Imagine a music festival. The only way to get tickets is to buy direct from the venue. For years, people have been cutting holes in the fence and allowing people through. While the venue would do their best to close the bigger holes, they’d leave smaller gaps and turn a blind eye. One year, someone starts to advertise the hole they’ve made and suggest a fee for the hole. The venue now cracks down on all holes. The hole-maker complains about this, publicly, and urges government to step in. This is, in my opinion, analogous to the Beeper situation. They know what they are doing is wrong, but are playing dumb.
Trillian, Pidgin et al. really came about after AIM opened up. Apple actually signed a deal with AOL to allow them to include AIM with iChat.
When someone exchanges phone numbers with a friend, you might not even know what kind of phone they have. Apple phones will send E2E iMessages by default to other Apple phones, and insecure SMS to non-Apple phones, and just shows this to you as "messages." This service only indicates this difference in connection status through a color change
This is a confusing choice, and most users don't even know the technical details, but the end result of it is that they might have extremely mixed information about how secure their text messages are, especially if they don't know in advance what kind of phone the other person has
I think we've seen about 15 years of tech companies trying to assert various kinds of control up to and including ownership over people's social graphs in order to lock them in to various services, and that it's clear some regulation is necessary to prevent this kind of play. Your analogy doesn't make sense because what Apple is trying to put a fence around is not something that it should be legal for them to in the first place
Happy to accept that criticism, it's fair. I'm sorry for pilling on more poor analogies...
> Apple is trying to put a fence around is not something that it should be legal for them to in the first place
Why?
When iMessage was released, it was done so as covenience feature for Apple users on iOS (so iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) to communicate with other Apple users. iMessage on OS X came later.
From the press release (https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2011/10/04Apple-Launches-iPho... WWDC announcement https://youtu.be/MvYEc8bFK-o?t=1709)
iPhone 4S comes with iOS 5, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system, which includes over 200 new features including Notification Center, an innovative way to easily view and manage notifications in one place without interruption and iMessage™, a new messaging service that lets you easily send text messages, photos and videos between all iOS 5 users. iOS 5 will also be available as a free software update for iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS customers allowing them to experience these amazing new features.
Some have used the emails from the Epic trial discovery to illustrate that Apple whant to keep iMessage as "lock-in" for iPhone. I'd suggest that the very fact that they had the discussion shows that the intention was never to be a multiplatform messaging client. They don't compete in that market. I also see anything inherently wrong with having sticky features which go to differentiating a product to make churning, or steering sales decisions a harder choice. Ultimately, there are choices and kids can have Android handsets and communicate securely and for free with multiple differnt apps. Preventing moving numbers and and therefore blocking the ability to change messaging providers is wrong, and Apple were rightly called out on this and have fixed that.
Should a user be able to choose the default messaging app? Yes. I see no rational argument against, except perhaps for security, but that can be dealt with and limiting liability through sensible terms is always an option.
I'm on the fence as to whether they should open it up to Android users and provide a client. I certainly don't think they should be forced or coerced, especially given that the market is so competative oustide of the US (the 3rd largest market globally, but dwarfed by the first two [CN, APAC] and only marginably larger than the next two (West Europe, Latin America), RCS fallback will solve most of the issues mentioned elsewhere. The color of bubble is not one, and nor should it be. It's an American cultural phenomena. There absolutely should be an easy way to defferentiate which service a message originates from. Note: green has never ment Android.
Irrelevant. Apple and iMessage today are not what Apple and iMessage were when iMessage was released. When a company gets large enough, they are held to a different standard. And for good reason. Waiting for Apple to become a monopoly before enforcing competition and consumer protection laws is, for lack of a better word, stupid. Apple is at risk of becoming a monopoly in this space and it needs to be dealt with before it's too late.
> I'd suggest that the very fact that they had the discussion shows that the intention was never to be a multiplatform messaging client. They don't compete in that market. I also see anything inherently wrong with having sticky features which go to differentiating a product to make churning, or steering sales decisions a harder choice.
Market competition isn’t the only issue here. Consumer protection is as well. Apple is doing something called “tying”. iPhones and Macs are the tied product and iMessage is the tying product (iMessage being free is irrelevant, it is nonetheless a product and it is a product that can operate independently from the tied product as has been established by Beeper). Tying needn’t affect all consumers, it just needs to be shown that there is a demand for the tying product sans the tied product. It also doesn’t need to be shown that Apple has the majority of the market. There are examples of illegal tying where the company doing it has a lower, but not insignificant, market share.
Beeper shows that there is a demand for iMessage independent of an iPhone. iMessage is now (what it was is irrelevant) a tying product. There is demand for communicating between users utilizing the iMessage platform without having to use an iPhone or another of Apple's tied products (that some Apple users want iMessage exclusivity is irrelevant).
> Ultimately, there are choices and kids can have Android handsets and communicate securely and for free with multiple differnt apps.
It’s also disingenuous to try to differentiate the market while simultaneously suggesting alternatives that supposedly replace the tying product. Either iMessage is in its own market or it's not. But even that doesn't matter, because it is actually up to the consumer to decide what the market is. The truth is that iMessage is in the same market as other messaging apps, but is being unfairly used as a tying product.
Of course Apple doesn't want iMessage to be cross-platform, but consumers don't want to be forced to choose what they see as an inferior tied product (regardless of Apple fans' beliefs about Apple's superiority, Apple fans don't represent all consumers, only some of them). To keep the market fair for consumers, Apple has to be held to a higher standard, which means unbundling iMessage and making it available on non-Apple devices or opening the protocol to third parties.
