>Specifically, investigators have examined how the Apple Watch works better with the iPhone than with other brands, as well as how Apple locks competitors out of its iMessage service. They have also scrutinized Apple’s payments system for the iPhone, which blocks other financial firms from offering similar services, these people said.
I'm not sure if current U.S. antitrust law condemns this behavior from Apple. In general, companies have no duty to deal with competitors. It can be anticompetitive to worsen access for competitors from a prior baseline without a procompetitive justification, but it's generally not anticompetitive to never offer access at parity with your own products (self preferencing) in the first place.
While these are reasonable complaints, it might take new legislation from Congress to remedy. I'm looking forward to seeing the actual complaint when it is filed so we can assess whether the Justice Department is working within existing frameworks or is instead attempting to push the envelope of antitrust law without Congressional authorization.
Still, this article is helpful in that is tells us what areas are the focus of the government's case (notably: nothing about the App Store).
I think it is kind of funny that one arm of the government is saying Apple can't sell its watches, while another arm is saying the watches are furthering their monopoly position.
And I don't think these two things contradict each other.
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.
I remember microsoft getting into huge shit over mandating preinstalling internet explorer on their OS.
This feels 100x worse because you can't install any alternative sms application afaik.
I think the only mismatch is that lawmakers always 20 years behind the times, so it's taken them this long to realize that sms/imessage/whatever is just as fundamental as a browser for modern interconnectivity.
Microsoft got in trouble for tying its monopoly in operating systems to OEMs preinstalling Internet Explorer. Essentially, they told OEMs that they would not sell them Windows unless they agreed to help Microsoft kill Netscape. That's a very different kind of antitrust complaint than what the article describes, which is Apple building seamless connections between its hardware and services while offering second-tier connections for competitors.
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.
I feel like you really didn't address what I said at all.
These are two cases of OS dictating which software comes on their platform. To make it worse, the microsoft case was just about defaults, you could still install whatever the heck you wanted. Whereas in IOS you can't, period.
So just imagine if microsoft windows never allowed you to install any other web-browsers without breaking the OS.
When Microsoft tells OEMs -- someone not Microsoft, "we won't license you Windows unless you include and set as default Internet Explorer" that's anticompetitive.
It's the act of using your pull of needing to buy Windows get another business to do something unrelated.
MS could absolutely not allow you to have any other browser without it being anticompetitive, to wit this is what happens on Xbox.
This is why Apple won and Google lost their case with Epic. Google tried to have an open platform but then used their pull with gapps to force OEMs to privilege the Play store. The mere act of privileging your own products and services on your own platform isn't anticompetitive.
They did address it by explaining why it's not only not worse, but different.
Microsoft to OEMs: you can only put our OS on the devices you sell if you make IE the default.
Without Windows, PC makers knew they had no market to sell to because there was no viable alternative OS being demanded by consumers (hence the asserted monopoly position of Microsoft). They were restraining other business from engaging alternatives from competing browser makers.
Apple: we build our messaging product, in our OS, on our devices
There are no other businesses involved between Apple and end users, who can use competing device makers, OS makers and contrary to what you stated, messaging services like Telegram, Signal, Matrix etc etc.
> How do you install Android or some other OS competitor on an iPhone, or install iOS on a Samsung or Google device?
You don’t, you either choose to buy an Android or an iPhone.
This is like asking why I can’t go to Princeton but have my favorite Stanford professor come teach my class, or why I can’t play CS:GO inside Mario Party.
Life is full of tradeoffs. You can’t have your cake and eat it too all the time.
> This is like asking why I can’t go to Princeton but have my favorite Stanford professor come teach my class
You can do that. You just convince them to teach the class at Princeton. Professors move from one school to another all the time. You can also go take a class at one school while attending another if you want to do that, and the other school will not only not stand in your way, you'll generally get transfer credit.
> or why I can’t play CS:GO inside Mario Party.
These are two different games. The example you're looking for is that you can't play Mario Party on a PlayStation. But that's barely even an analogy, it's just the same situation -- why shouldn't you be able to play Mario Party on a PlayStation except for nefarious anticompetitive BS?
This is distinct from technical capability. If you can't play Mario Party on a Sega Genesis because it only has 64KB of RAM, too bad. But if you can't play it on <whatever device> even though you paid for it solely because of some anti-competitive lock-in even if the hardware is capable and you're willing to e.g. create a compatibility layer, that's something else.
You didn't buy a full license to their software. You bought a phone that is a complete package. What entitles you to try to install their software on stuff they don't want it on or didn't build it to supprt?
Do you want them to spend money developing iOS for other devices, just so you can take that for free and install it on an Android?
You knew the rules before you pulled out your wallet.
For iMessage - they run a service that costs money. Why should they just give it out for free? Sure, they give it to their customers for free, but why does that mean you get it too?
It would be like sneaking into a complimentary hotel breakfast. Sure, you managed to grab someone's keycard - you technically can get past the restrictions. Still eating food someone else paid for. Just because you have friends eating already and you want to join them doesn't make it right.
> You didn't buy a full license to their software.
You bought a copy of their software. Now that copy is yours and not theirs. Why shouldn't you be able to transfer your copy of it to whatever you want or use it however you want? You paid for it.
Licensing is for granting additional rights you don't otherwise get with a copy, e.g. a volume license allows you to reproduce additional copies for multiple devices at once, or the GPL allows you to reproduce and distribute copies to other people under certain terms. Taking away rights via license is inconsistent with the first sale doctrine.
> Do you want them to spend money developing iOS for other devices, just so you can take that for free and install it on an Android?
Why would it have to be free? You don't get Windows for free. But you can install it on a Dell in addition to a Surface, and so can Dell.
> You knew the rules before you pulled out your wallet.
Saying "you knew the rules" is not how you establish someone's authority to create rules.
> For iMessage - they run a service that costs money.
This is a fig leaf. Messaging services cost a negligible amount of money to operate and if anybody actually cared about this, no one is demanding for them to operate it themselves anyway rather than using or creating a protocol that supports federation.
Notice that substantially all of the other popular messaging services are just as free to everyone, including the ones not limited to any particular platform.
You may have a point with regards to Webkit, however even that is potentially tenuous. The difference that you are missing, and that was addressed is how Microsoft levereged their market postion in the OS market (>85% in the late 1990's) to stop vendors and OEM pre-packaging an alternative browser; USA vs Microsoft was never about IE being bundled - that came later and that was the EU - it was always about how they killed the main competitor to their browser with threats.
Not even remotely the same with the biggest difference being that MS was telling other business to shut out competitors or lose access to Windows, which at the time was pretty much required for computing. If MS had its own hardware, they would have been free to do what they wanted with it.
In fact, Apple will like argue (and has successfully already in the Epic case) that it's the entire ecosystem that the courts have to look at and not any single feature. And at an ecosystem level there is a huge competitor in Android. Apple forcing webkit for example is Apple's choice as they control the entire platform. If they licensed iOS, then it would become harder to make that claim.
Statutory antitrust law in the US is extremely broad, to the point that it relies on the courts to interpret it to not prohibit anyone from so much as entering into a 30 day purchasing contract because it would restrain the buyer from patronizing a competitor for 30 days. By its terms that would nominally be a violation.
As a result most of what you have to look at is case law. But antitrust cases are rare to begin with and ones dealing with this kind of "huge conglomerate that ties its products and services together with computer code" -- try to name one dealing with a company of that nature other than Microsoft. Maybe AT&T? It's not a lot of precedent until you're looking at cases of much smaller companies doing much narrower things, which leaves plenty of room for the judge to "distinguish" them (i.e. do whatever they want in this case).
> In general, companies have no duty to deal with competitors.
It seems like a major difference here isn't just that they won't deal with competitors, it's that they don't allow their customers to deal with competitors. This is quite stark when you're looking at their products -- someone who owns an iPhone can't reasonably modify or replace the system software to integrate a competing payments system (or, for that matter, app store) because Apple doesn't allow it even on a piece of hardware they sold and is now owned by someone else.
You could make that argument for services, i.e. iMessage, but there are at least two other ways to get at that. First, iMessage is tied to their other offerings and so then you get them for the tying. Second, maybe routing something with a network effect through a centralized service is a different kind of thing than refusing to provide your competitors with delivery service when you don't have a monopoly on delivery service. Maybe it's more like refusing to provide your competitors with delivery service when you do have a monopoly on delivery service.
> I'm looking forward to seeing the actual complaint when it is filed so we can assess whether the Justice Department is working within existing frameworks or is instead attempting to push the envelope of antitrust law without Congressional authorization.
Congress pretty much authorized the courts to do whatever they want on this. The real question is what they want to do. You have to go back to Congress if they do something dumb.
> to the point that it relies on the courts to interpret it
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."
> 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.
The problem with simple and straight forward is that it's a law prohibiting something.
If you buy the output of some factory which is the input to your own product, is that in restraint of trade? Does it matter if it's 10% or 50% or 90% or 100% of the industry's production capacity for that input? What if it's only 10% but it's the last 10% and the other 90% is already locked up in contracts with companies in other industries?
There's nothing in the statute to answer questions like that so the courts have to make something up. There's a pretty good argument that they've narrowed the antitrust laws too much over time but it's hard to claim that Congress didn't leave things open to interpretation.
> 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.
A century ago there wasn't an internet-connected computer chip in everything that allows the vendor to exercise control over a product even after they've sold it.
> Iqvia holdings.
This appears to be a case about a merger between healthcare companies. Which part of it are you implying is relevant to what Apple is doing?
> 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."
They're presumably going to argue that you can create an account with AWS and install whatever applications you want on your cloud server and access them from your iPhone, or something like that.
> 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."
Let's put it this way: If the courts want to find Apple in violation, it would be difficult to argue that this is outside the scope of what Congress intended based on the wording of the laws Congress passed.
I think you’re misunderstanding tying by getting it backwards. If you want to buy Windows, you have to install Internet Explorer and agree not to install Netscape Navigator. The issue is the economic interest in the product being sold. The equivalent would be if you want to buy an iPhone, you have to use iMessage. Which is not the case.
> If you want to buy Windows, you have to install Internet Explorer and agree not to install Netscape Navigator.
If you want to buy iMessage, you have to use iOS/macOS.
You might be confused because it actually works in both directions. iMessage achieves a large network by being bundled with iPhones, then the large network creates market power and iMessage is tied to Apple devices which pressures other people to buy those devices, even when they'd have preferred not to, in order to avoid the green bubble.
This is one of the reasons this kind of tying is prohibited. Leveraging a dominant position in market A increases your share of market B and leveraging a dominant position in market B increases your share of market A, repeat until the market is concentrated into an oligopoly of vertically integrated conglomerates or a monopoly.
> Walled gardens aren’t antitrust violations.
Why not? Anti-competitive practices don't become otherwise just because you say "it's for your own good" as you lock the door.
> If you buy the output of some factory which is the input to your own product, is that in restraint of trade?
No. Why would you think it is? It's a restraint of trade if there's an illegal agreement between the two companies that unfairly disadvantages other purchasers. Or it's a restraint of trade if you've bought up all the other suppliers so there is only one. These concepts are enshrined in laws that are pretty simple to read, you're inventing conflict where there hasn't been any.
> This appears to be a case about a merger between healthcare companies.
That's not what it is. It's a digital healthcare advertising company. Software is at the heart of the case.
> They're presumably going to argue that you can create an account with AWS and install whatever applications you want on your cloud server and access them from your iPhone, or something like that.
Does that have platform parity with apps from the app store? If not, it's a flawed argument.
> If the courts want to find Apple in violation
The court doesn't _want_ anything. Other than for the parties to settle their disputes outside of court. When they can't, they rule, and often pretty carefully because they don't want to get overturned on appeal.
This isn't something that's happening to Apple, it's a strategy they've employed, in defiance of the law, in the hopes that they were going to be able to get away with it. That was a good short term gamble, because they almost got two decades out of it, but the courts have caught up to the market, and they're about to get the law applied to them.
If this bothers anyone that much, familiarize yourself with the laws, and then advocate against them. I think if you actually prepare to do this, you'll immediately understand that almost every consumer in America will be against you.
> While these are reasonable complaints, it might take new legislation from Congress to remedy. I'm looking forward to seeing the actual complaint when it is filed so we can assess whether the Justice Department is working within existing frameworks or is instead attempting to push the envelope of antitrust law without Congressional authorization.
I would not be surprised if they are trying to push the envelope of the current law is fine and I think that's fine. If you're unwilling to try to enforce unless you're 100% sure no judge would ever disagree with you, you're going to let people get away with a LOT of stuff by default that could very well be found to be covered by existing statute.
And the failures could galvanize additional legislation more than doing nothing.
The big issue is Apple air tags. They work so well because people own lots of iPhones, and there is nothing really equivalent that uses all Android phones to do the same. Air tags pretty much lock you into the Apple ecosystem given how useful they are, and the lack of an alternative from the competition.
Why is this Apple's fault that they've built their devices from the ground up to work seamlessly together and other companies haven't? A competitor is free to make their own version of air tags that work with Android phones.
The only reason AirTags work is because every iPhone runs code that tracks them. There are thousands of different models of Android phones, 99% of them have software that will never see another update again. How exactly do you add code that detects "their own version of air tags that work with Android phones"? The answer is you don't. AirTags took off because Apple had the ability to retroactively make every existing iPhone start to track them. No other company can pull that off.
hm, they are BLE devices right? google can push out google play services updates to a lot of those phones anytime. it doesn't seem inconceivable. (recent nothing os update has some feature related to this, I have no idea if it's from stock android or not though.)
I don't think it would be totally impossible for Google to try this, but even the percentage of phones that have functioning GMS (i.e. on a recent enough Android version, receiving updates, and even having GMS installed in the first place) is far lower than the percentage of iPhones that are still receiving updates.
Sure, most phones you can buy in the US will have GMS, but part of the benefit of AirTags is being able to track things through, say, China, and you could be somewhat hard-pressed to find a chinese Android with GMS.
Meanwhile, all sorts of people all around the world want the latest iPhone, and every single latest iPhone in the world gets the latest updates.
Hm, strange. I haven't looked at the numbers, but I would assume more Androids are sold and in use with GMS than iPhones. But you might be completed right!
Also it's a very interesting point about China and AirTags. How come it's not forbidden by the CCP?
> I would assume more Androids are sold and in use with GMS than iPhones.
As of 2023, Android has approximately a 70% global market share (iPhone has almost 60% in the US), but we don't know exactly how many of those run GMS. There's a list of supported devices [0], but it'd take forever to sort through it, and we don't know:
- how many devices there are not on that list
- how many devices have hacked/"pirated" GMS anyway
If Google were to pursue something like AirTag, it could probably work okay enough, except:
- It'd likely have worse/coarser coverage than Apple AirTags, simply due to the variety of Android phones out there, and the fact that most of them will never be fully updated
- It'd likely take a while to introduce because of the need to wait until enough phones are updated for the tags will work properly
- It'd likely not have the same quality of user experience, and Google is not particularly known for privacy
Re coarser coverage, there are also likely to be huge dead zones where e.g. the dominant phone manufacturer is Huawei, which is hated by Google and no longer allowed to manufacture phones running GMS. Xiaomi doesn't have Google Play, but they still have GMS.
I mean the CCP is stubborn and irrational, but not blind, if millions of iPhones serve as a dragnet data exfiltration platform, how come they don't try to block it? (Or since AirTags are easy to detect they are simply so low-risk?)
It is not really Apple's fault, but intentional or not, it locks people into their ecosystem. You don't have to be "at fault" to be subject to antitrust, just being really successful counts also.
>investigators have examined how the Apple Watch works better with the iPhone than with other brands
This is such a misleading way to phrase it. The Apple Watch only works with the iPhone (unfortunately. I would buy one if it worked on Android. Android watches are universally hopeless)
If you don't have it paired to an iPhone, an Apple Watch won't even tell you the time.
I really hope Big Tech, including but not limited to Apple, gets broken up, they've gotten too big and have expanded far beyond tech, and I'm not sure we're all the better for it.
>I really hope Big Tech, including but not limited to Apple, gets broken up, they've gotten too big and have expanded far beyond tech, and I'm not sure we're all the better for it.
Many of our retirement and wealth portfolios would beg to differ. S&P minus FAANG is virtually flat for the past few years (and depending upon which estimate you observe, likely negative if you factor inflation); almost all of the growth in the S&P 500 is from tech growth.
> S&P minus FAANG is virtually flat for the past few years
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.
I do not see why this has to be true (especially with declining fertility rates). Scale itself is a competitive advantage, especially when competing against a well oiled machine like China. The game is global, not national.
In my perfect world the bad practices Apple's resistance of which are a core thing that makes their products attractive—would be outlawed. Totally destroyed, eliminated from the market. Then they'd go after Apple (yes! Please! Do! ... but maybe remove the bad shit they use their vertical integration and market power to shield me from, first? That'd be nice.)
I understand the feeling looking for justice served by "breaking up", but in this case I don't think that's ever going to work. In fact, that will make even harder to regulate them in future since they're nominally smaller entities, but forming a cohesive cartel.
The market itself is reinforcing this distorted incentive structure, so even if you break them up into 100 smaller companies they will keep doing so in a more secretive way since they will still operate in the same market with aligned incentives. Breaking up works effectively only when you can effectively split the market those are operating on, something like AT&T or Standard oil. Big techs are not bound on geographic areas, so you're going to spend several years on uncertain fights only to make it even worse.
What we really need is precisely targeted legislation that will prevent anti-competitive business practice itself. EU has been successful here with GDPR, DMA and they're willing to extend them even further. US is holding everyone back here. This is a highly political problem. Any judicial treatment will only be temporary mitigation and those will quickly find out a way to circumvent it.
There are anti-trust concerns then there is geopolitics, with big businesses that are easier to control for US politicians... I mean the whole Prism thing relied on big tech olygopoly.
People often say they're being "punished for their success" but I think that's an interesting concept.
Apple raked in $93bn in profits last year. It's such an aberration compared to other companies I feel like there must be anti-competitive barriers somewhere. You expect me to believe that no competition is able to take a slice of that? It's too juicy not to! Competition should be eroding those margins to a more reasonable figure and it's not IMO.
Why is it so hard to believe that competing products are simply inferior? $93bn in profits might seem huge, but is it really such an outlier for a company of this size?
> I feel like there must be anti-competitive barriers somewhere
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.
> The barrier is inventing and organizing the logistics of delivering the most cutting edge technology
LOL, nothing Apple does is cutting edge. They took Linux and made it easy for corporate system admins. Touchscreens were invented back in the 60's. GUI's were created by Xerox.
Steve Jobs was a hack and a douche by all accounts, the reverence people have for him is laughable. But this is the behavior of the oligarchs and the monopolies they run; they have such centralized power that they're able to vacuum up all competitors, even potential or tangential ones.
Apple used 386BSD (4.3?), some userland from FreeBSD, and the Mach Microkernel from *CMU, all from the acquisition from NeXT, who developed XNU and NeXTStep 18 months-2 years before the Linux kernel was released. The innovative thing with the touch screen was smooth and accurate touch based gestures on a capacitive screen. GUI's were argubably invented by Ivan Sutherland and further developed by Doug Engelbart at SRI, which is where PARC poached the majority of their engineers.
If your going to troll, have the decency to get your facts straight.
> You expect me to believe that no competition is able to take a slice of that?
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.
It just runs counter to everything I think I know about capitalism. That all these disruptors and competitors would turn their nose up at a $93bn pile of money. The only other company more profitable that I could find was Saudi Aramco- a state owned petroleum company with all of the protection that that entails. Why is the iPhone so much more profitable (and the moat so much wider) than their other products? It doesn't pass the smell test IMO.
I don't think anyone else wants to make the bet that they could take a sufficient slice out of that pie to make the gamble pay off, given Apple's significant lead, and ~all of the likely-competitor tech companies with enough capital & expertise to try having cultures and existing lines of business that run contrary to such an attempt.
How's Google going to credibly do that, especially without going wildly into monopolist territory by freezing out ad & spying competitors while surely still allowing their own? Why would they when getting more eyes and ears on "their users" and defending against a rise of platforms that might hinder them was the point of not just developing Android, but making it free so that others would stop trying to do their own thing?
Microsoft could maybe try, but is running fast the other direction instead, probably for similar reasons of wanting to grab that sweet, sweet data (gotta feed LLMs, now; more reason than ever!)
To viably compete you need:
1) Software that actually works really really well (perfectly? Not even close. Wildly above the median in the world of consumer software, even from big vendors? Oh my, yes). Lots, and lots, and lots of such software. So very much. Operating systems, server-side systems of several kinds, an "office" suite, advanced camera-related software, mapping software, utilities galore (things like Preview and Digital Color Meter are great and are absolutely part of Apple's "moat")—maybe even a browser, if you want to approach things like Apple's real-world-use battery life on MacBooks. So much software. And it'll need to all work together well enough not to look pathetic next to the relatively-excellent integration that Apple's stuff has.
