorry, I do not parse this. What did they add?

The idea that Apple is compliant with the DMA has yet to be tested. There are many direct statements by the enforcing commissioner and complaints from third parties that I think only a direct ruling will settle things.

I forgot about Prime Video purchases having a special back door deal for some of their purchases. I wasn’t referring to the subscription service but the purchase of digital books/movies. My point stands though. Digital goods could be sold and bought without special exceptions or loopholes from the 30% fee. That alone is a huge market opportunity.

>don’t seem to have any real clear roadmap

not your fault, but that's pretty funny

I don't think that's enough to make them competitive though. For instance, a scandal in one feature of the app (or Facebook being considered lame by kids) will hurt the rest of it.

And hoping Apple's broken client actually downloads full history or by forcing it to download by scrolling up through years of chat by hand.

And hoping Apple doesn't interpret a read lock on the db as malicious activity and temporary ousting you from iMessage and causing every message you send on unrelated hardware to drop to SMS until you login / logout from every device you "own".

My understanding - Siri is at its heart a command and control system. It was able to do Music (and iTunes before) because it knew The Who and The Rolling Stones from the hosted music catalog, even if those weren’t downloaded locally.

Apple needed to provide the localized commands, but also still needed the nouns to go with the verbs.

> Is it just that Spotify didn't bother implementing the relevant APIs or because those APIs were not available?

The former. There are plenty of other CarPlay media apps. They are all limited (first and third party) in that CarPlay is basically like a low bandwidth VNC display.

Have you ever dealt with a big government? Then you can imagine, Apple doesn't have as much weight as typical governments but it is close.

that's how you know he's right

Like it or not, there are different rules for the biggest players who wield market power. If you want an iPhone, then Android is not an alternative option. DOJ's argument is that Apple has added artificial disincentives to enable switching to a non-iPhone and also favor its own apps/services.

This is verbatim the argument against Microsoft and how it was wielding its Windows monopoly to stifle competition like Netscape. Easy to forget that Microsoft had closed APIs for 3rd parties and dictated how OEMs installed its OS before the US government judgement. You could've made the same counterpoint at the time that there's theoretical alternative OSes like Linux and Unix.

What's authoritarian is Apple's lockdown of the iPhone. I should be able to run whatever application I want on my own device. Not the governement telling Apple, "Hey, people should be able to run what they want on their own device".

What if I cannot do that due to there being no incentive for Apple to support web standards in Safari?

We don't want our users to have to switch browsers, but that leaves us with no ability to use lots of the features that make modern web apps competitive at all with native apps.

Several years ago I wouldn't have even bothered trying to do that on my phone. There is some benefit to Safari being so ubiquitous.

Then all websites would be designed for the one browser!!

This is the easiest way to tell someone is wrong about politics. This doesn't happen, but everyone who doesn't know how anything works thinks it does. You just can't handle the truth that other voters actually believe different things than you.

> While the business in US was content to sit on their throne and milk the consumers, US consumers uplifted the entire country of China.

Think you forgot every other country exists here.

NFC has not been a "shaky" standard long long long before Apple adopted it

and most other phone vendors had at least some models which support it

even before that there where extension systems to try out and test it before phones did support it

so it was pretty much Apple holding the industry in that specific area back

and like I said it wasn't anti-competive, it was there right to do so

but it shows how apple often doesn't care too much about what would be good for the user if it isn't good for them, I mean they are in the end a stock traded company it would be strange if they didn't

and if one vendor has a huge usage base to a point it has monopoly like powers (even if the usage base is only around ~50% that still is monopoly like power in the phone marked due to the marked/usage dynamic of phones) then you can't rely on a technology 50%+(1) of your customers can't use because the vendor they use doesn't support it or artificially locks it down especially if it's something like a phone where the network effects makes it basically impossible to expect people to switch it (1: 50%+ as while the marked share wasn't 50%+ the marked share in the audience such a system would reach was.)

EDIT: And yes I'm fully aware of the while NFC<->SIM secure module<->carrier power being annoying thing. But that thing had been solved a long time ago outside of the US (and later in the US by virtual secure modules) and while the initial solutions to that problem (e.g. in the EU) where still annoying non of it was a major road block and would have been resolved if there would have been insensitive to do so. But if your product doesn't work with iPhone users and you potential customers are mainly people which high end phones it just never mattered because the marked was dead anyway.

At first I got into Apple’s ecosystem because it ticked the boxes of being Unix-compatible yet very capable (perhaps rivaling Windows) of working with multimedia, which I did and do.

However, the older I get and the more I lurk here and elsewhere, the more I realize there is another reason: I am not an expert, the aforementioned weeks spent on securing my device are not substantially benefitting my life and are better spent on something else, and while no one should completely give up on keeping up-to-date with modern attack vectors paying someone to do that work more competently is worthwhile.

I still go to crazy lengths to avoid closed products in actual work I do, but I consider a base system that is maybe proprietary but just works, and securely enough, to be providing value in that way and enabling me to provide more value in turn.

And I still consider myself more knowledgeable than 95% of my friends and relatives, so there’s them to think about.

I like how iOS works and I would prefer the government does not force Apple to change anything about it.

Just not the freedom to choose a walled garden (with its own set of - yes - positives). That choice needs to be taken away. For your freedom.

One might say - managed freedom.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/10/20689644/apple-zoom-web-s...

I agree we should force platforms to be more.open and interoperable, but we can get at least part way there by not allowing them to sue innovators.

So... what?

But there are other ways to send images or arbitrary files. Why does iMessage need to support it?