But how is this the result of Apple engaging in anti-competitive practices? 75% of people choosing your product can not be grounds to breakup a company and the fact that it looks different for other age groups is just further evidence that Apple is engaging in fair competition.
Blocking iMessage on non Apple devices and generally making Apple stuff only work with other Apple stuff, not to mention their 30% fees on their app store while also not allowing other app stores, are all anticompetitive practices, which the EU is well regulating soon.
iMessage has always worked with any device that supports SMS.
Google, on the other hand, actively blocked Windows Phone from having access to Youtube. Even when Microsoft paid to write a Youtube app themselves, Google blocked it.
Google did the same thing and blocked Youtube on Amazon's Echo Show.
> iMessage has always worked with any device that supports SMS
youtube has always worked in a web browser.
Meanwhile I'm laughing about how fast Apple would come down on Google if they made their own Android chat that tapped into iMessage and internet commentators tried to justify it by "even when Google paid to write an iMessage app themselves, Apple blocked it"
Google has used it's internet video monopoly as a weapon against Microsoft's competing smart phone platform AND Amazon's competing smart assistant platform.
Apple doesn't have a monopoly position to abuse in when it comes to texting.
Google, on the other hand, does nave a monopoly position on internet video, and a history of using that monopoly as a weapon against competing platforms.
Why the whataboutism? They both have flaws. By iMessage blocking, you surely knew that I didn't mean just interoperability via SMS. If Apple adopted RCS or some other such standard, Android users and iPhone users could talk without having a degraded experience on either side. Apple executives literally admitted that not expanding iMessage ensured that people would continue to buy iPhones:
> app.)...In the absence of a strategy to become the primary messaging service for [the] bulk of cell phone users, I am concerned [that] iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.
> By iMessage blocking, you surely knew that I didn't mean just interoperability via SMS
It's not blocking at all, when you explicitly support interoperation.
The only example that can obviously be called "blocking" is when Google used it's internet video monopoly as a weapon against Microsoft's competing smart phone platform.
Refusing to allow anyone to produce a Youtube app for Windows Phone isn't even in the same zip code as Google not writing a Youtube app themselves.
Since it seems like you are not aware, you should know that the functionality available for iMessage is different on other platforms.
That may be causing your confusing here. You weren't aware of the functionality difference that Apple prevents other platforms from using with their design choices.
I'd recommend that you research which functionality is prevented on other platforms, since you didn't seem to know about it.
Are we both talking about a text messaging app that can send text messages to any device that supports the universal SMS standard?
That's not blocking.
A good example of blocking is not allowing any developers on a competing smart phone platform to write an app that allows users to access your monopoly internet video platform.
Apple is pretty clearly blocking Google (or any other Android app developer) from implementing this functionality and greatly benefits from it. Particularly relevant for the age demographic this thread originally referenced.
Correct, the issue is that Apple doesn't support interoperability with iMessage or a modern standard like RCS. The EU is concerned enough to address this with a regulatory apparatus that the US lacks.
> Apple doesn't support interoperability with iMessage or a modern standard like RCS.
Sorry, but Google's proprietary closed source fork of RCS is not any kind of "standard".
> Google's version of RCS—the one promoted on the website with Google-exclusive features like optional encryption—is definitely proprietary, by the way. If this is supposed to be a standard, there's no way for a third-party to use Google's RCS APIs right now. Some messaging apps, like Beeper, have asked Google about integrating RCS and were told there's no public RCS API and no plans to build one.
Then Apple should allow interoperability with the iMessage protocol. They maintain control without the anti-competitive side effects. They are also free to use any variant of RCS that isn't controlled by Google.
This is very amusing given that Google wants to charge people to have RCS that can interoperate with their proprietary closed source implementation of RCS.
> If you want to implement RCS, you'll need to run the messages through some kind of service, and who provides that server? It will probably be Google. Google bought Jibe, the leading RCS server provider, in 2015. Today it has a whole sales pitch about how Google Jibe can "help carriers quickly scale RCS services, iterate in short cycles, and benefit from improvements immediately." So the pitch for Apple to adopt RCS isn't just this public-good nonsense about making texts with Android users better; it's also about running Apple's messages through Google servers. Google profits in both server fees and data acquisition.
Well, EU courts have recently ruled against Google's entire surveillance capitalism business model unless they convince users to opt in to ad tracking explicitly.
I don't see how that would hold up in a court. They didn't adopt RCS and I can still have group chats by SMS. They didn't adopt USB Micro and I can still charge my phone with the cable that came in the box.