2) You're gonna have to have tight integration with probably-custom hardware across several fairly-different product lines to achieve a similar quality level on #1, and to approach their levels of profitability. That's a huge investment, and hard. Your organization needs to be able to S-rank procurement, logistics, packaging, and hardware design on some balance of a functional and aesthetic level—at least more often than not.
3) You're gonna need to be able to play the "privacy defender" card and not have your pants immediately combust—whatever you think of Apple's credibility on this, it's surely well above the other tech giants. That also means forgoing or abandoning other opportunities at income (Apple's tentative move into ads is... worrisome, for this reason)
> without going wildly into monopolist territory by freezing out ad & spying competitors while surely still allowing their own
You mean like killing off third-party cookies while retaining a way to track and advertise to users via FLoC-turned-Interests? You can argue Firefox disables third-party cookies, but they're not an ad company. >85% (last I checked) of Google revenue is advertising or adjacent to it, and their legal team signed off on an action that harms their competitors and helps the ad network with the soon-to-be most accurate tracking
AMD is steadfastly refusing for provide software support equivalent to CUDA for their GPUs. They’re leaving a trillion dollars on the table. NVIDIA isn’t being anti-competitive, it’s AMD being un-competitive.
The Windows & Linux PC ecosystem badly lags behind Apple on a number of basic features. E.g.: literally just color! If I want to edit videos in HDR (which is just better color), I have to start with… buying a Mac. Windows essentially can’t do this without enormous effort, and Linux is hopeless. MacOS and all Apple hardware “just works”.
No Android phone manufacturer even begins to provide the quality and the service that Apple does. I give my old iPhones to my relatives to use and they still get updates and full support after six or more years! I can walk into an Apple Store, and they’ll fix or replace my phone on the spot. Etc…
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.
We're very likely worse off. Google and Apple having absolute authority over digital lives is bad enough, but giving them the power to destroy your actual life would be sufficient reason alone.
>Specifically, investigators have examined how the Apple Watch works better with the iPhone than with other brands, as well as how Apple locks competitors out of its iMessage service.
I'm suspicious that much of this is a ploy to weaken the tight security controls & encrypted data so that the US government (and potentially other governments?) can get easier access to surveillance data on US citizens.
There are dozens of messaging apps out there with equal or better encryption than iMessage and also multi OS support. Vendor lock-in doesn't mean better security.
Quality of security aside, I'd be curious which encrypted messaging apps have the highest quantity of (encrypted—some support unencrypted, also, as Messages does) messages flowing through them in a given day—for, say, US users, as that's the jurisdiction of the government whose motives are being questioned, so seems the most relevant.
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.
As a person who uses almost all of Apple's hardware, and almost all of Google's services, and none of Apple's services, the behavior that always strikes me as the most harmful to consumers is the constant nagging of users about the intended behavior of their chosen third-party apps, while their operating systems remain silent about the exact same behaviors of first-party apps. For example iOS has several silent default-opt-in location data features that I do not want or need, and at the same time it regularly tries to trick me into disabling location features of Google Maps, that I've used daily since 2005.
The other issue is the constant nagging, that can't be disabled, about iCloud backups being full, when in fact I never wanted them in the first place and as far as I can tell or recall they stole that data from me.
> it regularly tries to trick me into disabling location features of Google Maps, that I've used daily since 2005.
Citation needed. I periodically get popups for even Apple's own first-party apps asking if I still want to share location. "Do you still want Weather to know where you are?" Yes, I do, because I use it. You may very well be getting the same message for Google apps, but that's not special anti-Google behavior.
> The other issue is the constant nagging, that can't be disabled, about iCloud backups being full
Then turn off iCloud backups. It's an optional feature that makes sense to be on by default, but that's trivially easy to disable if you don't want it.
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.
... I wonder if the Maps app itself plays some role in providing Location services. That'd explain why they'd privilege it for location data, but not other first part apps that use location (why wouldn't they do that with all of them, if they were really doing this to "cheat"?)
[EDIT] Though, regardless, I do see why it'd rankle that in fact Apple Maps ends up seeing fewer permission-reminders than Google Maps, even if it's for a not-exactly-intended-as-nefarious reason—I don't mean to dismiss your complaint.
Your experience is vastly different from my own. Where do you see documented that Maps is immune from location permission popups? And if you're not using Apple Maps, what indication have you see that it's using your location? That is, why would it ask you if it could continue accessing your location if you're not opening the app and triggering it to find you?
I don't know if the location services permission is initially on in Apple Maps, but I just checked to see if you can turn it off, and you definitely can, without affecting other apps' ability to use it.
The nag to sign up for iCloud is terrible. It is literally not possible to arrange Apple devices and not pay for that. There’s no reason under the sun for it to be required (architecturally speaking) they just do it to force you into becoming another revenue stream. This is (in my opinion) the biggest example of Apple’s abuse of their monopoly position.
That's simply untrue. I opened the App Store on my iPhone, searched for Maps, tapped the Apple Maps item, scrolled down, and there's its privacy scorecard. I did the same for Messages, Mail, Photos, and Phone. All of them show up in the App Store with user reviews and the privacy section that all other apps have.
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
I really feel like the browser ban is one of their biggest unforced errors here. They could have utilized their discretion to ban Chrome[1] while allowing alternative browser engines like Firefox or classic Opera onto their store, which would have helped Mozilla compete against Google and slowed down their eventual takeover of the entire internet. 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.
1: There's a bunch of stuff the commercial Google Chrome does that they could easily ban through store policy. They could also just arbitrarily refuse to approve it.
> which would have helped Mozilla compete against Google and slowed down their eventual takeover of the entire internet
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.
The only browsers on iOS are webkit browsers, and when Chrome was new it was also webkit. Because of this, the ideal target for a web developer became webkit, including webkit-only features and workarounds for webkit bugs.
This automatically pushed Firefox, Opera, Edge, IE out of the picture, because we basically had an emerging browser monoculture already. If the people who were already using Firefox could have kept using it on their new phone or tablet as well, syncing bookmarks and history, that would have probably slowed its defeat a little bit and perhaps slowed Chrome's growth. We eventually got a Firefox-branded wrapper around Safari's webviews but Apple's architecture guarantees that those webview frames will always be inferior to Safari.
Safari being available on Windows might've helped too, but I understand why Apple chose not to do that.
I disagree with this. When chrome was released the ideal target for a web developer was Internet explorer, because everyone who wasn't a technology enthusiast just used the built-in browser. Many business related websites still required internet explorer to function properly years after IE was discontinued.
Additionally, this video shows FireFox's marketshare was still increasing, even two years after chrome was first released.
The reason google Chrome succeeded is because it was a better browser. It syncs all your favorites, passwords, and history with the google account you already have. It works on every platform. And Firefox had several years where it just wasn't very good. I was a Firefox user but around the time they killed legacy extensions I bailed.
I remember helping many family members when their Internet Explorer was filled with spyware toolbars taking up 50% of their screen. I would just install chrome and log them into their gmail account and never have to fix it again.
As others have mentioned, Safari was available on windows for many years.
If they would have allowed alternate web engines and excluded google then google could have easily sued the crap out of them. As it stands they can viably say it's for OS integrity and security by forcing everyone to use the say "guts"
> Blast them for forbidding competing browsers on iOS.
They allow competing browsers but they have to use the OS-provided JavaScript engine. I guess one could make an argument that allowing third-party engines would encourage innovation in the browser space but at the same time, there is a strong security argument for very narrowly limiting the JIT-code execution entitlement.
> They allow competing browsers but they have to use the OS-provided JavaScript engine
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.
> The company has previously said that its practices do not violate antitrust law. In defending its business practices against critics in the past, Apple said that its “approach has always been to grow the pie” and “create more opportunities not just for our business, but for artists, creators, entrepreneurs and every ‘crazy one’ with a big idea.”
Tell that to Beeper Mini who had the crazy idea of growing the pie of iMessage users, following the original protocol seamlessly through adversarial interoperability.
It is quite debatable over whether Apple should be forced to allow another company to make money using adverse interoperability and server runtime costs etc.
In the same way it was quite debatable over whether IBM should be forced to allow another company (Compaq) to make money using adverse interoperability and reverse engineering IBM's BIOS.
I'd argue that the second debate was settled in the right way, and am partial to Apple being forced to interoperate as well. If you run a service with more than, say, 5% of a market, and that market has a network lock-in effect, you should eventually be considered a public service and have to interoperate.
Pidgin / Blackberry Inbox / WP7 homescreen / Matrix bridges and other services that unify incoming and outgoing text and binary messages for 1x1/group chats should be table stakes, not selling points. Email and IM, whether on PC, mobile, XR, whatever, vendor agnostic!
> If you run a service with more than, say, 5% of a market, and that market has a network lock-in effect, you should eventually be considered a public service and have to interoperate.
I think this would create a whole new generation of tech startups in a stalled/captured industry.
> If you run a service with more than, say, 5% of a market, and that market has a network lock-in effect, you should eventually be considered a public service and have to interoperate.
I would love to see iMessage available to people not on Apple devices.
However, I am not enthusiastic about a government defining what "interoperate" means in general. By way of example, I can think of many definitions of "interoperate" that would prevent the use of end-to-end encryption, or prevent upgrading the protocol and not supporting old versions, or prevent fixing security issues because some third-party client was relying on the insecure behavior, or prevent setting requirements on acceptable client behavior...
I want interoperability. I don't want to end up in a world in which, once you get large enough, it's impossible to innovate without slowing down and waiting for the slowest and most recalcitrant/adversarial folks who want to interoperate with you to catch up.
fwiw in this case iMessage is easily funded by all the profit Apple earns off of iPhone/iPad sales, app store 30%, and iCloud subscriptions. It's not as if Apple is being forced to let millions of Android users communicate with each other for free over iMessage - Beeper exists because people want to communicate with Apple's customers, who already paid them money.
The US should focus on breaking up the app store duopoly that charges 30% on all digital items. Apps are not even allowed to link out to their website or tell users that Apple/Google is taking a 30% cut!
Apple & Google don’t have to pay the app store tax & have products that compete with books, audiobooks, Spotify etc — this is the most blatant antitrust issue. I hope the US lawsuit leads with this.
> Apps are not even allowed to link out to their website or tell users that Apple/Google is taking a 30% cut!
What business in their right mind would want to sell or stock a product that comes with a label that says, in effect, “Don’t spend your money here, go somewhere else”?
A large number of products are being sold with some docs that has a link to their own merchandise store and promote them? Apple doesn't have to tell about the competitions on their app store, but they should allow each app whatever they want to do.
So to be clear: if Apple printed on every iPhone box, "This phone is 30% cheaper on Apple.com", you feel that Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, %LOCAL_TECH_STORE%, etc. should be legally obligated to stock those iPhones?
Why should they be obligated to stock them? Grandmas that live in cities with walmarts and no apple stores will just buy a samsung or whatever is available in the store.
A better question is, why aren't iphones cheaper at apple stores?
> Apple doesn't have to tell about the competitions on their app store, but they should allow each app whatever they want to do.
So you think it's OK that Walmart doesn't want to sell a product that says, "Hey, don't buy this from Walmart", but you think it's wrong for Walmart not to want to sell a product that links to a website, where the website says, "Hey, don't buy any more of our stuff from Walmart"?
Is that not pretty much exactly what happens when you buy say a Nintendo Switch at Wal-Mart?
Nintendo will encourage you to buy from their online store, competing with Wal-Mart selling physical media (and maybe digital codes too on their own store?).
Why not? The former enforces Walmart to do something they don't want to do and the latter enforces Walmart not to do something someone else don't want to do. There is a discrete difference between those two. I don't understand why you don't get this simple old idea?
But this is standard in every other business. Want to buy a samsung phone? You can buy it at a samsung store directly or from amazon/walmart/your local telco. Printer? hp.com, or amazon, or walmart or whatever. You can even buy apple devices directly from apple stores or from other retailers.
A business that effectively feels consumer pressure. With their oligopoly neither Apple nor Google are feeling any consumer pressure to behave as good actors.
Why is suddenly “able to install another App Store” a thing or even a necessity?
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.
It seems like a fundamental right that I should have full control of a device which I own outright.
That control, over something I paid for and ostensibly 'own' will be used against me, as in the case of App Store cuts and digital payments. Why should that be allowed? If I own it, it is mine, and control over its technology should be mine as well.
That would be really nice to have in general. I don’t think an antitrust action is helpful to achieve it though.
Why not some legislation instead? For example, I have a friend who likes to tinker and they would love to be able to “own” their Tesla car, or Samsung smart TV (both also currently running as a black box of sorts… with even less security and transparency than iOS).
So you’re saying Apple should put a sticker on the box saying it’s a device designed to operate with a specific OS? Then you can make an informed decision and purchase something else?
Isn't 30% standard across pretty much every App Store? Steam does not have lock in and yet I thought charged 30%, GoG is 30%, etc.
Obviously other app stores could in principle charge lower amounts because they don't actually have to do any development work, unlike google or apple who both actually do real development work for products after they've been sold. Despite that GoG and Steam seem to charge 30% anyway.
I'm curious what you think the development model for companies that aren't just store fronts should be if they aren't able to make money from development, especially given they appear to be charging that same amount as those companies that aren't doing anything other than providing a store front? Maybe software updates should cost money again? Or you should only get one year of updates for a device? Maybe free apps should be banned as well? After all supporting those costs money but makes none?
I'm genuinely curious how you think development should be paid for when 15-30% is too high for developers but fine for store fronts?
What % should they charge then? It was my understanding that 30% was/is a fairly standard cut taken by retailers in general and they are just aligning with the industry. A quick search seems to confirm this idea with articles like this.. https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/10/07/report-steams-30-cut...
If the market was actually open, people would compete on different cuts and the % would eventually drift towards whatever the right number is.
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.
"The losses primarily stem from the millions the company pays game developers to ensure their newest titles are temporarily exclusive to the Epic Games Store"
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.
I am guessing the 30% quoted is specifically for digital goods because 10-15% is the fair price for connecting buyers with sellers of physical goods. At least that is the case with platforms like eBay, Walmart, and Amazon.
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.
About time. Apple has been getting a free pass on the exact same things that Microsoft was slapped down for. Notably: unchangeable default apps (browser, email, text messaging in particular).
I don't believe that they necessarily are violating antitrust by choosing to make imessage or apple watch ios only, but it would be obviously better for consumers in my opinion if they were more open.
One aspect which keeps annoying me is how hostile Apple is to developers that want to use anything other than Apple hardware to publish on the app store. The requirement to use xcode, and the fact that xcode only runs on Mac means they are leveraging their control of ios app stores to force hardware sales. I was particularly annoyed to find that even if I have a compiled .ipa file, the app store requires xcode to even upload it. It's a file upload! This has been working cross platform since before the advent of the web.
This case, at least as described in the article, has essentially no similarity to the Microsoft Internet Explorer trial (which, in case you forgot, Microsoft won on appeal).
Microsoft got in trouble for tying its monopoly in operating systems to OEMs preinstalling Internet Explorer. Essentially, they told OEMs that they would not sell them Windows unless they agreed to help Microsoft kill Netscape. That's a very different kind of antitrust complaint than what the article describes, which is Apple building seamless connections between its hardware and services while offering second-tier connections for competitors.
The Xcode angle is interesting, but likely not important enough for the Justice Department to sue over. Hardware for developers is negligible in the grand scheme of things.
There's a difference between obstructing (generally bad!) and refusal to deal (perfectly fine). Apple can't go out into the market and trip their competitors so they fall on their face. However, they are allowed to build themselves a nice road for their exclusive use on their own hardware and a winding dirt path for everyone else.
Put another way, Apple cannot worsen access for competitors on its platform absent a procompetitive justification. But they have no duty under U.S. antitrust law to provide equal access in the first place.
If Apple in 2020 had allowed third-party text message applications and in 2024 changed their mind because a competitor was eating their lunch, that would be anticompetitive.
It's not anticompetitive to never allow a third-party text message application in the first place.
For SMS? Maybe, but that's just a basic phone feature. An old Nokia also only offers one way to send SMS. It's just part of the phone-bits of the phone. And didn't Signal used to be able to send and receive SMS on iPhone, anyway? Thought it could.
Messaging apps that compete with iMessage are plentiful and Apple doesn't get in their way. You can also disable iMessage with a toggle on the Messages settings screen (it's well "above the fold" for me, fourth entry down, on that screen, it's the first thing they show other than security/permissions stuff for the app)
> But they have no duty under U.S. antitrust law to provide equal access in the first place.
True, but they're undeniably at a scale where this would just be expected of them either way. We broke up Ma Bell ignoring this exact defense, because at a certain scale of infrastructure you're expected to do the right thing legal or not. If Apple drills down on their "technically legal" defense, they're liable to find out how technically subjective law gets at their scale.
I agree that it's reasonable to hold platforms like Apple to a higher standard. The issue is that it would likely require new laws be passed, like the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act from the European Union.
> That's worlds worse than just making sure your app is the most convenient option, while other options can easily be installed.
I disagree.
Apple is actively hostile to third parties integrating with their own protocols, but Microsoft has been caught several times trying to subvert standards for their benefit, e.g. when they added extensions to their Exchange email servers that would work only with Outlook clients.
You mean "Apple should be required to build messaging services on top of apple's infrastructure".
Google also prevents me from making a company that uses its search engine infrastructure and unlike iMessage it is actually the dominant operator in the market.
I'm also not allowed to make a Twitter-like service that interoperates with twitter.
Explain what makes iMessage, a service that is part of a product apple sells, different from the above? Or in fact any service operated by any other company that sells a product but doesn't allow other companies to resell their services?
> they ban third parties from offering apps that interoperate e.g. with iMessage.
If you're referring to that company that reverse engineered the iMessage protocol, that entire companies business model was "we're going to give away free access to a service that isn't free, and that a company has to spend money supporting".
Again, how would this be different from requiring google, twitter, or GitHub, etc to provide 3rd parties access to their infrastructure to duplicate their services?
iMessage's problem is that it is functionally an SMS replacement, but architecturally nothing like SMS. If you wanted to extend iMessage so that other companies could support and pay for their own hardware on it, you couldn't. It's not just Apple's willingness either, it's designed specifically so that it embraces and extends SMS without offering the same inter-OS connectivity.
Google and Twitter have services to run that compete on generally equal terms (eg. the Internet). Apple's messaging service is integrated with Apple's runtime, and because they control both they can implement features that competitors cannot.
you're right, it's not an sms replacement: it's actually secure, and it has no requirement that you have a sim or phone number. Something RCS does not have.
You can use SMS (and apparently RCS in future?) to talk to others, and if there's the option to use iMessage instead it does that. i.e it interoperates with existing standard messaging systems when appropriate.
> Apple's messaging service is integrated with Apple's runtime, and because they control both they can implement features that competitors cannot.
Every messaging app on Mac and iOS can implement whatever features they want, just like iMessage does. It has nothing to do with the being "part of the system".
> Google and Twitter have services to run that compete on generally equal terms (eg. the Internet)
No they don't. I can't make a search engine that competes with google I don't have the hardware or existing index, much like apple has infrastructure to support and developer iMessage, google has hardware and infrastructure to support search. Why should I have to build my own infrastructure if google already has that?
Similarly I can't make something that competes with twitter if I can't read and reply to tweets on twitter, so why shouldn't twitter be required to let me do that as well?
You have created an artificial distinction that makes iMessage (a service that is part of a paid product that requires significant infrastructure) somehow different from every other service operated by every other company for which someone might want to piggy back off to avoid paying the actual operational costs. There is no different from "I want to make my own messaging app that uses iMessage for message delivery so that it interacts with iMessage, so apple must let me do that" and "I want to make a microblogging site that uses twitter's infrastructure so that it can interact with twitter, so twitter must let me do that".
> You have created an artificial distinction that makes iMessage [...] somehow different from every other service
Did I? Or did Apple?
Apple is the one that baked support for it into their SMS app. Apple is the party that designed iMessage to solely rely on Apple servers instead of extending to third-party instances or carrier partners. I'm willing to give Apple a fair shake here, but their approach is undeniably predatory. They are an enormous portion of the first-world smartphone market, and their ivory tower approach to communications is historically untenable.
Personally speaking, I despise RCS as a protocol but at least it acknowledged third-party interop as a necessary component of... you know, agnostic communication infrastructure. You'd hope that a company like Apple would annihilate Google in this arena, but instead they're silent. The largest company in the world, which built it's entire business on revolutionizing the phone, has nothing to give back to public communication infrastructure. They won't even come to the discussion table for future protocols unless regulators threaten them.
