This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I don’t get it. iMessage is Apple’s service. Why are they obliged to open it up for everyone to use? Would it be nice? Yes, of course. Should Apple be legally required to open up access to their service?
The US Federal Trade Commission puts it this way:
a firm with market power cannot act to maintain or acquire a dominant position by excluding competitors or preventing new entry
It further explains that "market power" means:
the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors
Emphasis added. What the government might argue in this case is that Apple has market power in the online message space because it preloads its own messaging app on its smartphones, which I believe enjoy a majority market share in the USA. One remedy the government could seek is requiring Apple to allow third parties to develop clients for its messaging service.
Yes, they should be legally required to open up access to their service. No more walled gardens that hold a large number of users hostage.
I think the problem is that it's unnecessarily hardware locked. They shouldn't have to "open it up" insofar as anyone can access it from whatever app like beeper is doing. But it's only fair that they support other operating systems. They can still control it or even charge a fee to access it from other OSes.
I wish this kind of thing was more spotlighted when Palm and Windows Phone developers were trying to use Google API’s to make apps for their OS’s and got shut down at every turn, eventually killing off the Palm and WP because of device lock-in on apps.
I still miss what Palm could have been before Google bent them over a barrel with their massively anti-competitive bs.
Palm terrified them.
Palm apps were tiny, took trivial resources, and could provide a lot of what was done with new apps on Android. Dictionaries, calculators, games (I played monopoly on a Treo, it looked great). I watched Mp4 movies on a Treo.
Imagine Android with a Palm Subsystem so all those old Palm apps could run. It would've majorly slowed Android app adoption, perhaps even giving enough support to allow PalmOS architecture to develop into a competitor to Android.
If they're going to default message service to it then yes.
At the root of this issue is that Google never built a messaging service that could survive Google's management shuffle. I understand people want Apple to bend the knee, but this is not their problem. It's perfectly fine for them to intercede Beeper's reverse engineering.
If you're an Android user and you need a messaging app, Signal is 100% open source, secure, and it works on iOS too, so tell your friends!
And you assume your apple-using friends will listen to you? They are really a part of the problem at least. Google would need to create an app they would want to install by themselves, and this is not exactly easy, if possible at all. Google users are mostly fine with having many apps for communication, apple users are mostly not.
I am fully in the Apple ecosystem, including my phone, work laptop, personal laptop, and an Apple watch. I pretty much exclusively use telegram, and sometimes Discord, not iMessage— and that’s not a niche or unpopular opinion in my experience either. This is absolutely because Google can’t stick with one app or product long enough to gain any market share. Each time they have tried, it’s lasted barely a year or so before they killed it.
You being on Lemmy pretty much means you are outside the majority group I'm talking about.
Regardless, my point still stands. The reason folks on Andriod are hopping around between different chat apps every few years is because Google refuses to create a robust chat app, and commit to it. Apple has power in this space because Google has refused to seriously, honestly try. If Google had a GOOD chat app, and a track record to prove it’s going to stick around, Apple would be much more open to integrating with another ecosystem, because it would be beneficial for them to do so.
I disagree. Apple with its iMessage is not a great example of how things should work. If someone thinks Google could theoretically have success in something like that then I say they don't understand the environment non-apple users are living in. The market is too big and the amount of devs who could provide service with benefits Google would never care about is also big. For example, do you think Google is able to create a great PC application? I think not, and a good PC companion for a chat app is a necessity for many users.
If Google had a GOOD chat app, and a track record to prove it’s going to stick around, Apple would be much more open to integrating with another ecosystem, because it would be beneficial for them to do so.
Not seeing the connection or logic here. Does Apple even have a track record of integrating with other ecosystems?
No chat app needs a desktop App, they need a WEB app. Generally I’m against them, but in this case it makes sense. It makes cross platform trivial, and you would never really need to use a messaging app offline anyway, browser APIs have come a LONG way. It’s also Google’s core competency. So yes, I believe they 100% have the tools if they wanted to try.
