The only thing end users really have control over is their own client. I don't know if they'll succeed in the long run, but I'm really rooting for beeper
Seriously, I'm struggling to imagine that. It suddenly reminds me of when Microsoft had to offer users to choose something other than IE because of anti-monopoly legislation. What you are telling me about iPhones sounds way, way worse than that. After all, it's not like people had to use IE before that, they just didn't know better. There was no network effect and vendor-lock with IE.
Also, what's even so special about this app? I maybe could understand that, if it was unique. But come one, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, plain old SMS after all… And I'm not even talking about older VoIP/messengers (Skype, Jabber), community-centered apps (Discord, Slack, MS Teams) or some fringe messengers nobody uses even though they are clearly better than everything else (Matrix). By no means there is a shortage of messaging apps and protocols…
The problem is this isn't how a non-technical audience views the problem. To them, they get a fully featured chat (rich media, reactions, hi def photos, etc) with most of their social circle. They don't have to install anything, they don't have to sign up for anything, they don't even have to remember different credentials, it just works. Best of all, it just works across their ipads and macs, too.
Sure, it doesn't work for a portion of their friends, but from their perspective, their friends are the weird ones: why wouldn't you switch to a phone that has a "better" experience like this?
> By no means there is a shortage of messaging apps and protocols
This is a bug, not a feature, in a world where there's no common clients that work across all those ecosystems. You go back to 2008ish and you have half a dozen clients that speak Jabber or XMPP. You can sign into GTalk or Facebook Messenger or (gods forbid) Yahoo Messenger all from the same application, and it all mostly works. Now you have a zillion apps and a zillion logins and some of them have nice features and some don't, but without interop, there's an upper limit to the number of chat apps people are willing to maintain to just talk to other people.
Especially when, for Apple users, the best one is already on their device.
How hard it is to install a cross-platform app? Some of these apps also work in a web browser on any OS, which is a nice advantage over iMessage.
The bet goes something like this: Pick a group chat you're in of 10 or more real-life acquaintances who all currently only use a single messaging platform, and convince them all to move the group chat entirely to a different messaging platform, and delete the old group chat.
It doesn't matter which messaging platform you're moving to, any will do, and as you mention there's many to pick from -- some of which are probably better and more feature complete than the one your group chat is currently using.
Not everyone is locked into iMessage.
Of course you’ve hardly been forced into hard labor in the gulag.
Can we use government for something more universal than saving you from your social groups choices?