Apple's entire modern business is built on making artificial distinctions between themselves and their competitors. That's why the DMA exists; Apple doesn't have the right to access a market where they deny their competitors fair competition. They don't have to forfeit every advantage they have, just the ones deemed anticompetitive. Since Apple has refused to negotiate on this in the past, it stands to reason that government intervention it the only way to make consumers lives (on both sides of the walled garden) better.
I think you make a great point. Still, the insidious way that Apple introduced iMessage is something right out of the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" playbook that feels fundamentally wrong to me:
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).
> including getting teens to bully other teens for an out-group bubble color
Whose messages turn green or blue depending on protocol in use in a given (potentially group) thread in Apple's Messages?
[EDIT] The up-and-down voting pattern suggests my point may not have come through: if you were trying to cause this, where would you place this indicator? On messages from the person with phone sending SMS, right? Apple places it on the iPhone user's messages that they send, to indicate what kind of message you've sent so you have some idea what the other end's experience will be, and why certain features may not appear in your UI (you don't need to see what kind of message is coming in—its capabilities are evident, whatever you see is the result of that message using whatever features it needed and could access)
Is Apple unhappy that Android users feel excluded? I doubt it. Was this feature evidently designed to do that, on purpose? I mean, if so, they didn't do it very well.
"Green bubble" became a thing, initially, because you'd add an Android users to a group text (actually iMessage) thread and it'd "green bubble" everyone else and make things work less-well. There had to be some kind of indicator so this wouldn't seem to happen just at random, and that was it—but the affordance pointedly does not single out who's responsible, indeed, in a group thread that starts out with mixed Android and iOS users, I'm not even sure how to tell who's a "green bubble" and who's a "blue bubble" (I suppose you'd tap each contact and see if iMessage-related features were available?)
oh right - as if a Billion users are forced to use iMessage </sarc>
edit an OS web browser tied to the base OS is not the same as an instant msg app on a phone. The OS Browser bundling is not at all comparable, by a long measure. Some context is needed on such a large situation.
source: read direct testimony on the MSFT anti-trust case
Again, I don't understand why people try to defend Apple's shitty behavior here. As I said in my comment, I'm less arguing from the technical legal details and more from a "this is just shitty, monopolistic-preserving behavior that serves no benefit besides protecting a company's marketshare" perspective. Apple could trivially easily:
1. Allow better interoperability from 3rd party clients. All of Apple's "user security" arguments are complete and total BS given that iMessage already degrades to the most insecure method of communication if any messages (including group chats) contain a non-iMessage user.
2. Provide a compatible Android client for iMessage (like literally every other single message app out there). At the very least they could stop breaking other iMessage Android clients.
3. Make it easier to choose a text client on startup.
4. Support a more functional interoperability standard - which, thankfully, Apple has finally said they will do by supporting RCS, but only after it looked like they became wary that their blatant tactics would look too monopolistic from a regulatory perspective.
There is just 0 user-centered rationale for defending Apple's behavior here.
> which, in case you forgot, Microsoft won on appeal
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.
Microsoft got into trouble because they were a supplier to computer companies (they supplied the OS and some software) and abused their market share to mess with other suppliers (browser makers).
Apple is themselves the computer maker. The situation is not similar even though both MS and Apple are big companies.
Microsoft required the OEMs to pay for windows license on every computer they sold whether it had Windows installed on it or another OS. It put a huge tax on consumers who didn't want to use windows since they were paying for a license no matter what. Its a textbook case for antitrust.
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.
> Apple has been getting a free pass on the exact same things that Microsoft was slapped down for. Notably: unchangeable default apps (browser, email, text messaging in particular).
I think this is due to regulators not understanding that phones are computers.
Apple definitely lets you change the default apps in macOS. If it didn't, that would be a problem. But until recently, both Google and Apple were given an exception on mobile computing, i.e. tablets, phones.
I think it's less to do with regulators not understanding that phones are computers and more to do with genuine disagreement over what constitutes a computer and even more so what societal and economic effects regulation might have on these changes.
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.
IMO regulation should kick in based on market share, regardless of device type. If 50% of the population was being taxed 30% on digital transactions by the platform owner, it doesn't really matter if it happened on an iPhone/Android or Nintendo Switch.
Market share of devices sold? Does it change by the year? Market share of the company? What if companies just introduce small changes to the device that result in different SKUs?
Take a look at the Nintendo Switch market share in 2020 [1]. We should regulate Nintendo and make them open up APIs but not Microsoft?
Percent of revenue of digital transactions should open up companies to regulation. Nintendo should be free to do whatever they want up until a certain percent of the digital pie is controlled by them. What that number is should be up to regulators/we the people.
Apple/Google's app store duopoly is a tax on competition and innovation. BTW these two app stores dwarf anything Nintendo is doing with theirs.
Apple for example is known (I don't have the numbers in front of me) for making high margins on their hardware and not digital transactions though they're certainly trying to grow that sector.
If you mean of the overall pie, wouldn't that just place burdensome regulation on new and small businesses or new sectors since as soon as you own a percent of the "digital pie" (what exactly is that anyway?) you have to then comply with regulations that could just open up your proprietary business features to your competitors?
Why is it that Apple and Google's app store duopoly a tax on competition when they created the sector that enabled businesses to sell products? If anything they should charge more.
But aside from that, doesn't this also discourage Apple, Google, and others from profiting off of or creating software features? Why even build the API? And if another company forks Android or creates a new mobile operating system they can keep all of their stuff closed until a later point in which they're beating incumbents and then just open up?
Idk I feel like there's already too much additive logic here to make this worthwhile. Good regulation would be much cleaner and ideally subtractive instead of additive.
> BTW these two app stores dwarf anything Nintendo is doing with theirs.
> If you mean of the overall pie, wouldn't that just place burdensome regulation on new and small businesses or new sectors since as soon as you own a percent of the "digital pie" (what exactly is that anyway?) you have to then comply with regulations that could just open up your proprietary business features to your competitors?
Businesses have to deal with new and changing regulations all the time. Once a business starts to worry about being too big and associated regulations, that's their legal team's job.
> Why is it that Apple and Google's app store duopoly a tax on competition when they created the sector that enabled businesses to sell products? If anything they should charge more.
Right, without regulation we're on a path for these megacoprs to start charging us more, especially if if our attempts to regulate them fail. They won't compete fairly out of the kindness of their hearts.
> But aside from that, doesn't this also discourage Apple, Google, and others from profiting off of or creating software features? Why even build the API? And if another company forks Android or creates a new mobile operating system they can keep all of their stuff closed until a later point in which they're beating incumbents and then just open up?
The beauty of competition is that if they don't continuously add new products or features, someone else will — Just like Apple/Google once did to the older tech incumbents.
> Idk I feel like there's already too much additive logic here to make this worthwhile. Good regulation would be much cleaner and ideally subtractive instead of additive.
While I proposed something, what I'm really looking for is outcomes that change tech into a more competitive landscape, and don't really care how it happens.
> I'm aware and I find this to be irrelevant.
It's not irrelevant in the context that antitrust regulations looks at the number of people impacted, which is very correlated to how much revenue is being generated.
Ok but you should at least have an idea because it's the central premise of your proposal. I'm not asking for you to split hairs between a percent or something but to provide something meaningful from a categorical standpoint.
> Businesses have to deal with new and changing regulations all the time. Once a business starts to worry about being too big and associated regulations, that's their legal team's job.
Sure that's fair though I'm still concerned about decreases in competition here due to this regulation as noted.
> Right, without regulation we're on a path for these megacoprs to start charging us more, especially if if our attempts to regulate them fail. They won't compete fairly out of the kindness of their hearts.
On the consumer side I don't see this as a big threat, it's more of a threat to developers. The vast majority of apps, games, etc. are junk and not worht acquiring for free or paid, and if those prices increase because companies are charging more then the likely scenario is they just die off which is good for the economy and the quality of the app stores.
On the developer side this also has the added benefit of weeding out uncompetitive apps and poor products, and the cost burden is beared by developers instead of the corporations and personally I don't really care that much if, say, Epic gets more or less revenue than Apple because of these dynamics. Neither are lowering their prices so it's not relevant to me.
> The beauty of competition is that if they don't continuously add new products or features, someone else will — Just like Apple/Google once did to the older tech incumbents.
Nothing stops those new products or features today though so I'm not sure what the argument here is. Are you suggesting if Apple and Google open up their APIs then other competitors will... open up their non-existent APIs? If anything these things just further cemement Apple and Google dominance.
> It's not irrelevant in the context that antitrust regulations looks at the number of people impacted, which is very correlated to how much revenue is being generated.
Are you suggesting regulation overall due to company size or regulation within a sector? If it's the former I think there's likely to be some faulty rationele here and if it's the latter it's irrelevant because Nintendo isn't competing in the same sector as Apple or Google.
>Ok but you should at least have an idea because it's the central premise of your proposal. I'm not asking for you to split hairs between a percent or something but to provide something meaningful from a categorical standpoint.
The central premise of my proposal is that once a company reaches antitrust-size, it should be regulated as such. Perhaps percent of all digital transactions is one way to do it without writing company-specific regulation that could be worked around in the future, perhaps not. I categorically do not want a handful of companies to control our digital landscape, and we need regulators to step in.
>On the consumer side I don't see this as a big threat, it's more of a threat to developers. The vast majority of apps, games, etc. are junk and not worht acquiring for free or paid, and if those prices increase because companies are charging more then the likely scenario is they just die off which is good for the economy and the quality of the app stores. On the developer side this also has the added benefit of weeding out uncompetitive apps and poor products, and the cost burden is beared by developers instead of the corporations and personally I don't really care that much if, say, Epic gets more or less revenue than Apple because of these dynamics. Neither are lowering their prices so it's not relevant to me.
Just because you don't feel personally impacted doesn't mean others aren't.
> Nothing stops those new products or features today though so I'm not sure what the argument here is. Are you suggesting if Apple and Google open up their APIs then other competitors will... open up their non-existent APIs? If anything these things just further cemement Apple and Google dominance.
If you zoom out a bit, you'll notice the entire web is effectively controlled by 2-3 companies via Chrome/Safari. It's not about being able to build on particular APIs per se. It's that if Apple/Google want web browsers to have (or NOT have) certain features, it's them who get to decide, and developers will fall in line. Google in particular has been working on features that make ad blocking worse, thus protecting their advertising empire, for example [1]. Edit: Just to clarify, what can/cannot be done on web browsers directly impacts the kind of apps developers build for app stores. However, the takeaway here is that what these big corporations want happens both in and out of app stores for their own benefit, because consumers lack choice.
>Are you suggesting regulation overall due to company size or regulation within a sector?
I meant that if we lived in a world where 1 in 2 people had to pay Nintendo ~30% when buying a digital good (Costs are passed to consumers), they too should be regulated. The rationale is protecting consumers from harm via higher prices, which result from a lack of competition.
I don't see why game consoles or anything else should be exempt from 'on a computer' rules.
What it boils down to in my opinion, is that you own the device, and the company that built it should be required to give you all the keys to do what you want with it. The ability for companies to technologically lock out what their customers can do with the devices is relatively new, but there are quite a few areas of law that follow this principle of "once you buy it, it's yours, full stop", and I think this is just following along from that.
So I'd like to see general legislation in that direction, that would outlaw all these companies from locking down their devices as a first step. It doesn't have to be super easy, but it absolutely should be possible to run whatever code you want on any device you own.
I think antitrust surrounding these marketplaces is also due, but is much less fundamental and a lot more situational, where it matters less what the definition of 'a computer' is and more who's getting screwed, how badly, and whether competition is possible.
Isn't that already the case with jailbreaking for example? I.e. it doesn't have to be easy.
Does Apple have something like a "key" that would allow you to just run arbitrary software on the device? Is it something they would have to build, support, and maintain? I'm guessing this isn't a problem on Android and you can run whatever you want.
A jailbreak is not something Apple (or whoever) allows, it's a (serious) security vulnerability being exploited to gain root level permissions on the device and then circumvent whatever checks are in place. These are things that should be fixed. It's also a cat and mouse game that is always changing.
> Does Apple have something like a "key" that would allow you to just run arbitrary software on the device? Is it something they would have to build, support, and maintain? I'm guessing this isn't a problem on Android and you can run whatever you want.
Not sure about the specifics of Apple's architecture (as it's also undocumented), but most modern secure boot systems have a hardware public key store (TPM) that any boot binaries must be signed with. Apple would closely guard those keys, and without them (and without security flaws), it is impossible to boot other code. Once you get a bit further along into the boot process, the architecture gets much more complicated as far as actually running apps, but it's all predicated on that secure boot key. Such a key store is probably possible to change, but Apple doesn't give any access to it from the userland, so users are unable to do so. It's also possible to make such a verification completely unchangeable in hardware; not sure if Apple may do it this way.
An open system would look something like UEFI secure boot, where the owner of the system can manage the keys in that hardware key store, to the extent of removing the manufacturer's keys entirely (which I think is also an important ability - what if I don't want Apple to be trusted on my device?). From there you can patch the OS to allow other code to run, though preferably this is something that would also be opened up explicitly.
Yes, it will require intentionally designing those capabilities into the products, but most likely it's not a significant architectural change, just a matter of giving users access to change the keys in the hardware they own.
You said it didn't need to be easy to run arbitrary code. Why would security not fall under that purview? You can jailbreak your phone and run arbitrary software on it. If there are security problems that's kind of your problem that you introduced by running your arbitrary software.
How would Apple/Google be able to monitor malware here?
How do we know that the secure boot key for example isn't part of the security architecture and by giving it out you basically enable those root level permissions?
Are we really trusting users to not lose or compromise secure boot keys that they manage on their own? If grandpa gets scammed out of his life savings are taxpayers footing that bill?
I'm not necessarily looking for answers to those questions, but it really just seems like there's a lot of open items here that have to be addressed for not a lot of benefit and instead it seems like people just want an effectively jailbroken iPhone that's somehow secured by Apple/Google more easily.
I'm not sure what you mean? The only reason jailbreaking is possible is because it's a security flaw. A secure device can't be jailbroken, and we should all have secure devices. Regardless, this is far from a sure thing, opens you to 'voids your warranty' bs from the manufacturer or even bogus DMCA paper terrorism. I'm saying it should be a legally enshrined right with no ambiguity.
Security is about trust. If you trust Apple or Google, and don't care about their 30% tax, then you should be able to choose that. Make it the default, even. But if you don't trust them, and don't want them to control what runs, that should be your choice too. It's your device for fucks sake!
"Security" is a weak argument for unconditionally giving up all control over your own device. Especially when that control is very obviously being used against us by those very same that are claiming to protect us. The situation is reminiscent of countless dystopian novels. If we're going to accept that anyway, I think it needs to come with much stronger protections for the common good in other ways than vague and pretty bogus "security" arguments. If they want lock in, I think they should have to operate the platform on a cost basis, and with strong antitrust protection in exchange for that privilege.
Most Windows PCs allow users to enroll keys in their secure boot system. Do you hear about grandpa getting his life savings stolen by this mechanism often? I certainly haven't. Much more likely he lost it to social engineering, where no technological measure is going to help you.
The thing about Xcode and associated tools is that they heavily rely on the entire Apple platform stack and would be quite a bear to port to other platforms. The iOS simulator, for example, simply runs the iOS userland on top of the core shared between macOS and iOS rather than emulating a full device. It might be practical to release CLI tools for cross-compilation but anything beyond that would be quite expensive.
Apple could afford to do this work of course, but the ROI of doing so is questionable. Ignoring the hit to Mac sales, it opens their platforms up to vast amounts of low effort shovelware — far more than already exists on the App Store. That’s the natural consequence of access to a platform being a single tickbox away.
Of course the actual problem might come down to lack of tools and services that push junkware into the gutters where it belongs while putting quality apps in the spotlight, but I’m not confident that this will magically appear should iOS as a platform be opened up.
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.
I don't really understand your point. Doesn't basically every app store in the world on any platform require an account? It seems like a fairly basic requirement for a functioning system (people need to be able to reinstall the apps they bought on a new device).
And if having an app store that doesn't require an account is actually somehow desireable, is your suggestion that Google somehow strong-armed Samsung into requiring an account rather than going with the ostensibly superior option of not requiring accounts? Or is the suggestion that the store should be using some other account than a Samsung account, but they weren't allowed to do that.
To use most major standard Android features in a Samsung phone, a Google account is needed, but a Samsung account is accessory.
My point here is that it does not matter that a device comes with one, two, or multiple app stores, if the whole start up flow steers users towards a specific one.
AltStore exploits a loophole that exists for app developers, and you have to “refresh” the app from a computer each week. It’s quite inconvenient and not practical for the average user.
Apple's been a walled garden since the early 80's. They let vendors make Mac-compatibles and then screwed them, IIRC. They've always preferred to have their own everything until absolutely forced to open up, e.g. USB ports. They had their own networking architecture in the 90's (AppleTalk).
Does that mean it's OK? Definitely not. But I think a general mandate of interoperability would be preferable to any point solutions. It's not clear how a court could rule that way, so it might require legislation.
The MS antitrust settlement included a "general mandate of interop" wrt. the issues that were raised there, such as web browsers as part of the OS and the use of private API's.
> They've always preferred to have their own everything until absolutely forced to open up, e.g. USB ports.
You must not have been alive at the time. Apple's early adoption of USB is why USB became the dominant peripheral interface. People were quite upset to have lost their legacy ports in 1998.
And of course, Apple's contributions to and early support for USB-C were also industry-leading. Apple has played a key role in creating and/or mainstreaming many standards: FireWire, Thunderbolt, Wi-Fi, ISOBMFF/MPEG-4, AAC, Mini-SIM/Nano-SIM, and I'm sure more I'm forgetting.
It's not their standard. It's in wide use on video game consoles and Android phones. The rest of the "PC" industry just hasn't moved so hard away from USB-A as they have, such that it remains the de facto PC standard for peripherals. It's largely displaced micro-usb, but not USB-A (comically, the one place it's dominated in the rest of the electronic-crap industry is where Apple lags, not the area in which they lead on its adoption)
(In a now-deleted post, the parent commenter requested citations, and also remembered Apple dragging their feet on TCP/IP support. Here's my reply since I'd already written it.)
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.
talk about selective rewriting of history: Wikipedia tells us
The rise of TCP/IP during the 1990s led to a reimplementation of most of these types of support on that protocol, and AppleTalk became unsupported as of the release of Mac OS X v10.6 in 2009.
> It was plug-and-play, amazing for its time, and showed what standards-based networking should aspire to.
I believe the IETF was quite active during that time, particularly in the 90's when I got somewhat involved, and even in the 80's. What role did Apple play in that? It seems to me they could have advanced their "aspirations" more effectively that way.
Your comment is the flagged dead one. You can see it with or without showdead on. You can tell it is dead by trying to reply to it yourself.
CharlesW was the one I was responding to who had thought your comment was deleted when it wasn’t. I was clarifying for them (and others) that the comment had not been deleted. I honestly have no idea why this confuses you.
> People were quite upset to have lost their ports in 2016 too. 5 years later Apple added some back.
it's always funny when usb-c (vs lightning, usb-a, etc) discussions come up, because there's very much people in favor of doing away with everything except USB-C (by government decree/fiat if necessary) but many of these individuals also seem to hate the usb-c only macbooks, despite those being the richest implementation of the concept to date.
not just usb-c everything, but thunderbolt everything, with full capability on all ports, full-speed charging on all ports, etc.
> Apple's early adoption of USB is why USB became the dominant peripheral interface.
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.
You're really grasping at straws here. They've been an NIH company since the beginning, and now you & few others are desperately touting the one, or one of the few areas where they embraced standards. Assuming they did.
As for "In the late 90's/early 00's, who were using technology like that? Designers. "
I believe that is just wrong. Mac users might have had an outsized impact, but the mass market always refrained from jumping on things until they were available for Windows.
> and now you & few others are desperately touting the one, or one of the few areas where they embraced standards. Assuming they did.
They were one of the first adopters, if not the first. They have been involved in the design of nearly every USB standard since; Micro USB being a notable exception.
> I believe that is just wrong. Mac users might have had an outsized impact, but the mass market always refrained from jumping on things until they were available for Windows.
Go get a copy of a computer magazine from around 6 months after the iMac G3 was released...
The thing is that on one hand, you're claiming that they're not innovative and on the other, suffering from NIH syndrome, so by implication, innovating. Which is it?
I never said they were "innovating." And it's funny how you all concentrate on USB and avoid AppleTalk. Or the Newton, which came about because Sculley stabbed their own alumni in the back. Or the "apple online network" (early 90's) which I can't even find the name of now.
Or, for that matter, FireWire, which found almost no lasting traction in the Windows world.
And of course you all decline to talk about their failure to make any contribution to the IETF. Or threatening to sue Microsoft over Windows.
