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Comment by dhruvdh | Hacker News Reader

The intention behind not letting it work for their competitors is immoral and potentially illegal. They want to do it to prevent their consumers to buy their competitors products for their family, even if their competitors product are better; just because they already have a device in the Apple ecosystem.

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They are not "preventing" anyone from doing anything, they are simply, until now, refraining from improving their competitors devices by releasing their software for it.

Of course they prefer people to buy iPhones for their kids, there is nothing wrong with that, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with not actively working to make the experience of mixed Android-iPhone families slightly better.

There are literally dozens of cross platform messaging and video calling apps. Banning these would have been wrong, and possibly illegal, but they are not doing that.

The email we are discussing specifically says they want to prevent customers from buying their competitors products for their friends and family.

I don't know if they use the word "prevent" or not, but we both know that they are not in fact trying to literally "prevent" anyone from buying an Android phone. They just don't want to give them some of the benefits of iOS if they do so. No reasonable person would call that "prevent".

They are specifically and intentionally limiting the ways in which their customer can use their devices unless they buy more. Is that simple enough to understand?

No they don’t, they “limit” the way people can use Android devices.

Their customers cannot use their devices to iMessage their friends or family on Android.

It is immoral and illegal that McDonalds won't serve me a Chik-Fil-A sandwich.

This is such a great rubric!

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