As for integration, my point is: why would Apple bother integrating with Google’s suggestions? Google has a track record of abandoning standards and ideas at the drop of a hat. Why on earth would Apple spend time, money, and engineering talent on something that’s likely to become abandonware in 2-4 years time? That’s also assuming it’s a GOOD standard, most of the previous attempts had fatal flaws that made the product dead on arrival. If Google had something compelling, and gave us a reason to believe it would be around for more than a few years, I’m sure adoption would go through the roof, and Apple would want to integrate— Because it would now benefit them, they would be getting something out of the deal; More features, an established user base, etc.
For the web apps, I disagree, as I personally would never consider a desktop electron app a good case. That is one of main reasons I prefer telegram. Good to see Whatsapp also moved this way recently, somewhat. Can't expect google to do the same.
By questioning why would apple do that you are missing that it never really did anything like that, and therefore it's unlikely to be the case anyway. This time, apple didn't really need to spend any resources to allow some integration and it spent them anyway, to try and block so called unauthorized albeit fully capable clients.
It's foolish to assume apple would adopt anything like that instead of coming up with a product of its own. You ask "why apple would adopt some bad protocol" but not "why would apple not let a good protocol used by others". "Why would google not create something that others would adopt" but not "why would apple not create something that others would adopt". This is kind of apple centric, a bias I'd say.
I think this is highly dependent on whether you’re still in high school or not. I recently switched to iPhone within the last couple years and everyone I know has an iPhone but almost none of them use iMessage. Facebook messenger, Telegram, Snapchat, hell even IG DMs. It’s all over the place. This sample of people is like 16-60 year olds too, I can’t even find a pattern.
If there is a pattern, I think it might have something to do with elitism, technology knowledge/ignorance, curiosity etc.
Apples bundling of iMessage is a barrier to entry. See also the findings of fact for Microsoft vs DoJ during the "browser wars"
More like senators are trying to make another show trial of BS they really have no plans to do anything about, and probably shouldn't be getting in the middle of, to make it seem like they are being productive in some way.
Answer me yes or no, If I stand in this room and use my phone can I send a message to your phone? — some senator to Tim Apple.
Tim: “No,.. because I blocked your number.”
Yeah good luck with that. It's very much a dick move but I don't think you'll have success arguing in court that Apple is obligated to open their personal messaging system to competitors.
You'd have much better luck arguing that they need to open up SMS use to other apps, and that that they need to allow sideloading and other app stores. These are the REAL anticompetitive concerns.
Man... Some of the Apple fans in this thread are making me lose faith in humanity. They have no idea how technology works, but they are defending an objectively shitty behavior from the world's most wealthy corporation based on... I don't know... their feelings?
Why would they need to look into Apple's conduct here? Investigate Beeper for CFAA violations since they cracked into Apple's internal APIs and ignored large chunks of their ToS in the process.
Of course Apple is going to shut down unauthorized access to their messaging system. They'd lose all customer trust instantly if they didn't.
ToS have almost universally been shown to be unenforceable in court. I'm also not sure what the hell you mean by customers would lose trust. It's not as if they had access to information they shouldn't, all they did was reverse engineer the protocol. They still had to have an account and a login and they still only had access to the data that account should have. There's nothing to lose trust over the only thing beeper was doing was emulating being an iMessage client
Reverse engineering for interoperability is legal, is it not? This is interoperability.
Australian legal case on Reverse engineering.
https://www.dundaslawyers.com.au/reverse-engineering-of-software-what-are-the-legal-boundaries/
I wonder if this case affects the tug of war Apple has with the EU about opening gatekeeping services up. I wonder if it occurs to some power that be that they might use this case (no matter how stupid it is) to argue Apple is a gatekeeper and has to open up iMessage at some point.
Likely won't happen though since it's not an EU problem really. The thing that's more possible is that California or some other progressive-ish US state follows the EU's lead in busting monopolies as they did with the GDPR, and does something about this in two decades.