No one I know who was using those technologies at the time (including myself) was a designer nor used a Mac. Apple had 2-3% market share in the early 00s, and still below 5% in 2005. Virtually every computer user was using USB for one thing or another by then.
So a base of N+1. I was a designer in the late 90's/early 00's. I worked for a large, well known global agency. We had iMacs. I also had one at home and remember the "pain" of USB, though supported peripherals (Iomega ZIP disks spring to mind) came fast, mainly aimed at the largest userbase for Macs at the time - designers.
I happened to use a ZIP drive as well on the PC. There’s no relation to Macs here. Designers in the US tended to use Macs, yes, but this isn’t what drove USB adoption, and it would have happened in much the same way without them.
USB ZIP drive on a PC in 1999? Possibly with an added card. I called ZIP drives out specifically because I remember being surprised at how quick they were in comparison to SCSI attached ZIP drives. And how much less hassle they were.
I sort of agree with what you are saying, but don't underestimate the impact that the G3 had on the desktop computing landscape.
Apple wasn't "forced" to use USB, they were one of the first. I don't know what you're on about with the rest. Market share? Who cares? You picked a bad example, move on or pick a better one.
I know it seems absurd, but as an android user I really do get cut out of group message convos due to not being on imessage. I realize many other countries use whatsapp or whatever, but my social circle in the US explicitly does not and won't. Even my parents have issues and frequently try to send me large videos. I've had to to completely decouple my phone number from my imessage email to be able to chat with people. Frequently things get messed up because iOS will always default to imessage over sms, so if your primary way to talk is via sms, but you do have an imessage and the person has both in your contact card you don't actually get anything on your phone. I can't really see how it isn't anticompetitive.
As an iPhone user, I find it super annoying too. I love my iPhone and Apple products in general but it's not fair to expect all my friends to be the same. One of my friends has an iPhone but turned off iMessage out of an abundance of caution. As a consumer, I would really like it if non-iMessage user can get the same experience as all the iMessage users. We know there is a way. The standard wasn't great when it was new but it has matured a lot. I would really like it if Apple supported it. Its behavior seems needlessly antagonistic.
The issue isn't that Apple should be using SMS in particular -- SMS sucks. But they should either use some standardized protocol, or publish a protocol standard for iMessage.
Someone willing to do the work should be capable of producing an interoperable implementation.
It's a step in the right direction but it's the same problem as iMessage supporting SMS in addition to its own protocol. If the proprietary protocol supports something the open protocol doesn't, or that Apple doesn't implement for the open protocol, a competing implementation can't do it. And if it doesn't do that then why does the proprietary protocol exist?
If you're going to make your own protocol, publish a spec.
It's a service and a protocol and a client application.
But it should be possible for a third party to make an interoperating client application using the same protocol, and then it could connect to any service implementing that protocol.
Obviously if you want to be selective in who can use your service then you should create a protocol that supports some kind of federation so that each user's service can forward messages to another service if the two endpoints don't use the same one. Email works like this, for example.
> Should I be able to operate a business that sends bulk advertisements to iMessage users?
The touchy part is the end-to-end encryption. The whole point is that Apple is the trusted party there. As an iMessage user I don’t want my messages passing through who knows which other parties’ servers when I send messages to others.
The point of the blue bubble is to ensure the encryption is there.
End-to-end encryption is where the client device encrypts the message and then the other end's client device decrypts the message. It doesn't matter how many servers it goes through, none of them can read it, that's the entire point of end-to-end encryption.
The hard part is associating some identity with the user's keys, but when the ID is your phone number or email address, the entity doing that is inherently your phone company or email provider. You can standardize a way to do that, i.e. to sign up you get an SMS or email with a code and have to enter the code. The client can automate that if it has access to read your SMS or email, or otherwise you enter it manually.
If the person on the other end is using a non-Apple client you cannot verify independently that their client isn’t peeping. It’s the client, not the servers.
But also when it comes to managing the keys and syncing across devices it’s also the servers.
> I've actually gotten into inadvertent fights with people over undelivered SMS text messages.
Oh, man.
Thankfully I haven't had an undelivered text in over a decade.
But back in the early-to-mid 2000s, it was maybe a 5% failure rate in the country I was living in then? With no indication.
And yes it really did cause arguments with romantic partners. There were times I had to pull out my phone and prove I'd asked/invited/told them whatever. But it's not like that ever really fixes the situation either.
But if you asked anyone to confirm they'd gotten your message you seemed paranoid or needy.
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.
> Prior to the iPhone / iOS, Apple would have happily built in support for something like Google Cast
I really don't think you can assume this. For example, a long time ago in computer years, Apple rolled out "Yellow Box for Windows" which was a way to get NeXTStep apps running on Windows http://www.shawcomputing.net/resources/apple/os_pictures/ybn... as part of Rhapsody Developer Release 2 (this was a prerelease OS X)... and then promptly ditched it.
Being able to develop once and then deploy to both OS X and Windows sounds great to developers, but think about this: If you had access to Mac apps from a Windows machine, then why would you buy a Mac, when Apple is competing on quality and not price? It'd be a win for app developers but a big "lose" for Apple.
So why would Apple have ever built a way to cast to Google Cast if they already had an AppleTV product that wasn't competing on price with Google Cast? (AppleTV's are great, btw)
Google can and has done the same thing. They stopped supporting YouTube on FireTV because Amazon refused to sell ChromeCast devices on their website. All these competitors have options to force you to buy their hardware just to use their services and vice versa. Google could start slowly degrading all their services for users without Chromebooks. Microsoft could force you to buy a Windows phone just to use ChatGPT.
Clearly, all of this is bad for users across the board. Apple is by far the most aggressive when it comes to this kind of anticompetitive bundling. You can't just say "of course they want to be anticompetitive, that's just business!". You're supposed to not let them pull this shit.
> So why would Apple have ever built a way to cast to Google Cast if they already had an AppleTV product that wasn't competing on price with Google Cast? (AppleTV's are great, btw)
Because it makes iPhone and Mac users their (digital) life better?
Let me give you a different example: you visit a hotel. They have Cast-enabled TV’s, but those do not support AirPlay. Anyone with an iPhone or Mac is SoL. It literally goes against Apple’s old “It Just Works” adage, when they probably would have looked at Cast as just another protocol to support. The only reason to do that is if you think the net decrease in usability will increase the company’s profitability via lock-in.
To be clear, it is not just Apple doing this. A different vector is a product like YouTube: often when I’m scrolling the comments after a video ends, an ad will play that extends down vertically, making me tap it. If I swipe it away, the entire screen shifts again, but now there is an ad strip at the bottom, that I accidentally tap again, taking me out of the app. This is obviously horrid UX, but Google doesn’t care because the only thing Google wants from you is eyes on ads. They don’t have to deliver a good product (users first), they just have to make the product barely not-shitty-enough that you won’t leave.
A great counter-example is 1Password: they support numerous ways to export their own or import other services their vaults. If you have a running subscription with a competitor, they will credit you the remainder of your bill if you switch. If you asks customer support for help if you are switching to, say, Bitwarden, they’ll help you. They believe in their product and that you’ll either come back or stick with them because it is the best on the market. Which frankly, for now, it is. Due to user-first perspective :)
You should really watch a bunch of the old Jobs videos.
A prime example is price. Jobs’ was asked why they didn’t make a competing MacBook at the $600 Windows laptop price point (I think this was the mid 2000s?). He said that it might have sold really well but that they would have to severely degrade the user experience to hit that price point, and he refused to do that because he wanted to make great devices.
Back in those days you could plug any non-exotic device into a Mac, and it would mostly just work instantly, which was paradise compared to XP and 7’s driver and .dll hell. These days, I’d expect Apple to do stuff like patch the AirPods Max firmware to break the Android apps that enable all the cool non-basic features.
You’re making a good point, but I don’t think this is fair to AirPlay. You don’t need an Apple TV to use AirPlay. My LG TV supports AirPlay. I recently stayed at an Airbnb with a TV running Roku OS. It supported AirPlay as well. Sonos and various other speakers and AV equipment support audio-only AirPlay.
When AirPlay launched in 2010, Google Cast didn’t exist. EDIT: TV manufacturers only started adding AirPlay (now “AirPlay 2”) in 2019. Still, I think it’s reasonable to expect a modern device, without extra hardware, to support AirPlay.
Ideally of course Apple would bake in Cast and Google would bake in AirPlay 2. Best case for users, worst case for them.
Much more tangential but AirPlay (even AirPlay 2) is hot garbage for music due to the gigantic audio buffers. When I press “play/pause/next”, I want my command to process immediately, not after 2-3 seconds.
Free software (libre -- free as in freedom) is the antidote to this entire mess. We should always choose free software whenever we can, so that we cannot get used by agents of corporate media in their hunt for more loot.
Oh, you're right, let's just not even try and wallow in self-pity while we continue to be slaves to megacorporations. Or...just choose free software yourself, so that _you_ don't get used by these entities who seek to eliminate computer user freedom.
I run Trisquel GNU/Linux-libre on my laptop. It is totally possible to use 100% free/libre software. I use it for professional work. If GNU/Linux ain't your gig, lots of people also run OpenBSD.
Google chrome cast is a really bad example of something they could add because it is s locked down proprietary technology that you need to have permission from Google to use now and at all times in the future.
The open cast protocol (miracast?) was lacking in some ways or other and therefore they chose to make something that did what they wanted and also could guarantee it would still be working down the road (AirPlay)
What they should have done is open up AirPlay and perhaps turn it into the next standard that everyone expects to be able to use.
> Google chrome cast is a really bad example of something they could add because it is s locked down proprietary technology that you need to have permission from Google to use now and at all times in the future.
They have added it though, in Apple Music on Android, so they clearly already have both a license and a developed Cast “app” that gets loaded onto the Chromecast.
> The open cast protocol (miracast?)
It was DIAL. Why it died is anyone’s guess. Perhaps Google wanted more control, and Netflix et al didn’t feel like carrying the development burden.
> 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.
airplay works fine on my roku, OTOH my chromecast is becoming useless because i don't use chrome as a browser.
the lockin isn't just producer side, many consumers love ve the conspicuous consumption and exclusivity this create a toxic capitalism and antisocial behavior the clearly mimics the current American class struggle.
> I know it seems absurd, but as an android user I really do get cut out of group message convos due to not being on imessage.
I'm a U.S. iPhone user on many "green bubble" (standards-based) group chats, as are my wife and kids. I don't think we're outliers in this respect. If you're getting pushback on this, consider that this may say more about your social circle.
The problem is that someone always has to be in charge. If no one is in charge, usually nothing good happens.
So for example, we have Ecosystem A and Ecosystem B, each led by a company. Their users (note: NOT those companies) want an enhanced messaging standard between them. Who should be in charge of it? One of those two, or someone else? WHY would either company be incentivized to do so, since it hypothetically facilitates losing users to the other ecosystem? WHY would a third party come up with the best possible standard between these two (as well as maintaining it!) that they wouldn't then be compensated for?
So when you say "technology should serve the user", who or what "should" do this, and why "should" they do it? For free? You have to find or build the right incentives if you want something to be.
This is the same reason we are still grappling with a single medical records standard/exchange format. No one wants anyone else to be in charge of it, and yet someone must be, otherwise you have dilution of responsibility and perverse incentives.
> WHY would a third party come up with the best possible standard between these two (as well as maintaining it!) that they wouldn't then be compensated for?
This is the easiest one to solve, because it's not that expensive to make a decent messaging standard (Open Whisper Systems was very small, for example; solitary individuals have done it in other cases). It's not a matter of getting someone to do the work.
It's that messaging systems have a network effect, so when one comes as the default on a device with a billion users, it has a big network regardless of whether or not a competing protocol might be just as good. And then they want to lock competitors out of that network effect, which is an antitrust issue, and so here we are.
In this case, the simple solution is for Apple is to have an Android app. Which, as per the email revealed in court cases, they have had and haven't launched since 2013.
I'm a U.S. iPhone user, and I have approximately 0 confidence in MMS message delivery. They're extremely unreliable in my experience. I'll suggest going to Signal or something similar if I need a group chat that includes non-iPhone folks.
Lol, this response always happens in the discussion of Android and imessage. It's great that it works for you, but I don't think this is the case for most given the level of discussion on this topic across the web here, reddit, etc. I totally agree standard messages work fine. But nothing is really standard anymore. Videos for example are the typical culprit in degrading the experience: If I'm in a group chat and someone sends a video it gets reduced to such low quality you often can't even tell what it is. Same with facetime, large amounts of photos, the list goes on. Recently stuff like message reactions were fixed, but still cause hiccups.
> Videos for example are the typical culprit in degrading the experience
My dad does this to me all the time. For those that don't know, the videos we receive are 320x240p. Talk about potato... No matter how many times I tell him, he still does it. It's quite deliberate from Apple. For example, I have a video that I received which is 0.1MP (262kb) but an image I received that is 1536x2048 or 3.1MP (548kb). Why are my images double the size of the videos? I find it hard to buy an argument about bandwidth when doubling the video size would make it substantially more visible (though still quite annoying). I can't think of how this is anything but deliberate. Even if it isn't, clearly it's going to be taken that way.
This may be ignorant, but why does green/blue bubble matter for US folks? Almost all cell providers have free SMS/MMS. Would people even notice it if the color was always blue?
Green/MMS messages end up having much lower quality images and videos than iMessages. Send the video to another iPhone user and they see it in HD. Send it via MMS and someone gets a blurry postage stamp video.
But from an Android phones perspective it is the iPhone users that have low quality images and compatibility. Whenever someone sends me an image or video from an iPhone it seems like their phone must be terrible.
These systems could work together if Apple wanted them to. Google / Android isn't the part that is preventing interoperability. So ultimately it really is an iPhone being bad problem. They've marketed the problem well to make it seem like it is the other way around in order to make iPhones more desirable.
because it doesn't allow nearly as large images/videos/etc to be sent. They either get dropped or reduced in size by various means. If you stick to text I've had no problems, if you don't you're on your own if your doing Android <-->iPhone . most of my friends use signal or whatsapp so it's not a big deal for me, but others have issues.
It's really not, it's just the norm. Android has 40% market share in the U.S., so virtually all group chats are going to be standards-based SMS/MMS for interoperability with at least one Android-using member.
If toxicity based upon bubble shame becomes a norm. You should actually be ashamed of yourself as a company, but I guess these days shame came out of fashion.
Their message app is kinda weird in that it seems to be impossible to see which number a messages has been sent from. I found myself messaging a person and asking them what their current personal phone number is because it wasn't clear from the app.
This is because iMessage (somewhat notoriously) allows not just multiple single identifiers (such as a phone number or email address) but multiple identifiers AT ONCE (such as BOTH a phone number AND an email address)... And all of these are treated differently!
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.
> it seems to be impossible to see which number a messages has been sent from
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.)
> as an android user I really do get cut out of group message convos due to not being on imessage
Well, that's the drawback of having an Android I guess, at least in those spaces (I also inhabit one). The evidence of the disjoint relationship between a product space that competes on price and one that competes on quality. /satirical-elitist-shrug-with-smirk
But seriously, didn't Google try at least 10 different ways to roll out their own iMessage competitor and SMS eclipser, and failed every time? This is not all Apple's fault, here.
> Even my parents have issues and frequently try to send me large videos
Yeah, my S.O.'s parents kept trying to send videos from their Androids to our iPhones and they come in as tiny thumbails. I FINALLY got them onto a Whatsapp group text to exchange videos and photos over, although they still miss out on LivePhotos, which is a favorite Apple feature of mine.
It's not anticompetitive because you're misunderstanding what Apple Messages fundamentally is.
It's not just a protocol. It's a very expensive service platform that Apple runs as a service to its users. Apple is simply not obligated to let Android users use that platform and derive all its benefits for free. It's not.
This isn't anticompetitive; it's an example of Apple being simply better at competing in this particular arena.
The fact that your social circle has certain dynamics doesn't change this at all, of course.
You make it sound as if it's something innovative or special.
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.
in general, a lot of people get pretty worked up about anything having to do with the fruit company so I find it often helps to just substitute in "discord" and see if the argument sounds hyperbolic.
"discord is intentionally causing problems by blocking interoperability with third-party clients and using that to funnel sales via peer-pressure from his peer group"
why does discord have to allow third parties to run off their infrastructure and development spends? is discord a gatekeeper in this context? certainly it would hurt me socially to not be able to access the space where all my friends hang out, and they monetize that further by forcing me into shitty pay-by-month upgrades that are only possible via their gatekeeping (otherwise I'd trivially be able to add animated emojis back etc).
or how about slack?
email is another great example... if you figure out how to spoof some headers and trick gmail into thinking you are another gmail SMTP relay, do you have the right to build a commercial service on the ability to send email through gmail's infrastructure, and gmail is legally prohibited from closing the open relay ever again? And bear in mind that google is DEFINITELY a gatekeeper in all senses of the word - it is very hard to convince gmail and outlook to take your emails from a self-hosted server.
XMPP allowed interoperability, but it was never a legal requirement. And if you do create this legal requirement, you turn it into an email-like situation where there are certainly parties who would love to use that relay to worsen your customers' quality-of-life.
I don't know how any of those examples are supposed to help in this situation.
You have exactly two relevant phone infrastructures in the Western World. One is pretty open and the other is locked. Usually it doesn't cause many problems besides envy. People can still talk with each other. It works quite well all over the planet because of third party commutation software like Whatsapp, Facebook, etc.
However, on the locked ones biggest market there is a special situation where the fact that third party software is not that popular. This situation grew out of historical reasons and has created a toxic problem which divides the whole country almost in half. None of your examples above is so widespread and creates such a huge divide.
So what is it you can do about it as a company? You could allow for interoperability within the established communication methods your customers use. Or you could just ignore the problem and be happy about all those customers who have to buy your expensive devices and services only because they don't want to be outcasts in their class, in dating, at work, etc.
The decision Apple made here shows their attitude towards their customers and their potential customers. An attitude towards the society at large, actually. Looking at it from outside the US-bubble it's quite shocking and pretty much disgusting. I wonder how people working there are not ashamed of themselves for keeping such a problem up.
> 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.
I see this claim made often, but I have yet to see anything substantial that serves as evidence that Apple is intentionally trying to get customers to exert peer pressure or even anything that hints that they’re relying on said peer pressure to generate sales, regardless of if they drive customers to exert the peer pressure.
I’ve read more pages of internal communications published through discovery than I care to admit, but I have yet to find anything substantiating this claim.
As it stands now, this anti-social behavior seems wholly driven by the culture of people in general, or more so the culture in the US if we’re being specific.
Would you happen to have anything concrete to support your assertion?
> I have yet to see anything substantial that serves as evidence that Apple is intentionally
Like what? What do you need here, additional to what is already happening? A letter signed by the CEO? Seriously? The evidence is right before us all. It is happening. People are being bullied because of this. Why should they have to write it down? For people to leak and make them liable?
They do it this way and it works automatically. At least in the US.
> As it stands now, this anti-social behavior seems wholly driven by the culture of people in general, or more so the culture in the US if we’re being specific.
Yeah, it is easy to blame it on the people. The fact remains that they could do something about it, and pretty easy. They don't and there is no sane reason to not do it. Meanwhile, the pressure for Android users to switch remains and the whole practice is even being promoted and defended by their own customers for them. Here you go with your anti-social Win-win.
> Like what? What do you need here, additional to what is already happening? A letter signed by the CEO? Seriously? The evidence is right before us all. It is happening. People are being bullied because of this. Why should they have to write it down? For people to leak and make them liable?
You assert that Apple has a specific intent and goal concerning bullying; “what is already happening” proves very little in that regard.
Case in point, my intent and goal is for you to produce something that supports your assertion so I can finally assess if your assertion, and others similar to it, have any merit.
But “what is [actually] happening” is you trying to flip it on me by trying to make your lack of supporting evidence my problem, only to continue and essentially claim that no further evidence is necessary because “it’s happening.”
Clearly, my intent and goal have little to do with the actual outcome.
Just as it is clear to me that you don’t have anything substantial to support your assertion that Apple is intentionally driving their users into anti-social behavior, which ultimately is your problem because you’re the one making the assertion.
> Yeah, it is easy to blame it on the people.
Yes, of course, it’s easy to blame it on the people that do the actual bullying. Because they’re the ones that do the actual bullying. I fail to see how this is controversial in the slightest.
I generally don’t subscribe to the “people’s own responsibility” doctrine when we're dealing with things where companies go out of their way to manipulate and influence consumers by preying on human weaknesses and tempting them, employing an army of psychologists to target these weaknesses, etc.
Things we see with loot boxes, gambling ads, crypto, micro-transaction games, and what we saw in cigarette ads.
However, none of that seems applicable here.
To my knowledge iMessage isn’t even actively advertised, much less in a way that it tries to manipulate consumers with dopamine injections or representations of a lifestyle that is out of reach, even less so in a way that would encourage dickish behavior.
