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Comment by madeofpalk

2 years ago

I believe Apple needs more regulatory action taken against it for abusing it's dominant position. But apart from cloud streaming apps (which they've resolved recently by allowing them), I find these claims to be pretty weak and not significantly market-affecting.

I strongly believe Apple is under no obligation to make iMessage cross-platform. It's their service they invented, and they get to run it how they chose. SMS is the interoperable standard between different platforms, and RCS is the new standard which they've comitted to supporting.

I would much rather action taken on Apple for the anti-steering provisions restricting competition for payments. I think this has had a much bigger market impact than limitations on game streaming or smart watches.

31 comments

madeofpalk

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rezonant  2 years ago

As sibling points out and I have argued strongly for in past discussions here, at issue is Apple's control of texting: That is, the ability for a phone to message any other phone with a text message without requiring the other participant to use a custom app. Only iMessage can do this on the iPhone.

In the consumer's eye, all phones can text, so it is a universal way to reach someone who has a phone number. It removes the complexity of having to coordinate ahead of time with a contact about what messaging service they both have. It's why texting is so popular in the US (along with historical actions by US carriers to make texting extremely cheap and ultimately free)

Once they had this control, they then used it to make texting better only when the conversation participants each had iPhones, which produced a network effect where friends would be incentivized to pressure their contacts to also use iPhones. Apple leveraged convenience, features and security to make this happen.

I don't anticipate Apple's upcoming RCS support to materially change this. If we're lucky, we'll get higher quality pictures out of it, but it's possible to support RCS while not supporting a lot of the features that make RCS better than SMS, such as read receipts, replies, typing indicators, and yes, encryption. Encryption is not a standard part of RCS yet, but it could be made so by Apple forcing Google to standardize their encryption and then implementing it. But it's not in Apple's interest given the above to bother. More likely they will do as their initial complaint/announcement about RCS hinted at: Not even engage on encryption because it's "not part of the spec", leaving iPhone/Android messaging unencrypted.

Google is not blameless here, it's insane that they haven't worked themselves to standardize encryption.

  • nerdix  2 years ago

    When you put it that way, it certainly sounds a lot like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. And I've never seen any tech oriented person who is familiar with EEE argue that it is a legitimate business strategy that should be permitted except in this case.

miloignis  2 years ago

That's one of the things I like about this complaint - it points out that they don't allow any other apps to support SMS, so only iMessage has the ability to message anyone with just a phone number, seamlessly upgrading if the other party has iMessage and using SMS otherwise.

It's not solely about iMessage not being open, it's about reserving key features for only iMessage to give it a significant advantage. (Also mentioned are other key bits like running in the background, etc)

amelius  2 years ago

> I strongly believe Apple is under no obligation to make iMessage cross-platform. It's their service they invented, and they get to run it how they chose.

So if it were up to you all telecom operators would be on separate networks, because you can always use smoke signals to get your message across?

(I'm with you for niche applications where the number of users is small. But we're talking mainstream communication here.)

  • madeofpalk  2 years ago

    I think that telecom operators are free to offer phones that don’t send SMS, and see how many customers that gets them.

    What i meant to say in my original comment - it’s not Apple’s fault SMS sucks and people don’t want to use it.

    • room500  2 years ago

      But it is apples fault that they let the alternatives stagnate and refuse (until recently) things like RCS that would make SMS suck less.

      It is clear that Apple considers iMessage a significant network effect and is not interested in having feature parity between iOS and non-iOS

    • Defletter  2 years ago

      This is exactly my thinking. I can fully understand why green bubbles are annoying, why not being able to send multimedia is annoying, why it all being unencrypted is incredibly unsafe... but why is this Apple's fault? Why is the complaint that Apple is stifling innovation and not that phone carriers are refusing to innovate and or provide these services at a reasonable cost? Why is Apple effectively being required to act as a phone carrier?

WheatMillington  2 years ago

>It's their service they invented, and they get to run it how they chose.

That argument only works until there is market dominance, which is the point of anti-trust regulations.

Cheer2171  2 years ago

> It's their service they invented, and they get to run it how they chose.

So was the Bell telephone network.

nickpsecurity  2 years ago

My biggest problem is how hard it is to get my data out of apps in usable formats, move it between apps, or put in custom apps. My iPhone would be great if I could use my own data and apps as easily (and freely) as my old Samsung Galaxy.

  • EasyMark  2 years ago

    It's hard to use iphone as a general purpose computing device when they make it hard to share between apps. I know it's part of apple's "security model" but it can also be interpreted as killing competition between 3rd party apps and apple apps

    • nickpsecurity  2 years ago

      They’ve long been anti-competitive against alternatives like Hackintosh’s or file lawsuits over interface similarities. That aggressive suppression of competing suppliers is partly how they got tens of billions of dollars. They’re not doing it for security.

      One test, though, would be to look at customizability of Mac OS vs iOS. They claim to be securing both. Can we run custom apps easily on Mac OS, script it, get full access to our files, etc? If so, why would they restrict the iPhones from doing those things, but leave Macs wide open, if it was merely a security issue?

      Another example might be remote, access tools. Aka remote control of iPhones. If App Store has any, then they’d put iPhones at much higher risk than users running their own code on their own devices. Even with a review given that a RAT might have a zero day that gives attackers full control. If they restrict user freedom, but allow RAT’s, that would be another hint that they restrict user freedom for anti-competitive reasons.

      I don’t have Mac OS, though. It might be as locked down as the iPhone. That would make my argument useless.

  • GnarfGnarf  2 years ago

    You can download all your data from the Apple Website. Heartbeat, GPS etc. are plainly available. I wrote an app that converts Lat/lon to distance traveled.

EasyMark  2 years ago

I think they are hitting apple pretty broadly on all things you're mentioning. I don't think everyone will agree on all of them but many will agree on various ones and it's left up to courts after that.

diffeomorphism  2 years ago

> It's their service they invented, and they get to run it how they chose.

What does that have to do with anything? They have a dominant market position and they abuse it. Different position, different rules.

carlosjobim  2 years ago

Where does that "dominant position" idea come from, that you and others are claiming in this thread? Apple is nowhere near having a dominant position in any of the markest where they compete, such as cell phones or computers.