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Comment by sumuyuda | Hacker News Reader

> Antitrust pressure has slowed consolidation, opened app distribution, killed the anti-competitive iMessage and AirDrop moats

iMessage is still only available on Apple hardware. Apple’s malicious compliance has made developing apps for third party app stores a no-go. I have AltStore installed but there are no apps worth installing.

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> iMessage is still only available on Apple hardware.

Yes, but I think the pressure is external. RCS brings many iMessage capabilities cross platform. As adoption increases I think the power and influence of iMessage will wane.

RCS is Google's iMessage with the same vendor locking — not actually cross-platform.

RCS is an open standard that Apple now uses as well.

I think there's a legitimate concern about having essentially two phone platforms, and how anything can really be "open" in that environment. But it's definitely a step forward.

And Google has built proprietary things on top of the standard, which is indeed concerning.

"Open" is an overstatement when it comes to RCS. You can't go out and write a new RCS client for Android, and you can't provide RCS on a new platform (or even unGoogled Android). It's open to the extent that both Google and Apple can use it; other major hardware vendors and carriers could, but don't (Samsung used to, and dropped it earlier this year).

It requires you to have a whitelisted private key to make devices that use RCS

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