So yes, I blame it on the people who actually act this way without any stimulus that fosters that behavior.
> The fact remains that they could do something about it, and pretty easy. They don't and there is no sane reason to not do it.
The only thing they could do to “do something about it” is to give away their IP or lessen the value of their IP. Those are pretty sane reasons not to do it.
Other than that, they have no moral obligation to do so, in my opinion.
The fact that they don’t choose to do that doesn’t equate to them condoning such behavior, much less intentionally driving said behavior.
Others can also do something about it, and it would be without much effort. People could, for example, choose to be less shitty without any sane reason not to be shitty, or people could address people that act shitty.
This notion that someone can do something about something and therefore has a moral obligation and the moral liability to do something is quite a slippery slope, one that I’m not even opposed to on principle because many people are in ridiculously inhumane conditions just in the US alone.
Conditions that are much worse than being bullied for not having a blue bubble, conditions we all collectively have created and benefit from, and conditions that could all be solved tomorrow if we all decided we could do something about it with little to no effort on individuals in this collective.
But alas, we have decided that it’s more important for small groups of people to thrive and, with it, corporations such as Apple. As such, a corporation’s IP is theirs to use as they see fit, so under the morals we have chosen to live by, they don’t have a moral obligation to “do something.”
> Meanwhile, the pressure for Android users to switch remains and the whole practice is even being promoted and defended by their own customers for them.
> You assert that Apple has a specific intent and goal concerning bullying; “what is already happening” proves very little in that regard.
I assert that a company like Apple would have no problem with interoperability of their messenger. They wouldn't have a problem releasing an iMessage app for Android. They still don't do it.
I also assert that they profit from the resulting toxic situation, as people are forced to change to their environment if they don't want to be excluded in their social circles.
Ergo: it must be intended.
> But “what is [actually] happening” is you trying to flip it on me by trying to make your lack of supporting evidence my problem, only to continue and essentially claim that no further evidence is necessary because “it’s happening.”
I questioned the naive presentation of your request. You can't be serious, requesting from me (or anybody) some kind of written statement which would write down what is actually happening. Who would do that? For what reason? Who is this statement supposed to serve internally if the policy to prevent interoperability suffices? So why should there be anything?
I also don't see how this is even relevant because it is happening. We're faced with the facts I've written above. It is their day-to-day business to keep up this toxic situation for no other reason.
> Yes, of course, it’s easy to blame it on the people that do the actual bullying.
If you create an environment where this bullying develops, you are to blame first.
And it's not like this is something users came up. It is a pain in the ass for both sides affected. But it is not because of what those users do. It is because the communication protocol makes it so.
> To my knowledge iMessage isn’t even actively advertised
Why would they have to? It's a native communication environment.
> The only thing they could do to “do something about it” is to give away their IP or lessen the value of their IP. Those are pretty sane reasons not to do it.
They don't have to give up anything. They could have made an iMessage app for Android. Apple users would still use it as it's the native tool to communicate on their devices. People know it and obviously are even now too lazy to switch to much better, safer, etc. tools. This is a common trope in software. The only thing they'd actually lose is the pressure on Android users. This is of course also "sane" if you don't care about the toxicity you create and only care about profits. Which is what I said they do.
> Others can also do something about it, and it would be without much effort.
> This notion that someone can do something about something and therefore has a moral obligation and the moral liability to do something is quite a slippery slope, one that I’m not even opposed to on principle because many people are in ridiculously inhumane conditions just in the US alone.
What's wrong about a "slippery slope" to better moral standards?
> Conditions that are much worse than being bullied for not having a blue bubble, conditions we all collectively have created and benefit from, and conditions that could all be solved tomorrow if we all decided we could do something about it with little to no effort on individuals in this collective.
The whole business model plays upon a systematic problem wit...
I’ve never received a spam iMessage. My dad, on the other hand, receive one through WhatsApp that lead to him being scammed for tens of thousands of dollars. God knows I receive plenty of regular text spam messages.
Should Facebook be forced to let people on Twitter message them and vice versa?
I think the only reason anyone cares is because it’s folded into the default SMS app. If it were separate like Google Meets/Allo/whatever they’re doing now nobody would care, even if it wasn’t available on iOS.
The fact that your dad (and our all moms and dads) get spam, and we don't (or less) doesn't have anything to do with the messenger. Just google "spam on imessage". It is because your dad has people in their contacts who are not careful with their phone number. Or your dad is.
People also seem to miss that the hardware-level signatures are the reason they’re able to manage spam so effectively. Opening up iMessage could easily lead to email levels of spam.
> but as an android user I really do get cut out of group message convos due to not being on imessage.
I'll second this complaint. Though personally I try to use Signal with my friends and this led to the strategy of "it's like iMessage, but cross platform" for those who aren't security conscious. Sure, not exactly, but close enough. There's a lot I like about Apple, but the closed walls are a major hindrance. I really wish companies would see the value of open source or at least open protocols. I mean hasn't our entire technological framework essentially been built due to source code being available? Certainly we can point to the internet, android, any programming language, linux, and many other common systems that we use daily (knowingly or unknowingly). I mean it's like turning down free work... Why?
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.
I mean I can understand the argument, but is there any good counterfactual evidence to this? I'd wager the stronger effect be from simple peer pressure and wanting to fit in (don't have strong evidence either, so I'll admit to that). I mean Apple has spent a lot of marketing on aligning their products to social status and let's be real, people do associate Android phones with being cheaper. So I hear the claim, I'm just not ready to buy it without good evidence and more importantly, that this outweighs the benefits of the "free work" (especially given that there are other mechanisms to get said desired outcome).
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)
So I guess I should be clear, I'm thinking source available. I know Open Source is a loaded word.
But doesn't this kinda support my thinking? They accelerated by using the open tools and then slowed once they had a more mature product? I mean we've seen huge advancements in LLaMA and StableDiffusion because of their open source-ness. One could argue that GPT is also getting major benefits from this, but I think also partially because it's the most common LLM to perform analysis on (which is a bit weird that researchers do this on a closed source/data model...)
I definitely get the argument around your competitor being able to snag your work, but if we're talking about source available then that becomes a legal matter. And truth be told, we could say the same about a lot of hardware. I mean anything hardware you can visibly inspect.
I definitely don't know how that all plays out in literal numbers and I do wonder if there is some counterfactual data out there. I'm just highly suspicious that it isn't as big of a cost as many assume it is. Even software you can do a really good job at cloning if you have access to it (even if completely black box). There's definitely costs, my question is just how much this compares to benefits. And is source available cost being confused with first mover cost? Because that has the same implication as you note in your conclusion.
The above commenter explained how. iPhones will sometimes simply refuse to send an actual text message if the phone number was once associated with an iMessage account. I have deregistered my phone number from iMessage, iCloud, and whatever else, and my parents' iPhones still send me iMessages despite texting my phone number, even replying to a message or geoup that I text messaged from my phone number. Apple has already been sued about this before. That and picture and video sending is horrible, I think because Apple has historically not implemented protocols that Android exposes.
This won’t help you, but might help others in a similar situation:
If a sender starts a new conversation based on your name and they happen to have your email stored in your contact card as well, and the email is registered with iMessage, it’ll favor iMessage via email over SMS the first time, unless your number is specifically chosen[0] and then it’ll remember that preference for subsequent times
This doesn’t happen when there’s already a conversation going based on your phone number in the contact card, even if that phone number used to be registered with iMessage (in that case it’ll switch to SMS) or if the phone number is typed in manually or the sender searches you with the phone number.
You can of course, as recipient, also select with which email addresses and phone numbers would want to be reachable via iMessage.
To me this seems like good idea reservation and generally desired behavior because it prioritizes a richer messaging experience over one that is basic and you l, by virtue of enabling receipt of iMessages via email, essentially advertise that you’re able and willing to receive iMessages.
To me, the fact that Apple broke SMS by defaulting to iMessage to that contacts not on iMessage that previously had iMessage interactions get messages silently dropped is where the hammer should drop on Apple.
If you need anti-competitive tactics or the freedom to violate the law in order to protect your customers I'm not sure you're very good at protecting your customers. And even so, why should I trust you to use your "i'm violating the law for a good reason" blank check responsibly in the future?
It will be interesting to see any growth of short activity against APPL with this release by NY Times. This does not seem to have had a significant hit yet, as the put-call ratio for APPL is within its normal range?
That's contingent on how Apple implements the features. When Apple works with standards and local computing, we get great user-respecting software like the OG iTunes and QuickTime. When Apple works against standards and local computing, we get headscratchers like Apple Music and AppleTV.
Yes, government's definitely the answer here. Once the government forces Apple to open iMessage, then competitors (RCS, Signal, Telegraph, etc.) can all just die in peace, making life simpler for everyone.
The fact that they do not have a platform agnostic version of iMessage -- even if it requires 2FA from an Apple device like the $1200 iPhone that I was forced to buy -- is utter bullshit. I had to convert my friends one-by-one over to Telegram because I prefer Windows/Linux PCs and I don't really check my phone that much.
I'm knee-deep in Apple's ecosystem, because I like all of their other products, but I can't use iMessage because I prefer to use a PC. This has been a thorn in my side for years.
There can be only one reason that iMessage is available on Apple devices exclusively and it's at least antitrust adjacent. For this alone, I hope they get fined a gigantic amount of money.
> I had to convert my friends one-by-one over to Telegram because I prefer Windows/Linux PCs and I don't really check my phone that much.
I'm sorry, but this sounds pretty obnoxious as presented. You made your friends adopt a new messaging service because you don't want to check your phone?
On one hand it's "obnoxious" to ask people to switch to another messaging app, on the other hand, the solution if you want people to not use iMessage is to "simply" use a different messaging app. But if it's obnoxious, it doesn't really seem that simple.
How did you parse forced adoption out of that sentence? Heh. For most of them, all it took was me telling them it would make my life easier. For the others, the animated middle finger stickers.
I don't see Apple ever capitulating to opening iMessage unless absolutely forced, which will take a while even if it succeeds.
Almost everyone I know (less than 30 and outside of tech, in the south Florida area to be specific) uses an iPhone, specifically for iMessage. If you don't have an iPhone, people will avoid talking to you over text. Your social standing will also take a hit.
While I personally think it would be cool, since it would basically open the door to buying an Android phone Apple is not going to let it happen voluntarily.
Android is not the reason they won't message you, The lack of iMessage is. Nobody I know cares what kind of phone you have. But they do care if you have iMessage or not.
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.
I can wrap my head around the usability and interoperability arguments but this idea that "social standing" is contingent on iOS vs Android just seems alien to me.
Are there really people that adjust their social circles based on what type of phone someone is using?
Not so much adjust circles, but typically (obviously not always) Androids are seen as cheap and iPhones are seen as premium. (Young) people doing quick judgements of others use blue bubbles as a filter like nice cars and expensive clothes and watches.
People will specifically not add android users to group texts. If I am making a casual group text, and there is one android user, it may just be easier to not add a person than turn everyone's text boxes green, reduce image size, etc.
Not social standing per se, but a 0.01% chance of being excluded isn't going to feel good.
I'm sure there are some obnoxious people out there, but also I think there is a bit of a social hit resulting directly from the poor functionality. People are often lazy and/or not super tech literate, so for example when someone wants to send a couple pics from an event they'll default to iPhone-only group chat to avoid destroying the quality of the image, rather than using a different sharing mechanism. This is sometimes accompanied by a misunderstanding that Android phones are at fault for the downsampling, when actually it is the iPhone causing the issue and getting away with it due to majority rule.
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.
> Are there really people that adjust their social circles based on what type of phone someone is using?
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.
They don't need to open iMessage IMO, they just need to use better practices for text messaging between iPhone/Android. Like images are downsampled to hell if a single Android user is in an iPhone group chat -- but any time I've texted groups containing only various Android phones, images are decent quality (even if the members are using different text messaging platforms, so not like this is a Google Messages or Samsung thing).
Idc about green bubbles or cloud access/being integrated with the Apple ecosystem, but the core functionality should be decent. They should not be using outdated standards for non-Apple messages, which sure seems like a ploy to keep people away from Android.
Without legislation dictating interop of all messaging platforms, I don't see how iMessage would ever be opened up. I just don't see an antitrust case against iMessage.
Specifically, investigators have examined how the Apple Watch works better with the iPhone than with other brands
Apple is under no obligation to make sure that the Apple watch works well with an android phone. Unless they have specific evidence that Apple is doing something to explicitly block non-iOS devices, this is weak.
An Apple Watch does not pair with anything but an iPhone. You cannot call the product a "smart watch." All you can all it is an iPhone accessory.
Let's check in with Apple's marketing department[0]
> Apple Watch can do what your other devices can’t because it’s on your wrist. When you wear it, you get a fitness partner that measures all the ways you move, meaningful health insights, innovative safety features, and a connection to the people you care about most.
So how many of those things work without a paired iPhone?
Even Family Setup (which requires at least one family member to own an iPhone) doesn't give the watch full functionality.
> Not all features will be available if the Apple Watch is set up through Family Setup
From a third party[1]
> In short, anyone can wear an Apple Watch, including Android phone users. However, the reality is that anyone looking to have a proper smartwatch experience should stay within their own OS lanes. Android users should use Wear OS or third-party platform watches, iPhone users should use Apple Watches, and that's what it all really boils down to.
They seem to be giving preferential treatment to the apple watch:
"Users of Garmin devices have complained in Apple’s support forums about being unable to use their watches to reply to certain text messages from their iPhones or tweak the notifications they receive from the iPhone that they have connected to their watch."
Garmin makes no claim that their watch can reply to texts when paired to iPhone. "Text reply" is in the list of features, but clearly marked "Android only". It's not even fine print or anything:
Agreed, why should Apple watches have to work with android phones? Apple users understand it's an ecosystem they're buying into. If you don't like it, then don't purchase Apple products.
If I would get a dollar every time the media reports antitrust action is coming for Apple and people who insist Apple is “going to get rekt,” I could buy up 100% of the Apple stock and turn the iMessage bubbles purple and make iMessage only accessible to me and a select few so everyone on earth could complain forever how they’re being excluded.
At this point, let’s get it over with.
Let the DOJ sue them with 1200 pages of alleged violations, everything they could possibly think of and then some, and have the courts, all the way up to the SCOTUS, decide once and for all if Apple is violating antitrust laws and what, if anything, needs to be done to remedy it.
They could pull Apple apart into 20 companies for all I care. Let’s just get it over with so we know, once and for all if Apple was naughty in the eyes of the law or not.
But somehow, I suspect we will never get this sweet release because the next (and already held) debate will then be about how there needs to be new legislation to make them naughty in the eyes of the law, even though there’s no constitutional way of doing so in such a way that it would only affect Apple and not the latest hot startup on Silicon Valley.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadI'm not sure if current U.S. antitrust law condemns this behavior from Apple. In general, companies have no duty to deal with competitors. It can be anticompetitive to worsen access for competitors from a prior baseline without a procompetitive justification, but it's generally not anticompetitive to never offer access at parity with your own products (self preferencing) in the first place.
While these are reasonable complaints, it might take new legislation from Congress to remedy. I'm looking forward to seeing the actual complaint when it is filed so we can assess whether the Justice Department is working within existing frameworks or is instead attempting to push the envelope of antitrust law without Congressional authorization.
Still, this article is helpful in that is tells us what areas are the focus of the government's case (notably: nothing about the App Store).
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.
I remember microsoft getting into huge shit over mandating preinstalling internet explorer on their OS.
This feels 100x worse because you can't install any alternative sms application afaik.
I think the only mismatch is that lawmakers always 20 years behind the times, so it's taken them this long to realize that sms/imessage/whatever is just as fundamental as a browser for modern interconnectivity.
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.
These are two cases of OS dictating which software comes on their platform. To make it worse, the microsoft case was just about defaults, you could still install whatever the heck you wanted. Whereas in IOS you can't, period.
So just imagine if microsoft windows never allowed you to install any other web-browsers without breaking the OS.
When Microsoft tells OEMs -- someone not Microsoft, "we won't license you Windows unless you include and set as default Internet Explorer" that's anticompetitive.
It's the act of using your pull of needing to buy Windows get another business to do something unrelated.
MS could absolutely not allow you to have any other browser without it being anticompetitive, to wit this is what happens on Xbox.
This is why Apple won and Google lost their case with Epic. Google tried to have an open platform but then used their pull with gapps to force OEMs to privilege the Play store. The mere act of privileging your own products and services on your own platform isn't anticompetitive.
Microsoft to OEMs: you can only put our OS on the devices you sell if you make IE the default.
Without Windows, PC makers knew they had no market to sell to because there was no viable alternative OS being demanded by consumers (hence the asserted monopoly position of Microsoft). They were restraining other business from engaging alternatives from competing browser makers.
Apple: we build our messaging product, in our OS, on our devices
There are no other businesses involved between Apple and end users, who can use competing device makers, OS makers and contrary to what you stated, messaging services like Telegram, Signal, Matrix etc etc.
How do you install Android or some other OS competitor on an iPhone, or install iOS on a Samsung or Google device?
> and contrary to what you stated, messaging services like Telegram, Signal, Matrix etc etc.
Only with Apple's blessing, which they then deny for competing payment systems, browser engines, app stores etc. And iMessage is still the default.
You don’t, you either choose to buy an Android or an iPhone.
This is like asking why I can’t go to Princeton but have my favorite Stanford professor come teach my class, or why I can’t play CS:GO inside Mario Party.
Life is full of tradeoffs. You can’t have your cake and eat it too all the time.
You can do that. You just convince them to teach the class at Princeton. Professors move from one school to another all the time. You can also go take a class at one school while attending another if you want to do that, and the other school will not only not stand in your way, you'll generally get transfer credit.
> or why I can’t play CS:GO inside Mario Party.
These are two different games. The example you're looking for is that you can't play Mario Party on a PlayStation. But that's barely even an analogy, it's just the same situation -- why shouldn't you be able to play Mario Party on a PlayStation except for nefarious anticompetitive BS?
This is distinct from technical capability. If you can't play Mario Party on a Sega Genesis because it only has 64KB of RAM, too bad. But if you can't play it on <whatever device> even though you paid for it solely because of some anti-competitive lock-in even if the hardware is capable and you're willing to e.g. create a compatibility layer, that's something else.
You either get the money or you keep the stuff. You don't get to take the money and retain ownership control of the stuff.
Do you want them to spend money developing iOS for other devices, just so you can take that for free and install it on an Android?
You knew the rules before you pulled out your wallet.
For iMessage - they run a service that costs money. Why should they just give it out for free? Sure, they give it to their customers for free, but why does that mean you get it too?
It would be like sneaking into a complimentary hotel breakfast. Sure, you managed to grab someone's keycard - you technically can get past the restrictions. Still eating food someone else paid for. Just because you have friends eating already and you want to join them doesn't make it right.
You bought a copy of their software. Now that copy is yours and not theirs. Why shouldn't you be able to transfer your copy of it to whatever you want or use it however you want? You paid for it.
Licensing is for granting additional rights you don't otherwise get with a copy, e.g. a volume license allows you to reproduce additional copies for multiple devices at once, or the GPL allows you to reproduce and distribute copies to other people under certain terms. Taking away rights via license is inconsistent with the first sale doctrine.
> Do you want them to spend money developing iOS for other devices, just so you can take that for free and install it on an Android?
Why would it have to be free? You don't get Windows for free. But you can install it on a Dell in addition to a Surface, and so can Dell.
> You knew the rules before you pulled out your wallet.
Saying "you knew the rules" is not how you establish someone's authority to create rules.
> For iMessage - they run a service that costs money.
This is a fig leaf. Messaging services cost a negligible amount of money to operate and if anybody actually cared about this, no one is demanding for them to operate it themselves anyway rather than using or creating a protocol that supports federation.
Notice that substantially all of the other popular messaging services are just as free to everyone, including the ones not limited to any particular platform.
* Edited for spelling
In fact, Apple will like argue (and has successfully already in the Epic case) that it's the entire ecosystem that the courts have to look at and not any single feature. And at an ecosystem level there is a huge competitor in Android. Apple forcing webkit for example is Apple's choice as they control the entire platform. If they licensed iOS, then it would become harder to make that claim.
As a result most of what you have to look at is case law. But antitrust cases are rare to begin with and ones dealing with this kind of "huge conglomerate that ties its products and services together with computer code" -- try to name one dealing with a company of that nature other than Microsoft. Maybe AT&T? It's not a lot of precedent until you're looking at cases of much smaller companies doing much narrower things, which leaves plenty of room for the judge to "distinguish" them (i.e. do whatever they want in this case).
> In general, companies have no duty to deal with competitors.
