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Comment by SamBorick | Hacker News Reader

For once, I'm proud to be a customer of a company that is willing to stand up against monopolies.

How is iMessage a monopoly? I would like open communications standards as much as the next guy, but next to iMessage there are WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, WeChat, Facebook Messenger etc. etc.

And as far as I know, you have to use the official WhatsApp app to chat on WhatsApp, same for Telegram, etc. etc. So apart from iMessage not being a monopoly, they are also not more restrictive than their competition.

So besides not matching with our "open" ideology for communication, what exactly has Apple done wrong here?

My view is that all of those messaging platforms blocking alternative clients are equally problematic.

I've arrived at this position because I'm not able to use any of those platforms because they don't provide accessibility tools that I need. Beeper does, and most matrix clients do also.

I recognize that the open source "everything should be open" view is not remotely mainstream, but the only way forward is to demand better.

Demand better, unauthorized usage of other peoples systems has long been considered bad practice. We have movies about this stuff.

We have best practices and movies about having too little control of other people's systems too. If law, morality, and debate only required finding whether there was a negative outcome they would be trivial. Unfortunately that doesn't yield practical results. Things need to be weighed and debated on a larger scale.

Throwing in my perspective: I largely agree with the DMA and think while iMessage was found not to be popular enough to qualify in Europe we should have something similar in place in the US and it certainly has enough penetration here to qualify under the same wording. I.e. I think we need something between "free rein" and "monopoly" for very large players which has practical effects on how you're required to interop.

Apples only escape here is that they're only popular in America. Whatsapp, Facebook messenger etc have to open up in the coming months because it's illegal in Europe. Apple should open up too, just like they have to with the App Store (because that is big enough to count as a gatekeeper)

Definitely not true for Telegram, they are completely open about the client side infrastructure: https://telegram.org/apps (and there are dozens of third party clients, some even linked on their official website)

Telegram does have some weird restrictions on third-party clients -- in particular, you'll get blocked if you try to create an account or perform certain other operations using an unofficial client. But generally, yes.

> How is iMessage a monopoly? I would like open communications standards as much as the next guy, but next to iMessage there are WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, WeChat, Facebook Messenger etc. etc.

Because it's the replacement for SMS for Apple phones and doesn't require an account in the same way those other services do. It just uses the Apple account iPhone owners already need to have.

You don't actually need an account to use an iPhone. You can also use SMS without iMessage.

> You don't actually need an account to use an iPhone.

Really? It's never insisted upon for any core service?

> You can also use SMS without iMessage.

But most people don't because it's the default. MS was found to have a monopoly with IE even though there were alternatives.

> But most people don't because it's the default. MS was found to have a monopoly with IE even though there were alternatives.

Windows also was the dominant operating system with a market share in the 90% or higher. iOS isn't even the market leader in the US let alone the world, so can't really be a monopoly now can it?

54% of the US market makes them a pretty clear market leader. https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...

> iOS isn't even the market leader in the US

How can that not be true if most people in the US use an iPhone as their phone?

iPhone and Samsung combined make up almost 80% of smart phone market share in the US. Being as Statistia is a premium thing I can't get accurate numbers, but lets say splitting 50/50 because if it was anything with any serious gap, they wouldn't group them the same. I'd assume they're high 40's and low 50's split between the two, so means iPhone is ~40%, now I ain't no math magician or anything but that leaves ~60% for non-iPhone devices.

In plenty of other threads I've seen people bring up that in the US most phones are iPhones, they are the most popular choice by far. I can't remember where they sourced the info from and not about to research it myself though, at least not at the moment.

So you just believe what others say without actually looking up sources? Got it.

This has Apple at over 50%:

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/us-smartphone-...

This does as well:

https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/us-smartphone-market-share

I would’ve been highly surprised if Samsung and Apple were head-to-head in the USA.

Even at those numbers I wouldn't consider it market dominance. Barely being the leader.

It seems we have very differing definitions of "barely".

Apple has more than double the market share that Samsung does.

The EU considers any party that has more than 40% of market share to be in a dominant market position.

This isn't directly relatable to the USA, of course, but it shows that its far from "clear cut".

Except Samsung isn't the only Android provider and it's not one maker vs the other, it's Android vs iOS.

No buddy. I've looked up and verified sources in the past, just not willing to do so conversing with you in this particular discussion, especially since your reasoning which was just making assumptions was not very convincing. Thankfully others have already provided better sources.

That's a mighty chip on your shoulder, I hope it doesn't slow you down.

No chip on my shoulder, was just calling out your nonsense.

Have a great day.

> Really? It's never insisted upon for any core service?

You might need to qualify "core service" here, but no. Calls, SMS, MMS, internet all work fine without an account. You need an account to download apps from the app store, but that's a different argument. If you wanted to, there are various methods to load apps up without an account too (side loading via Xcode, MDM, etc).

Apparently since Apple made it more convenient to iPhone users to not only message other iPhone users from iMessage, but also receive their text messages in that single app too, it's a monopoly?

That probably didn't help things but I think the root cause comes down to the usual source of monopolies in this case: having vertical integration and a default app. Technically you don't even need an iPhone or SMS service to use iMessage. It is by the most common use case though, and one which increased the amount of integration a bit.

You do not want open communication standards as much as the next guy. You’re advocating for a closed communication standard.

Here's how a monopoly hearing would work against iMessage:

Apple: We do not restrict who you can talk to on iPhone

Prosecutor: but the bubble is green and my friends won't talk to me :(

So if your ISP like AOL makes all of their webpages nice and fast but competitors slower and uglier artificially then is AOL abusing their market position here? We already set the precedent here that this is market abuse. This new case is no different.

Also, Apple knows this. They know they'd lose that's why they are already ahead of this by announcing adoption of RCS in 2024.

How can anyone presume that Apple would stand some sort of ideological ground here? We literally have emails where Apple c-suits say that iMessages mistreating android benefits them and they don't want to fix this. This is such a clear case I don't understand how anyone can defend this.

I don't see how Apple is making Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Signal, slower and uglier.

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