It seems like a major difference here isn't just that they won't deal with competitors, it's that they don't allow their customers to deal with competitors. This is quite stark when you're looking at their products -- someone who owns an iPhone can't reasonably modify or replace the system software to integrate a competing payments system (or, for that matter, app store) because Apple doesn't allow it even on a piece of hardware they sold and is now owned by someone else.
You could make that argument for services, i.e. iMessage, but there are at least two other ways to get at that. First, iMessage is tied to their other offerings and so then you get them for the tying. Second, maybe routing something with a network effect through a centralized service is a different kind of thing than refusing to provide your competitors with delivery service when you don't have a monopoly on delivery service. Maybe it's more like refusing to provide your competitors with delivery service when you do have a monopoly on delivery service.
> I'm looking forward to seeing the actual complaint when it is filed so we can assess whether the Justice Department is working within existing frameworks or is instead attempting to push the envelope of antitrust law without Congressional authorization.
Congress pretty much authorized the courts to do whatever they want on this. The real question is what they want to do. You have to go back to Congress if they do something dumb.
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."
The problem with simple and straight forward is that it's a law prohibiting something.
If you buy the output of some factory which is the input to your own product, is that in restraint of trade? Does it matter if it's 10% or 50% or 90% or 100% of the industry's production capacity for that input? What if it's only 10% but it's the last 10% and the other 90% is already locked up in contracts with companies in other industries?
There's nothing in the statute to answer questions like that so the courts have to make something up. There's a pretty good argument that they've narrowed the antitrust laws too much over time but it's hard to claim that Congress didn't leave things open to interpretation.
> 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.
A century ago there wasn't an internet-connected computer chip in everything that allows the vendor to exercise control over a product even after they've sold it.
> Iqvia holdings.
This appears to be a case about a merger between healthcare companies. Which part of it are you implying is relevant to what Apple is doing?
> 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."
They're presumably going to argue that you can create an account with AWS and install whatever applications you want on your cloud server and access them from your iPhone, or something like that.
> 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."
Let's put it this way: If the courts want to find Apple in violation, it would be difficult to argue that this is outside the scope of what Congress intended based on the wording of the laws Congress passed.
Walled gardens aren’t antitrust violations.
If you want to buy iMessage, you have to use iOS/macOS.
You might be confused because it actually works in both directions. iMessage achieves a large network by being bundled with iPhones, then the large network creates market power and iMessage is tied to Apple devices which pressures other people to buy those devices, even when they'd have preferred not to, in order to avoid the green bubble.
This is one of the reasons this kind of tying is prohibited. Leveraging a dominant position in market A increases your share of market B and leveraging a dominant position in market B increases your share of market A, repeat until the market is concentrated into an oligopoly of vertically integrated conglomerates or a monopoly.
> Walled gardens aren’t antitrust violations.
Why not? Anti-competitive practices don't become otherwise just because you say "it's for your own good" as you lock the door.
No. Why would you think it is? It's a restraint of trade if there's an illegal agreement between the two companies that unfairly disadvantages other purchasers. Or it's a restraint of trade if you've bought up all the other suppliers so there is only one. These concepts are enshrined in laws that are pretty simple to read, you're inventing conflict where there hasn't been any.
> This appears to be a case about a merger between healthcare companies.
That's not what it is. It's a digital healthcare advertising company. Software is at the heart of the case.
> They're presumably going to argue that you can create an account with AWS and install whatever applications you want on your cloud server and access them from your iPhone, or something like that.
Does that have platform parity with apps from the app store? If not, it's a flawed argument.
> If the courts want to find Apple in violation
The court doesn't _want_ anything. Other than for the parties to settle their disputes outside of court. When they can't, they rule, and often pretty carefully because they don't want to get overturned on appeal.
This isn't something that's happening to Apple, it's a strategy they've employed, in defiance of the law, in the hopes that they were going to be able to get away with it. That was a good short term gamble, because they almost got two decades out of it, but the courts have caught up to the market, and they're about to get the law applied to them.
If this bothers anyone that much, familiarize yourself with the laws, and then advocate against them. I think if you actually prepare to do this, you'll immediately understand that almost every consumer in America will be against you.
I would not be surprised if they are trying to push the envelope of the current law is fine and I think that's fine. If you're unwilling to try to enforce unless you're 100% sure no judge would ever disagree with you, you're going to let people get away with a LOT of stuff by default that could very well be found to be covered by existing statute.
And the failures could galvanize additional legislation more than doing nothing.
Sure, most phones you can buy in the US will have GMS, but part of the benefit of AirTags is being able to track things through, say, China, and you could be somewhat hard-pressed to find a chinese Android with GMS.
Meanwhile, all sorts of people all around the world want the latest iPhone, and every single latest iPhone in the world gets the latest updates.
Also it's a very interesting point about China and AirTags. How come it's not forbidden by the CCP?
As of 2023, Android has approximately a 70% global market share (iPhone has almost 60% in the US), but we don't know exactly how many of those run GMS. There's a list of supported devices [0], but it'd take forever to sort through it, and we don't know:
- how many devices there are not on that list
- how many devices have hacked/"pirated" GMS anyway
If Google were to pursue something like AirTag, it could probably work okay enough, except:
- It'd likely have worse/coarser coverage than Apple AirTags, simply due to the variety of Android phones out there, and the fact that most of them will never be fully updated
- It'd likely take a while to introduce because of the need to wait until enough phones are updated for the tags will work properly
- It'd likely not have the same quality of user experience, and Google is not particularly known for privacy
Re coarser coverage, there are also likely to be huge dead zones where e.g. the dominant phone manufacturer is Huawei, which is hated by Google and no longer allowed to manufacture phones running GMS. Xiaomi doesn't have Google Play, but they still have GMS.
[0]: https://storage.googleapis.com/play_public/supported_devices...
> Also it's a very interesting point about China and AirTags. How come it's not forbidden by the CCP?
Probably because it's invisible. Consumers have no visibility or say in how their iPhone tracks nearby AirTags.
This is such a misleading way to phrase it. The Apple Watch only works with the iPhone (unfortunately. I would buy one if it worked on Android. Android watches are universally hopeless)
If you don't have it paired to an iPhone, an Apple Watch won't even tell you the time.
Many of our retirement and wealth portfolios would beg to differ. S&P minus FAANG is virtually flat for the past few years (and depending upon which estimate you observe, likely negative if you factor inflation); almost all of the growth in the S&P 500 is from tech growth.
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.
I do not see why this has to be true (especially with declining fertility rates). Scale itself is a competitive advantage, especially when competing against a well oiled machine like China. The game is global, not national.
The market itself is reinforcing this distorted incentive structure, so even if you break them up into 100 smaller companies they will keep doing so in a more secretive way since they will still operate in the same market with aligned incentives. Breaking up works effectively only when you can effectively split the market those are operating on, something like AT&T or Standard oil. Big techs are not bound on geographic areas, so you're going to spend several years on uncertain fights only to make it even worse.
What we really need is precisely targeted legislation that will prevent anti-competitive business practice itself. EU has been successful here with GDPR, DMA and they're willing to extend them even further. US is holding everyone back here. This is a highly political problem. Any judicial treatment will only be temporary mitigation and those will quickly find out a way to circumvent it.
Apple raked in $93bn in profits last year. It's such an aberration compared to other companies I feel like there must be anti-competitive barriers somewhere. You expect me to believe that no competition is able to take a slice of that? It's too juicy not to! Competition should be eroding those margins to a more reasonable figure and it's not IMO.
Microsoft profits are over $150bn.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/net...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/gro...
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.
LOL, nothing Apple does is cutting edge. They took Linux and made it easy for corporate system admins. Touchscreens were invented back in the 60's. GUI's were created by Xerox.
Steve Jobs was a hack and a douche by all accounts, the reverence people have for him is laughable. But this is the behavior of the oligarchs and the monopolies they run; they have such centralized power that they're able to vacuum up all competitors, even potential or tangential ones.
If your going to troll, have the decency to get your facts straight.
* Edited for clarity
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.
How's Google going to credibly do that, especially without going wildly into monopolist territory by freezing out ad & spying competitors while surely still allowing their own? Why would they when getting more eyes and ears on "their users" and defending against a rise of platforms that might hinder them was the point of not just developing Android, but making it free so that others would stop trying to do their own thing?
Microsoft could maybe try, but is running fast the other direction instead, probably for similar reasons of wanting to grab that sweet, sweet data (gotta feed LLMs, now; more reason than ever!)
To viably compete you need:
1) Software that actually works really really well (perfectly? Not even close. Wildly above the median in the world of consumer software, even from big vendors? Oh my, yes). Lots, and lots, and lots of such software. So very much. Operating systems, server-side systems of several kinds, an "office" suite, advanced camera-related software, mapping software, utilities galore (things like Preview and Digital Color Meter are great and are absolutely part of Apple's "moat")—maybe even a browser, if you want to approach things like Apple's real-world-use battery life on MacBooks. So much software. And it'll need to all work together well enough not to look pathetic next to the relatively-excellent integration that Apple's stuff has.
2) You're gonna have to have tight integration with probably-custom hardware across several fairly-different product lines to achieve a similar quality level on #1, and to approach their levels of profitability. That's a huge investment, and hard. Your organization needs to be able to S-rank procurement, logistics, packaging, and hardware design on some balance of a functional and aesthetic level—at least more often than not.
3) You're gonna need to be able to play the "privacy defender" card and not have your pants immediately combust—whatever you think of Apple's credibility on this, it's surely well above the other tech giants. That also means forgoing or abandoning other opportunities at income (Apple's tentative move into ads is... worrisome, for this reason)
> without going wildly into monopolist territory by freezing out ad & spying competitors while surely still allowing their own
You mean like killing off third-party cookies while retaining a way to track and advertise to users via FLoC-turned-Interests? You can argue Firefox disables third-party cookies, but they're not an ad company. >85% (last I checked) of Google revenue is advertising or adjacent to it, and their legal team signed off on an action that harms their competitors and helps the ad network with the soon-to-be most accurate tracking
AMD is steadfastly refusing for provide software support equivalent to CUDA for their GPUs. They’re leaving a trillion dollars on the table. NVIDIA isn’t being anti-competitive, it’s AMD being un-competitive.
The Windows & Linux PC ecosystem badly lags behind Apple on a number of basic features. E.g.: literally just color! If I want to edit videos in HDR (which is just better color), I have to start with… buying a Mac. Windows essentially can’t do this without enormous effort, and Linux is hopeless. MacOS and all Apple hardware “just works”.
No Android phone manufacturer even begins to provide the quality and the service that Apple does. I give my old iPhones to my relatives to use and they still get updates and full support after six or more years! I can walk into an Apple Store, and they’ll fix or replace my phone on the spot. Etc…
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.
I'm suspicious that much of this is a ploy to weaken the tight security controls & encrypted data so that the US government (and potentially other governments?) can get easier access to surveillance data on US citizens.
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.
The other issue is the constant nagging, that can't be disabled, about iCloud backups being full, when in fact I never wanted them in the first place and as far as I can tell or recall they stole that data from me.
Citation needed. I periodically get popups for even Apple's own first-party apps asking if I still want to share location. "Do you still want Weather to know where you are?" Yes, I do, because I use it. You may very well be getting the same message for Google apps, but that's not special anti-Google behavior.
> The other issue is the constant nagging, that can't be disabled, about iCloud backups being full
Then turn off iCloud backups. It's an optional feature that makes sense to be on by default, but that's trivially easy to disable if you don't want it.
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.
[EDIT] Though, regardless, I do see why it'd rankle that in fact Apple Maps ends up seeing fewer permission-reminders than Google Maps, even if it's for a not-exactly-intended-as-nefarious reason—I don't mean to dismiss your complaint.
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 can go to AppStore and see what data each app uses or read user reviews but there's no way to do that for any Apple apps for some reason.
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
1: There's a bunch of stuff the commercial Google Chrome does that they could easily ban through store policy. They could also just arbitrarily refuse to approve it.
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.
This automatically pushed Firefox, Opera, Edge, IE out of the picture, because we basically had an emerging browser monoculture already. If the people who were already using Firefox could have kept using it on their new phone or tablet as well, syncing bookmarks and history, that would have probably slowed its defeat a little bit and perhaps slowed Chrome's growth. We eventually got a Firefox-branded wrapper around Safari's webviews but Apple's architecture guarantees that those webview frames will always be inferior to Safari.
Safari being available on Windows might've helped too, but I understand why Apple chose not to do that.
Additionally, this video shows FireFox's marketshare was still increasing, even two years after chrome was first released.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/internet-browser-market-sha...
The reason google Chrome succeeded is because it was a better browser. It syncs all your favorites, passwords, and history with the google account you already have. It works on every platform. And Firefox had several years where it just wasn't very good. I was a Firefox user but around the time they killed legacy extensions I bailed.
I remember helping many family members when their Internet Explorer was filled with spyware toolbars taking up 50% of their screen. I would just install chrome and log them into their gmail account and never have to fix it again.
As others have mentioned, Safari was available on windows for many years.
They allow competing browsers but they have to use the OS-provided JavaScript engine. I guess one could make an argument that allowing third-party engines would encourage innovation in the browser space but at the same time, there is a strong security argument for very narrowly limiting the JIT-code execution entitlement.
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.
Tell that to Beeper Mini who had the crazy idea of growing the pie of iMessage users, following the original protocol seamlessly through adversarial interoperability.
It is quite debatable over whether Apple should be forced to allow another company to make money using adverse interoperability and server runtime costs etc.
In the same way it was quite debatable over whether IBM should be forced to allow another company (Compaq) to make money using adverse interoperability and reverse engineering IBM's BIOS.
I'd argue that the second debate was settled in the right way, and am partial to Apple being forced to interoperate as well. If you run a service with more than, say, 5% of a market, and that market has a network lock-in effect, you should eventually be considered a public service and have to interoperate.
Pidgin / Blackberry Inbox / WP7 homescreen / Matrix bridges and other services that unify incoming and outgoing text and binary messages for 1x1/group chats should be table stakes, not selling points. Email and IM, whether on PC, mobile, XR, whatever, vendor agnostic!
I think this would create a whole new generation of tech startups in a stalled/captured industry.
I would love to see iMessage available to people not on Apple devices.
However, I am not enthusiastic about a government defining what "interoperate" means in general. By way of example, I can think of many definitions of "interoperate" that would prevent the use of end-to-end encryption, or prevent upgrading the protocol and not supporting old versions, or prevent fixing security issues because some third-party client was relying on the insecure behavior, or prevent setting requirements on acceptable client behavior...
I want interoperability. I don't want to end up in a world in which, once you get large enough, it's impossible to innovate without slowing down and waiting for the slowest and most recalcitrant/adversarial folks who want to interoperate with you to catch up.
Apple & Google don’t have to pay the app store tax & have products that compete with books, audiobooks, Spotify etc — this is the most blatant antitrust issue. I hope the US lawsuit leads with this.
What business in their right mind would want to sell or stock a product that comes with a label that says, in effect, “Don’t spend your money here, go somewhere else”?
It's not in contention: it's both of those things. It's just that some people want it to be exclusively one of those things.
So to be clear: if Apple printed on every iPhone box, "This phone is 30% cheaper on Apple.com", you feel that Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, %LOCAL_TECH_STORE%, etc. should be legally obligated to stock those iPhones?
A better question is, why aren't iphones cheaper at apple stores?
So you think it's OK that Walmart doesn't want to sell a product that says, "Hey, don't buy this from Walmart", but you think it's wrong for Walmart not to want to sell a product that links to a website, where the website says, "Hey, don't buy any more of our stuff from Walmart"?
Nintendo will encourage you to buy from their online store, competing with Wal-Mart selling physical media (and maybe digital codes too on their own store?).
After that sure, they can try to go after Google.
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.
That control, over something I paid for and ostensibly 'own' will be used against me, as in the case of App Store cuts and digital payments. Why should that be allowed? If I own it, it is mine, and control over its technology should be mine as well.
Why not some legislation instead? For example, I have a friend who likes to tinker and they would love to be able to “own” their Tesla car, or Samsung smart TV (both also currently running as a black box of sorts… with even less security and transparency than iOS).
Ford can't geofence my Bronco to only drive to stores that pay them off, why should Apple be allowed to enforce what I can run on my iPhone?
Obviously other app stores could in principle charge lower amounts because they don't actually have to do any development work, unlike google or apple who both actually do real development work for products after they've been sold. Despite that GoG and Steam seem to charge 30% anyway.
I'm curious what you think the development model for companies that aren't just store fronts should be if they aren't able to make money from development, especially given they appear to be charging that same amount as those companies that aren't doing anything other than providing a store front? Maybe software updates should cost money again? Or you should only get one year of updates for a device? Maybe free apps should be banned as well? After all supporting those costs money but makes none?
I'm genuinely curious how you think development should be paid for when 15-30% is too high for developers but fine for store fronts?
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.
https://www.techspot.com/news/100767-after-almost-five-years...
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 believe that they necessarily are violating antitrust by choosing to make imessage or apple watch ios only, but it would be obviously better for consumers in my opinion if they were more open.
One aspect which keeps annoying me is how hostile Apple is to developers that want to use anything other than Apple hardware to publish on the app store. The requirement to use xcode, and the fact that xcode only runs on Mac means they are leveraging their control of ios app stores to force hardware sales. I was particularly annoyed to find that even if I have a compiled .ipa file, the app store requires xcode to even upload it. It's a file upload! This has been working cross platform since before the advent of the web.
"I am personally not convinced and dislike your tone" doesn't add anything to the conversation.
Perhaps I just don't fit in with HN anymore.
Microsoft got in trouble for tying its monopoly in operating systems to OEMs preinstalling Internet Explorer. Essentially, they told OEMs that they would not sell them Windows unless they agreed to help Microsoft kill Netscape. That's a very different kind of antitrust complaint than what the article describes, which is Apple building seamless connections between its hardware and services while offering second-tier connections for competitors.
The Xcode angle is interesting, but likely not important enough for the Justice Department to sue over. Hardware for developers is negligible in the grand scheme of things.
That's worlds worse than just making sure your app is the most convenient option, while other options can easily be installed.
Put another way, Apple cannot worsen access for competitors on its platform absent a procompetitive justification. But they have no duty under U.S. antitrust law to provide equal access in the first place.
It's not anticompetitive to never allow a third-party text message application in the first place.
Messaging apps that compete with iMessage are plentiful and Apple doesn't get in their way. You can also disable iMessage with a toggle on the Messages settings screen (it's well "above the fold" for me, fourth entry down, on that screen, it's the first thing they show other than security/permissions stuff for the app)
On Android, yes. Not on iOS.
True, but they're undeniably at a scale where this would just be expected of them either way. We broke up Ma Bell ignoring this exact defense, because at a certain scale of infrastructure you're expected to do the right thing legal or not. If Apple drills down on their "technically legal" defense, they're liable to find out how technically subjective law gets at their scale.
I disagree.
Apple is actively hostile to third parties integrating with their own protocols, but Microsoft has been caught several times trying to subvert standards for their benefit, e.g. when they added extensions to their Exchange email servers that would work only with Outlook clients.
Google also prevents me from making a company that uses its search engine infrastructure and unlike iMessage it is actually the dominant operator in the market.
I'm also not allowed to make a Twitter-like service that interoperates with twitter.
Explain what makes iMessage, a service that is part of a product apple sells, different from the above? Or in fact any service operated by any other company that sells a product but doesn't allow other companies to resell their services?
> they ban third parties from offering apps that interoperate e.g. with iMessage.
If you're referring to that company that reverse engineered the iMessage protocol, that entire companies business model was "we're going to give away free access to a service that isn't free, and that a company has to spend money supporting".
Again, how would this be different from requiring google, twitter, or GitHub, etc to provide 3rd parties access to their infrastructure to duplicate their services?
Google and Twitter have services to run that compete on generally equal terms (eg. the Internet). Apple's messaging service is integrated with Apple's runtime, and because they control both they can implement features that competitors cannot.
You can use SMS (and apparently RCS in future?) to talk to others, and if there's the option to use iMessage instead it does that. i.e it interoperates with existing standard messaging systems when appropriate.
> Apple's messaging service is integrated with Apple's runtime, and because they control both they can implement features that competitors cannot.
Every messaging app on Mac and iOS can implement whatever features they want, just like iMessage does. It has nothing to do with the being "part of the system".
> Google and Twitter have services to run that compete on generally equal terms (eg. the Internet)
No they don't. I can't make a search engine that competes with google I don't have the hardware or existing index, much like apple has infrastructure to support and developer iMessage, google has hardware and infrastructure to support search. Why should I have to build my own infrastructure if google already has that?
Similarly I can't make something that competes with twitter if I can't read and reply to tweets on twitter, so why shouldn't twitter be required to let me do that as well?
You have created an artificial distinction that makes iMessage (a service that is part of a paid product that requires significant infrastructure) somehow different from every other service operated by every other company for which someone might want to piggy back off to avoid paying the actual operational costs. There is no different from "I want to make my own messaging app that uses iMessage for message delivery so that it interacts with iMessage, so apple must let me do that" and "I want to make a microblogging site that uses twitter's infrastructure so that it can interact with twitter, so twitter must let me do that".
Did I? Or did Apple?
Apple is the one that baked support for it into their SMS app. Apple is the party that designed iMessage to solely rely on Apple servers instead of extending to third-party instances or carrier partners. I'm willing to give Apple a fair shake here, but their approach is undeniably predatory. They are an enormous portion of the first-world smartphone market, and their ivory tower approach to communications is historically untenable.
Personally speaking, I despise RCS as a protocol but at least it acknowledged third-party interop as a necessary component of... you know, agnostic communication infrastructure. You'd hope that a company like Apple would annihilate Google in this arena, but instead they're silent. The largest company in the world, which built it's entire business on revolutionizing the phone, has nothing to give back to public communication infrastructure. They won't even come to the discussion table for future protocols unless regulators threaten them.
Apple's entire modern business is built on making artificial distinctions between themselves and their competitors. That's why the DMA exists; Apple doesn't have the right to access a market where they deny their competitors fair competition. They don't have to forfeit every advantage they have, just the ones deemed anticompetitive. Since Apple has refused to negotiate on this in the past, it stands to reason that government intervention it the only way to make consumers lives (on both sides of the walled garden) better.
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).
Whose messages turn green or blue depending on protocol in use in a given (potentially group) thread in Apple's Messages?
[EDIT] The up-and-down voting pattern suggests my point may not have come through: if you were trying to cause this, where would you place this indicator? On messages from the person with phone sending SMS, right? Apple places it on the iPhone user's messages that they send, to indicate what kind of message you've sent so you have some idea what the other end's experience will be, and why certain features may not appear in your UI (you don't need to see what kind of message is coming in—its capabilities are evident, whatever you see is the result of that message using whatever features it needed and could access)
Is Apple unhappy that Android users feel excluded? I doubt it. Was this feature evidently designed to do that, on purpose? I mean, if so, they didn't do it very well.
"Green bubble" became a thing, initially, because you'd add an Android users to a group text (actually iMessage) thread and it'd "green bubble" everyone else and make things work less-well. There had to be some kind of indicator so this wouldn't seem to happen just at random, and that was it—but the affordance pointedly does not single out who's responsible, indeed, in a group thread that starts out with mixed Android and iOS users, I'm not even sure how to tell who's a "green bubble" and who's a "blue bubble" (I suppose you'd tap each contact and see if iMessage-related features were available?)
edit an OS web browser tied to the base OS is not the same as an instant msg app on a phone. The OS Browser bundling is not at all comparable, by a long measure. Some context is needed on such a large situation.
source: read direct testimony on the MSFT anti-trust case
Don't even have to scroll to find it (at least on mine).
1. Allow better interoperability from 3rd party clients. All of Apple's "user security" arguments are complete and total BS given that iMessage already degrades to the most insecure method of communication if any messages (including group chats) contain a non-iMessage user.
2. Provide a compatible Android client for iMessage (like literally every other single message app out there). At the very least they could stop breaking other iMessage Android clients.
3. Make it easier to choose a text client on startup.
4. Support a more functional interoperability standard - which, thankfully, Apple has finally said they will do by supporting RCS, but only after it looked like they became wary that their blatant tactics would look too monopolistic from a regulatory perspective.
There is just 0 user-centered rationale for defending Apple's behavior here.
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 is themselves the computer maker. The situation is not similar even though both MS and Apple are big companies.
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.
I think this is due to regulators not understanding that phones are computers.
Apple definitely lets you change the default apps in macOS. If it didn't, that would be a problem. But until recently, both Google and Apple were given an exception on mobile computing, i.e. tablets, phones.
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.
Take a look at the Nintendo Switch market share in 2020 [1]. We should regulate Nintendo and make them open up APIs but not Microsoft?
[1] Assume this is accurate for the sake of argument https://www.statista.com/statistics/276768/global-unit-sales...
Apple/Google's app store duopoly is a tax on competition and innovation. BTW these two app stores dwarf anything Nintendo is doing with theirs.
Apple for example is known (I don't have the numbers in front of me) for making high margins on their hardware and not digital transactions though they're certainly trying to grow that sector.
If you mean of the overall pie, wouldn't that just place burdensome regulation on new and small businesses or new sectors since as soon as you own a percent of the "digital pie" (what exactly is that anyway?) you have to then comply with regulations that could just open up your proprietary business features to your competitors?
Why is it that Apple and Google's app store duopoly a tax on competition when they created the sector that enabled businesses to sell products? If anything they should charge more.
But aside from that, doesn't this also discourage Apple, Google, and others from profiting off of or creating software features? Why even build the API? And if another company forks Android or creates a new mobile operating system they can keep all of their stuff closed until a later point in which they're beating incumbents and then just open up?
Idk I feel like there's already too much additive logic here to make this worthwhile. Good regulation would be much cleaner and ideally subtractive instead of additive.
> BTW these two app stores dwarf anything Nintendo is doing with theirs.
I'm aware and I find this to be irrelevant.
I don't know, that's the regulator's job.
> If you mean of the overall pie, wouldn't that just place burdensome regulation on new and small businesses or new sectors since as soon as you own a percent of the "digital pie" (what exactly is that anyway?) you have to then comply with regulations that could just open up your proprietary business features to your competitors?
Businesses have to deal with new and changing regulations all the time. Once a business starts to worry about being too big and associated regulations, that's their legal team's job.
> Why is it that Apple and Google's app store duopoly a tax on competition when they created the sector that enabled businesses to sell products? If anything they should charge more.
Right, without regulation we're on a path for these megacoprs to start charging us more, especially if if our attempts to regulate them fail. They won't compete fairly out of the kindness of their hearts.
> But aside from that, doesn't this also discourage Apple, Google, and others from profiting off of or creating software features? Why even build the API? And if another company forks Android or creates a new mobile operating system they can keep all of their stuff closed until a later point in which they're beating incumbents and then just open up?
The beauty of competition is that if they don't continuously add new products or features, someone else will — Just like Apple/Google once did to the older tech incumbents.
> Idk I feel like there's already too much additive logic here to make this worthwhile. Good regulation would be much cleaner and ideally subtractive instead of additive.
While I proposed something, what I'm really looking for is outcomes that change tech into a more competitive landscape, and don't really care how it happens.
> I'm aware and I find this to be irrelevant.
It's not irrelevant in the context that antitrust regulations looks at the number of people impacted, which is very correlated to how much revenue is being generated.
Ok but you should at least have an idea because it's the central premise of your proposal. I'm not asking for you to split hairs between a percent or something but to provide something meaningful from a categorical standpoint.
> Businesses have to deal with new and changing regulations all the time. Once a business starts to worry about being too big and associated regulations, that's their legal team's job.
Sure that's fair though I'm still concerned about decreases in competition here due to this regulation as noted.
> Right, without regulation we're on a path for these megacoprs to start charging us more, especially if if our attempts to regulate them fail. They won't compete fairly out of the kindness of their hearts.
On the consumer side I don't see this as a big threat, it's more of a threat to developers. The vast majority of apps, games, etc. are junk and not worht acquiring for free or paid, and if those prices increase because companies are charging more then the likely scenario is they just die off which is good for the economy and the quality of the app stores.
On the developer side this also has the added benefit of weeding out uncompetitive apps and poor products, and the cost burden is beared by developers instead of the corporations and personally I don't really care that much if, say, Epic gets more or less revenue than Apple because of these dynamics. Neither are lowering their prices so it's not relevant to me.
> The beauty of competition is that if they don't continuously add new products or features, someone else will — Just like Apple/Google once did to the older tech incumbents.
Nothing stops those new products or features today though so I'm not sure what the argument here is. Are you suggesting if Apple and Google open up their APIs then other competitors will... open up their non-existent APIs? If anything these things just further cemement Apple and Google dominance.
> It's not irrelevant in the context that antitrust regulations looks at the number of people impacted, which is very correlated to how much revenue is being generated.
Are you suggesting regulation overall due to company size or regulation within a sector? If it's the former I think there's likely to be some faulty rationele here and if it's the latter it's irrelevant because Nintendo isn't competing in the same sector as Apple or Google.
The central premise of my proposal is that once a company reaches antitrust-size, it should be regulated as such. Perhaps percent of all digital transactions is one way to do it without writing company-specific regulation that could be worked around in the future, perhaps not. I categorically do not want a handful of companies to control our digital landscape, and we need regulators to step in.
>On the consumer side I don't see this as a big threat, it's more of a threat to developers. The vast majority of apps, games, etc. are junk and not worht acquiring for free or paid, and if those prices increase because companies are charging more then the likely scenario is they just die off which is good for the economy and the quality of the app stores. On the developer side this also has the added benefit of weeding out uncompetitive apps and poor products, and the cost burden is beared by developers instead of the corporations and personally I don't really care that much if, say, Epic gets more or less revenue than Apple because of these dynamics. Neither are lowering their prices so it's not relevant to me.
Just because you don't feel personally impacted doesn't mean others aren't.
> Nothing stops those new products or features today though so I'm not sure what the argument here is. Are you suggesting if Apple and Google open up their APIs then other competitors will... open up their non-existent APIs? If anything these things just further cemement Apple and Google dominance.
If you zoom out a bit, you'll notice the entire web is effectively controlled by 2-3 companies via Chrome/Safari. It's not about being able to build on particular APIs per se. It's that if Apple/Google want web browsers to have (or NOT have) certain features, it's them who get to decide, and developers will fall in line. Google in particular has been working on features that make ad blocking worse, thus protecting their advertising empire, for example [1]. Edit: Just to clarify, what can/cannot be done on web browsers directly impacts the kind of apps developers build for app stores. However, the takeaway here is that what these big corporations want happens both in and out of app stores for their own benefit, because consumers lack choice.
>Are you suggesting regulation overall due to company size or regulation within a sector?
I meant that if we lived in a world where 1 in 2 people had to pay Nintendo ~30% when buying a digital good (Costs are passed to consumers), they too should be regulated. The rationale is protecting consumers from harm via higher prices, which result from a lack of competition.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/google/2023/12/chromes-next-weapon-i...
What it boils down to in my opinion, is that you own the device, and the company that built it should be required to give you all the keys to do what you want with it. The ability for companies to technologically lock out what their customers can do with the devices is relatively new, but there are quite a few areas of law that follow this principle of "once you buy it, it's yours, full stop", and I think this is just following along from that.
So I'd like to see general legislation in that direction, that would outlaw all these companies from locking down their devices as a first step. It doesn't have to be super easy, but it absolutely should be possible to run whatever code you want on any device you own.
I think antitrust surrounding these marketplaces is also due, but is much less fundamental and a lot more situational, where it matters less what the definition of 'a computer' is and more who's getting screwed, how badly, and whether competition is possible.
Does Apple have something like a "key" that would allow you to just run arbitrary software on the device? Is it something they would have to build, support, and maintain? I'm guessing this isn't a problem on Android and you can run whatever you want.
> Does Apple have something like a "key" that would allow you to just run arbitrary software on the device? Is it something they would have to build, support, and maintain? I'm guessing this isn't a problem on Android and you can run whatever you want.
Not sure about the specifics of Apple's architecture (as it's also undocumented), but most modern secure boot systems have a hardware public key store (TPM) that any boot binaries must be signed with. Apple would closely guard those keys, and without them (and without security flaws), it is impossible to boot other code. Once you get a bit further along into the boot process, the architecture gets much more complicated as far as actually running apps, but it's all predicated on that secure boot key. Such a key store is probably possible to change, but Apple doesn't give any access to it from the userland, so users are unable to do so. It's also possible to make such a verification completely unchangeable in hardware; not sure if Apple may do it this way.
An open system would look something like UEFI secure boot, where the owner of the system can manage the keys in that hardware key store, to the extent of removing the manufacturer's keys entirely (which I think is also an important ability - what if I don't want Apple to be trusted on my device?). From there you can patch the OS to allow other code to run, though preferably this is something that would also be opened up explicitly.
Yes, it will require intentionally designing those capabilities into the products, but most likely it's not a significant architectural change, just a matter of giving users access to change the keys in the hardware they own.
How would Apple/Google be able to monitor malware here?
How do we know that the secure boot key for example isn't part of the security architecture and by giving it out you basically enable those root level permissions?
Are we really trusting users to not lose or compromise secure boot keys that they manage on their own? If grandpa gets scammed out of his life savings are taxpayers footing that bill?
I'm not necessarily looking for answers to those questions, but it really just seems like there's a lot of open items here that have to be addressed for not a lot of benefit and instead it seems like people just want an effectively jailbroken iPhone that's somehow secured by Apple/Google more easily.
Security is about trust. If you trust Apple or Google, and don't care about their 30% tax, then you should be able to choose that. Make it the default, even. But if you don't trust them, and don't want them to control what runs, that should be your choice too. It's your device for fucks sake!
"Security" is a weak argument for unconditionally giving up all control over your own device. Especially when that control is very obviously being used against us by those very same that are claiming to protect us. The situation is reminiscent of countless dystopian novels. If we're going to accept that anyway, I think it needs to come with much stronger protections for the common good in other ways than vague and pretty bogus "security" arguments. If they want lock in, I think they should have to operate the platform on a cost basis, and with strong antitrust protection in exchange for that privilege.
Most Windows PCs allow users to enroll keys in their secure boot system. Do you hear about grandpa getting his life savings stolen by this mechanism often? I certainly haven't. Much more likely he lost it to social engineering, where no technological measure is going to help you.
What isn't a computer nowadays?
* https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/
Apple could afford to do this work of course, but the ROI of doing so is questionable. Ignoring the hit to Mac sales, it opens their platforms up to vast amounts of low effort shovelware — far more than already exists on the App Store. That’s the natural consequence of access to a platform being a single tickbox away.
Of course the actual problem might come down to lack of tools and services that push junkware into the gutters where it belongs while putting quality apps in the spotlight, but I’m not confident that this will magically appear should iOS as a platform be opened up.
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.
Google positioned itself so it is the de facto default for pretty much every Android phone.
And if having an app store that doesn't require an account is actually somehow desireable, is your suggestion that Google somehow strong-armed Samsung into requiring an account rather than going with the ostensibly superior option of not requiring accounts? Or is the suggestion that the store should be using some other account than a Samsung account, but they weren't allowed to do that.
My point here is that it does not matter that a device comes with one, two, or multiple app stores, if the whole start up flow steers users towards a specific one.
Does that mean it's OK? Definitely not. But I think a general mandate of interoperability would be preferable to any point solutions. It's not clear how a court could rule that way, so it might require legislation.
You must not have been alive at the time. Apple's early adoption of USB is why USB became the dominant peripheral interface. People were quite upset to have lost their legacy ports in 1998.
And of course, Apple's contributions to and early support for USB-C were also industry-leading. Apple has played a key role in creating and/or mainstreaming many standards: FireWire, Thunderbolt, Wi-Fi, ISOBMFF/MPEG-4, AAC, Mini-SIM/Nano-SIM, and I'm sure more I'm forgetting.
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.
The rise of TCP/IP during the 1990s led to a reimplementation of most of these types of support on that protocol, and AppleTalk became unsupported as of the release of Mac OS X v10.6 in 2009.
> It was plug-and-play, amazing for its time, and showed what standards-based networking should aspire to.
I believe the IETF was quite active during that time, particularly in the 90's when I got somewhat involved, and even in the 80's. What role did Apple play in that? It seems to me they could have advanced their "aspirations" more effectively that way.
It's not deleted, it got flag killed. Turn on showdead in your profile and you'll be able to see the comment.
CharlesW was the one I was responding to who had thought your comment was deleted when it wasn’t. I was clarifying for them (and others) that the comment had not been deleted. I honestly have no idea why this confuses you.
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.
it's always funny when usb-c (vs lightning, usb-a, etc) discussions come up, because there's very much people in favor of doing away with everything except USB-C (by government decree/fiat if necessary) but many of these individuals also seem to hate the usb-c only macbooks, despite those being the richest implementation of the concept to date.
not just usb-c everything, but thunderbolt everything, with full capability on all ports, full-speed charging on all ports, etc.
"no, not like that!"
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.
> USB became popular due to digital cameras, USB printers and scanners, flash drives and the like
In the late 90's/early 00's, who were using technology like that? Designers. What were they using? iMacs...
As for "In the late 90's/early 00's, who were using technology like that? Designers. "
I believe that is just wrong. Mac users might have had an outsized impact, but the mass market always refrained from jumping on things until they were available for Windows.
So who did Woz copy for the Apple I ][ and ///?
> and now you & few others are desperately touting the one, or one of the few areas where they embraced standards. Assuming they did.
They were one of the first adopters, if not the first. They have been involved in the design of nearly every USB standard since; Micro USB being a notable exception.
> I believe that is just wrong. Mac users might have had an outsized impact, but the mass market always refrained from jumping on things until they were available for Windows.
Go get a copy of a computer magazine from around 6 months after the iMac G3 was released...
The thing is that on one hand, you're claiming that they're not innovative and on the other, suffering from NIH syndrome, so by implication, innovating. Which is it?
I never said they were "innovating." And it's funny how you all concentrate on USB and avoid AppleTalk. Or the Newton, which came about because Sculley stabbed their own alumni in the back. Or the "apple online network" (early 90's) which I can't even find the name of now.
Or, for that matter, FireWire, which found almost no lasting traction in the Windows world.
And of course you all decline to talk about their failure to make any contribution to the IETF. Or threatening to sue Microsoft over Windows.
What you believe is irrelevant, especially when it has no foundation in reality.
The Internet was around then. The Wayback Machine was, too.
I sort of agree with what you are saying, but don't underestimate the impact that the G3 had on the desktop computing landscape.
It nearly caused Apple to go bankrupt.
I don't think you could have picked a worse example to attempt to make your point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy-free_PC#1990s
I'll save you a click: the Apple iMac is credited with popularizing USB.
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?
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.
Someone willing to do the work should be capable of producing an interoperable implementation.
It's a step in the right direction but it's the same problem as iMessage supporting SMS in addition to its own protocol. If the proprietary protocol supports something the open protocol doesn't, or that Apple doesn't implement for the open protocol, a competing implementation can't do it. And if it doesn't do that then why does the proprietary protocol exist?
If you're going to make your own protocol, publish a spec.
It's a service and a protocol and a client application.
But it should be possible for a third party to make an interoperating client application using the same protocol, and then it could connect to any service implementing that protocol.
Obviously if you want to be selective in who can use your service then you should create a protocol that supports some kind of federation so that each user's service can forward messages to another service if the two endpoints don't use the same one. Email works like this, for example.
> Should I be able to operate a business that sends bulk advertisements to iMessage users?
Can you do this now by using a Mac with iMessage?
The point of the blue bubble is to ensure the encryption is there.
The hard part is associating some identity with the user's keys, but when the ID is your phone number or email address, the entity doing that is inherently your phone company or email provider. You can standardize a way to do that, i.e. to sign up you get an SMS or email with a code and have to enter the code. The client can automate that if it has access to read your SMS or email, or otherwise you enter it manually.
But also when it comes to managing the keys and syncing across devices it’s also the servers.
Kicking them out of the system makes your messages less secure, not more secure.
Oh, man.
Thankfully I haven't had an undelivered text in over a decade.
But back in the early-to-mid 2000s, it was maybe a 5% failure rate in the country I was living in then? With no indication.
And yes it really did cause arguments with romantic partners. There were times I had to pull out my phone and prove I'd asked/invited/told them whatever. But it's not like that ever really fixes the situation either.
But if you asked anyone to confirm they'd gotten your message you seemed paranoid or needy.
You just couldn't win. So much friction.
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.
I really don't think you can assume this. For example, a long time ago in computer years, Apple rolled out "Yellow Box for Windows" which was a way to get NeXTStep apps running on Windows http://www.shawcomputing.net/resources/apple/os_pictures/ybn... as part of Rhapsody Developer Release 2 (this was a prerelease OS X)... and then promptly ditched it.
Being able to develop once and then deploy to both OS X and Windows sounds great to developers, but think about this: If you had access to Mac apps from a Windows machine, then why would you buy a Mac, when Apple is competing on quality and not price? It'd be a win for app developers but a big "lose" for Apple.
So why would Apple have ever built a way to cast to Google Cast if they already had an AppleTV product that wasn't competing on price with Google Cast? (AppleTV's are great, btw)
Clearly, all of this is bad for users across the board. Apple is by far the most aggressive when it comes to this kind of anticompetitive bundling. You can't just say "of course they want to be anticompetitive, that's just business!". You're supposed to not let them pull this shit.
Because it makes iPhone and Mac users their (digital) life better?
Let me give you a different example: you visit a hotel. They have Cast-enabled TV’s, but those do not support AirPlay. Anyone with an iPhone or Mac is SoL. It literally goes against Apple’s old “It Just Works” adage, when they probably would have looked at Cast as just another protocol to support. The only reason to do that is if you think the net decrease in usability will increase the company’s profitability via lock-in.
To be clear, it is not just Apple doing this. A different vector is a product like YouTube: often when I’m scrolling the comments after a video ends, an ad will play that extends down vertically, making me tap it. If I swipe it away, the entire screen shifts again, but now there is an ad strip at the bottom, that I accidentally tap again, taking me out of the app. This is obviously horrid UX, but Google doesn’t care because the only thing Google wants from you is eyes on ads. They don’t have to deliver a good product (users first), they just have to make the product barely not-shitty-enough that you won’t leave.
A great counter-example is 1Password: they support numerous ways to export their own or import other services their vaults. If you have a running subscription with a competitor, they will credit you the remainder of your bill if you switch. If you asks customer support for help if you are switching to, say, Bitwarden, they’ll help you. They believe in their product and that you’ll either come back or stick with them because it is the best on the market. Which frankly, for now, it is. Due to user-first perspective :)
They have never cared about this.
A prime example is price. Jobs’ was asked why they didn’t make a competing MacBook at the $600 Windows laptop price point (I think this was the mid 2000s?). He said that it might have sold really well but that they would have to severely degrade the user experience to hit that price point, and he refused to do that because he wanted to make great devices.
Back in those days you could plug any non-exotic device into a Mac, and it would mostly just work instantly, which was paradise compared to XP and 7’s driver and .dll hell. These days, I’d expect Apple to do stuff like patch the AirPods Max firmware to break the Android apps that enable all the cool non-basic features.
https://andymatuschak.org/files/papers/Apple%20Human%20Inter...
When AirPlay launched in 2010, Google Cast didn’t exist. EDIT: TV manufacturers only started adding AirPlay (now “AirPlay 2”) in 2019. Still, I think it’s reasonable to expect a modern device, without extra hardware, to support AirPlay.
Much more tangential but AirPlay (even AirPlay 2) is hot garbage for music due to the gigantic audio buffers. When I press “play/pause/next”, I want my command to process immediately, not after 2-3 seconds.
https://fsf.org
https://gnu.org
libre software is not going to stop that.
I run Trisquel GNU/Linux-libre on my laptop. It is totally possible to use 100% free/libre software. I use it for professional work. If GNU/Linux ain't your gig, lots of people also run OpenBSD.
The open cast protocol (miracast?) was lacking in some ways or other and therefore they chose to make something that did what they wanted and also could guarantee it would still be working down the road (AirPlay)
What they should have done is open up AirPlay and perhaps turn it into the next standard that everyone expects to be able to use.
They have added it though, in Apple Music on Android, so they clearly already have both a license and a developed Cast “app” that gets loaded onto the Chromecast.
> The open cast protocol (miracast?)
It was DIAL. Why it died is anyone’s guess. Perhaps Google wanted more control, and Netflix et al didn’t feel like carrying the development burden.
My Hyatt hotel supports Chromecast to the TVs in the rooms in the hotel. At no time did I have to give permission to Google to use it from my iPhone
Or are you meaning some other permission?
airplay works fine on my roku, OTOH my chromecast is becoming useless because i don't use chrome as a browser.
I'm a U.S. iPhone user on many "green bubble" (standards-based) group chats, as are my wife and kids. I don't think we're outliers in this respect. If you're getting pushback on this, consider that this may say more about your social circle.
Maybe, just maybe, technology should serve the user by enabling people to socialize with whom they wish, rather than the opposite.
So for example, we have Ecosystem A and Ecosystem B, each led by a company. Their users (note: NOT those companies) want an enhanced messaging standard between them. Who should be in charge of it? One of those two, or someone else? WHY would either company be incentivized to do so, since it hypothetically facilitates losing users to the other ecosystem? WHY would a third party come up with the best possible standard between these two (as well as maintaining it!) that they wouldn't then be compensated for?
So when you say "technology should serve the user", who or what "should" do this, and why "should" they do it? For free? You have to find or build the right incentives if you want something to be.
This is the same reason we are still grappling with a single medical records standard/exchange format. No one wants anyone else to be in charge of it, and yet someone must be, otherwise you have dilution of responsibility and perverse incentives.
This is the easiest one to solve, because it's not that expensive to make a decent messaging standard (Open Whisper Systems was very small, for example; solitary individuals have done it in other cases). It's not a matter of getting someone to do the work.
It's that messaging systems have a network effect, so when one comes as the default on a device with a billion users, it has a big network regardless of whether or not a competing protocol might be just as good. And then they want to lock competitors out of that network effect, which is an antitrust issue, and so here we are.
My dad does this to me all the time. For those that don't know, the videos we receive are 320x240p. Talk about potato... No matter how many times I tell him, he still does it. It's quite deliberate from Apple. For example, I have a video that I received which is 0.1MP (262kb) but an image I received that is 1536x2048 or 3.1MP (548kb). Why are my images double the size of the videos? I find it hard to buy an argument about bandwidth when doubling the video size would make it substantially more visible (though still quite annoying). I can't think of how this is anything but deliberate. Even if it isn't, clearly it's going to be taken that way.
So you send links, or use use alternatives like Discord, Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.
It can’t be the multi-trillion-dollar company that’s terrible, it must always be the people in your life.
These systems could work together if Apple wanted them to. Google / Android isn't the part that is preventing interoperability. So ultimately it really is an iPhone being bad problem. They've marketed the problem well to make it seem like it is the other way around in order to make iPhones more desirable.
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.)
Well, that's the drawback of having an Android I guess, at least in those spaces (I also inhabit one). The evidence of the disjoint relationship between a product space that competes on price and one that competes on quality. /satirical-elitist-shrug-with-smirk
But seriously, didn't Google try at least 10 different ways to roll out their own iMessage competitor and SMS eclipser, and failed every time? This is not all Apple's fault, here.
> Even my parents have issues and frequently try to send me large videos
Yeah, my S.O.'s parents kept trying to send videos from their Androids to our iPhones and they come in as tiny thumbails. I FINALLY got them onto a Whatsapp group text to exchange videos and photos over, although they still miss out on LivePhotos, which is a favorite Apple feature of mine.
It's not just a protocol. It's a very expensive service platform that Apple runs as a service to its users. Apple is simply not obligated to let Android users use that platform and derive all its benefits for free. It's not.
This isn't anticompetitive; it's an example of Apple being simply better at competing in this particular arena.
The fact that your social circle has certain dynamics doesn't change this at all, of course.
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.
"discord is intentionally causing problems by blocking interoperability with third-party clients and using that to funnel sales via peer-pressure from his peer group"
why does discord have to allow third parties to run off their infrastructure and development spends? is discord a gatekeeper in this context? certainly it would hurt me socially to not be able to access the space where all my friends hang out, and they monetize that further by forcing me into shitty pay-by-month upgrades that are only possible via their gatekeeping (otherwise I'd trivially be able to add animated emojis back etc).
or how about slack?
email is another great example... if you figure out how to spoof some headers and trick gmail into thinking you are another gmail SMTP relay, do you have the right to build a commercial service on the ability to send email through gmail's infrastructure, and gmail is legally prohibited from closing the open relay ever again? And bear in mind that google is DEFINITELY a gatekeeper in all senses of the word - it is very hard to convince gmail and outlook to take your emails from a self-hosted server.
XMPP allowed interoperability, but it was never a legal requirement. And if you do create this legal requirement, you turn it into an email-like situation where there are certainly parties who would love to use that relay to worsen your customers' quality-of-life.
You have exactly two relevant phone infrastructures in the Western World. One is pretty open and the other is locked. Usually it doesn't cause many problems besides envy. People can still talk with each other. It works quite well all over the planet because of third party commutation software like Whatsapp, Facebook, etc.
However, on the locked ones biggest market there is a special situation where the fact that third party software is not that popular. This situation grew out of historical reasons and has created a toxic problem which divides the whole country almost in half. None of your examples above is so widespread and creates such a huge divide.
So what is it you can do about it as a company? You could allow for interoperability within the established communication methods your customers use. Or you could just ignore the problem and be happy about all those customers who have to buy your expensive devices and services only because they don't want to be outcasts in their class, in dating, at work, etc.
The decision Apple made here shows their attitude towards their customers and their potential customers. An attitude towards the society at large, actually. Looking at it from outside the US-bubble it's quite shocking and pretty much disgusting. I wonder how people working there are not ashamed of themselves for keeping such a problem up.
I see this claim made often, but I have yet to see anything substantial that serves as evidence that Apple is intentionally trying to get customers to exert peer pressure or even anything that hints that they’re relying on said peer pressure to generate sales, regardless of if they drive customers to exert the peer pressure.
I’ve read more pages of internal communications published through discovery than I care to admit, but I have yet to find anything substantiating this claim.
As it stands now, this anti-social behavior seems wholly driven by the culture of people in general, or more so the culture in the US if we’re being specific.
Would you happen to have anything concrete to support your assertion?
Like what? What do you need here, additional to what is already happening? A letter signed by the CEO? Seriously? The evidence is right before us all. It is happening. People are being bullied because of this. Why should they have to write it down? For people to leak and make them liable?
They do it this way and it works automatically. At least in the US.
> As it stands now, this anti-social behavior seems wholly driven by the culture of people in general, or more so the culture in the US if we’re being specific.
Yeah, it is easy to blame it on the people. The fact remains that they could do something about it, and pretty easy. They don't and there is no sane reason to not do it. Meanwhile, the pressure for Android users to switch remains and the whole practice is even being promoted and defended by their own customers for them. Here you go with your anti-social Win-win.
You assert that Apple has a specific intent and goal concerning bullying; “what is already happening” proves very little in that regard.
Case in point, my intent and goal is for you to produce something that supports your assertion so I can finally assess if your assertion, and others similar to it, have any merit.
But “what is [actually] happening” is you trying to flip it on me by trying to make your lack of supporting evidence my problem, only to continue and essentially claim that no further evidence is necessary because “it’s happening.”
Clearly, my intent and goal have little to do with the actual outcome.
Just as it is clear to me that you don’t have anything substantial to support your assertion that Apple is intentionally driving their users into anti-social behavior, which ultimately is your problem because you’re the one making the assertion.
> Yeah, it is easy to blame it on the people.
Yes, of course, it’s easy to blame it on the people that do the actual bullying. Because they’re the ones that do the actual bullying. I fail to see how this is controversial in the slightest.
I generally don’t subscribe to the “people’s own responsibility” doctrine when we're dealing with things where companies go out of their way to manipulate and influence consumers by preying on human weaknesses and tempting them, employing an army of psychologists to target these weaknesses, etc.
Things we see with loot boxes, gambling ads, crypto, micro-transaction games, and what we saw in cigarette ads.
However, none of that seems applicable here. To my knowledge iMessage isn’t even actively advertised, much less in a way that it tries to manipulate consumers with dopamine injections or representations of a lifestyle that is out of reach, even less so in a way that would encourage dickish behavior.
So yes, I blame it on the people who actually act this way without any stimulus that fosters that behavior.
> The fact remains that they could do something about it, and pretty easy. They don't and there is no sane reason to not do it.
The only thing they could do to “do something about it” is to give away their IP or lessen the value of their IP. Those are pretty sane reasons not to do it. Other than that, they have no moral obligation to do so, in my opinion.
The fact that they don’t choose to do that doesn’t equate to them condoning such behavior, much less intentionally driving said behavior.
Others can also do something about it, and it would be without much effort. People could, for example, choose to be less shitty without any sane reason not to be shitty, or people could address people that act shitty.
This notion that someone can do something about something and therefore has a moral obligation and the moral liability to do something is quite a slippery slope, one that I’m not even opposed to on principle because many people are in ridiculously inhumane conditions just in the US alone.
Conditions that are much worse than being bullied for not having a blue bubble, conditions we all collectively have created and benefit from, and conditions that could all be solved tomorrow if we all decided we could do something about it with little to no effort on individuals in this collective.
But alas, we have decided that it’s more important for small groups of people to thrive and, with it, corporations such as Apple. As such, a corporation’s IP is theirs to use as they see fit, so under the morals we have chosen to live by, they don’t have a moral obligation to “do something.”
> Meanwhile, the pressure for Android users to switch remains and the whole practice is even being promoted and defended by their own customers for them.
Whic...
I assert that a company like Apple would have no problem with interoperability of their messenger. They wouldn't have a problem releasing an iMessage app for Android. They still don't do it.
I also assert that they profit from the resulting toxic situation, as people are forced to change to their environment if they don't want to be excluded in their social circles.
Ergo: it must be intended.
> But “what is [actually] happening” is you trying to flip it on me by trying to make your lack of supporting evidence my problem, only to continue and essentially claim that no further evidence is necessary because “it’s happening.”
I questioned the naive presentation of your request. You can't be serious, requesting from me (or anybody) some kind of written statement which would write down what is actually happening. Who would do that? For what reason? Who is this statement supposed to serve internally if the policy to prevent interoperability suffices? So why should there be anything?
I also don't see how this is even relevant because it is happening. We're faced with the facts I've written above. It is their day-to-day business to keep up this toxic situation for no other reason.
Besides that, there is of course the Epic lawsuit: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-an...
> Yes, of course, it’s easy to blame it on the people that do the actual bullying.
If you create an environment where this bullying develops, you are to blame first.
And it's not like this is something users came up. It is a pain in the ass for both sides affected. But it is not because of what those users do. It is because the communication protocol makes it so.
> To my knowledge iMessage isn’t even actively advertised
Why would they have to? It's a native communication environment.
> The only thing they could do to “do something about it” is to give away their IP or lessen the value of their IP. Those are pretty sane reasons not to do it.
They don't have to give up anything. They could have made an iMessage app for Android. Apple users would still use it as it's the native tool to communicate on their devices. People know it and obviously are even now too lazy to switch to much better, safer, etc. tools. This is a common trope in software. The only thing they'd actually lose is the pressure on Android users. This is of course also "sane" if you don't care about the toxicity you create and only care about profits. Which is what I said they do.
> Others can also do something about it, and it would be without much effort.
I assume you didn't follow the Beeper story: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-iphone-b...
> This notion that someone can do something about something and therefore has a moral obligation and the moral liability to do something is quite a slippery slope, one that I’m not even opposed to on principle because many people are in ridiculously inhumane conditions just in the US alone.
What's wrong about a "slippery slope" to better moral standards?
> Conditions that are much worse than being bullied for not having a blue bubble, conditions we all collectively have created and benefit from, and conditions that could all be solved tomorrow if we all decided we could do something about it with little to no effort on individuals in this collective.
The whole business model plays upon a systematic problem wit...
Should Facebook be forced to let people on Twitter message them and vice versa?
I think the only reason anyone cares is because it’s folded into the default SMS app. If it were separate like Google Meets/Allo/whatever they’re doing now nobody would care, even if it wasn’t available on iOS.
I'll second this complaint. Though personally I try to use Signal with my friends and this led to the strategy of "it's like iMessage, but cross platform" for those who aren't security conscious. Sure, not exactly, but close enough. There's a lot I like about Apple, but the closed walls are a major hindrance. I really wish companies would see the value of open source or at least open protocols. I mean hasn't our entire technological framework essentially been built due to source code being available? Certainly we can point to the internet, android, any programming language, linux, and many other common systems that we use daily (knowingly or unknowingly). I mean it's like turning down free work... Why?
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)
So I guess I should be clear, I'm thinking source available. I know Open Source is a loaded word.
But doesn't this kinda support my thinking? They accelerated by using the open tools and then slowed once they had a more mature product? I mean we've seen huge advancements in LLaMA and StableDiffusion because of their open source-ness. One could argue that GPT is also getting major benefits from this, but I think also partially because it's the most common LLM to perform analysis on (which is a bit weird that researchers do this on a closed source/data model...)
I definitely get the argument around your competitor being able to snag your work, but if we're talking about source available then that becomes a legal matter. And truth be told, we could say the same about a lot of hardware. I mean anything hardware you can visibly inspect.
I definitely don't know how that all plays out in literal numbers and I do wonder if there is some counterfactual data out there. I'm just highly suspicious that it isn't as big of a cost as many assume it is. Even software you can do a really good job at cloning if you have access to it (even if completely black box). There's definitely costs, my question is just how much this compares to benefits. And is source available cost being confused with first mover cost? Because that has the same implication as you note in your conclusion.
If a sender starts a new conversation based on your name and they happen to have your email stored in your contact card as well, and the email is registered with iMessage, it’ll favor iMessage via email over SMS the first time, unless your number is specifically chosen[0] and then it’ll remember that preference for subsequent times
This doesn’t happen when there’s already a conversation going based on your phone number in the contact card, even if that phone number used to be registered with iMessage (in that case it’ll switch to SMS) or if the phone number is typed in manually or the sender searches you with the phone number.
You can of course, as recipient, also select with which email addresses and phone numbers would want to be reachable via iMessage.
To me this seems like good idea reservation and generally desired behavior because it prioritizes a richer messaging experience over one that is basic and you l, by virtue of enabling receipt of iMessages via email, essentially advertise that you’re able and willing to receive iMessages.
0: https://ibb.co/VV9hvxF
https://www.alphaquery.com/stock/AAPL/volatility-option-stat...
https://marketchameleon.com/Overview/AAPL/VolatilitySkew/
Do you mean worse?
(I would love to firewall my phone - especially against apple)
I'm knee-deep in Apple's ecosystem, because I like all of their other products, but I can't use iMessage because I prefer to use a PC. This has been a thorn in my side for years.
There can be only one reason that iMessage is available on Apple devices exclusively and it's at least antitrust adjacent. For this alone, I hope they get fined a gigantic amount of money.
I'm sorry, but this sounds pretty obnoxious as presented. You made your friends adopt a new messaging service because you don't want to check your phone?
Almost everyone I know (less than 30 and outside of tech, in the south Florida area to be specific) uses an iPhone, specifically for iMessage. If you don't have an iPhone, people will avoid talking to you over text. Your social standing will also take a hit.
While I personally think it would be cool, since it would basically open the door to buying an Android phone Apple is not going to let it happen voluntarily.
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.
I can wrap my head around the usability and interoperability arguments but this idea that "social standing" is contingent on iOS vs Android just seems alien to me.
Are there really people that adjust their social circles based on what type of phone someone is using?
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.
Idc about green bubbles or cloud access/being integrated with the Apple ecosystem, but the core functionality should be decent. They should not be using outdated standards for non-Apple messages, which sure seems like a ploy to keep people away from Android.
Apple is under no obligation to make sure that the Apple watch works well with an android phone. Unless they have specific evidence that Apple is doing something to explicitly block non-iOS devices, this is weak.
Let's check in with Apple's marketing department[0]
> Apple Watch can do what your other devices can’t because it’s on your wrist. When you wear it, you get a fitness partner that measures all the ways you move, meaningful health insights, innovative safety features, and a connection to the people you care about most.
So how many of those things work without a paired iPhone?
Even Family Setup (which requires at least one family member to own an iPhone) doesn't give the watch full functionality.
> Not all features will be available if the Apple Watch is set up through Family Setup
From a third party[1]
> In short, anyone can wear an Apple Watch, including Android phone users. However, the reality is that anyone looking to have a proper smartwatch experience should stay within their own OS lanes. Android users should use Wear OS or third-party platform watches, iPhone users should use Apple Watches, and that's what it all really boils down to.
[0] https://www.apple.com/watch/why-apple-watch/
[1] https://screenrant.com/apple-watch-android-phone-pairing-com...
"Users of Garmin devices have complained in Apple’s support forums about being unable to use their watches to reply to certain text messages from their iPhones or tweak the notifications they receive from the iPhone that they have connected to their watch."
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.
An apple watch is allowed to do it.
Look at it from an anti-trust standpoint, in favor of the consumer, not a technical standpoint.
"They have also looked at how the Apple Watch works better alongside the iPhone than other competing smartwatches."
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/05/technology/antitrust-appl...
At this point, let’s get it over with.
Let the DOJ sue them with 1200 pages of alleged violations, everything they could possibly think of and then some, and have the courts, all the way up to the SCOTUS, decide once and for all if Apple is violating antitrust laws and what, if anything, needs to be done to remedy it.
They could pull Apple apart into 20 companies for all I care. Let’s just get it over with so we know, once and for all if Apple was naughty in the eyes of the law or not.
But somehow, I suspect we will never get this sweet release because the next (and already held) debate will then be about how there needs to be new legislation to make them naughty in the eyes of the law, even though there’s no constitutional way of doing so in such a way that it would only affect Apple and not the latest hot startup on Silicon Valley.