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Comment by commoner | Hacker News Reader

> This would of course be different if Apple prevented you from sending SMS messages via iMessage, or from installing third party messengers. But they don’t do either of these things.

Apple does, in fact, prevent you from installing a third-party messenger on iOS that uses the device's native SMS/MMS capabilities. Apple's own Messages app is the only app that is allowed by Apple to handle SMS/MMS on iOS.

The fact that Apple has made iMessage exclusive to Messages, paired with the Messages app's privileged position as the only SMS/MMS client Apple allows on iOS, gives the Messages app and iMessage an unfair advantage over competing messengers and messaging protocols.

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I have Signal and WhatsApp installed on my phone, along with 3 or 4 other apps. The “competing messaging protocols” aspect seems to be doing just fine.

I don’t think a competing SMS/MMS application would shift the competitive landscape significantly here. If it was, we’d see Beeper making an SMS app and challenging Apple’s inclusion policies there, not reverse engineering iMessage.

Beeper (Beeper Cloud) already supports SMS/MMS from Android devices, but is unable to do so for SMS/MMS from iOS devices due to Apple's restriction.

As a Signal user, you might have remembered when Signal/TextSecure supported SMS/MMS on Android in addition to Signal Protocol messages, which was a big factor in helping Signal onboard new Android users when it had a smaller user base. Signal never had the opportunity to do the same on iOS because Apple only allows its own Messages client to handle on-device SMS/MMS messages, which gave Messages (and iMessage) an unfair advantage over Signal (and the Signal Protocol).

Anticompetitive measures like Apple's SMS/MMS client restriction harm the market even when alternatives to Apple's products exist. The entire blue vs. green bubble issue would not be a problem in the first place had iOS users been able to switch to a competing messenger app that supports both SMS/MMS messaging and a newer cross-platform messaging protocol (instead of iMessage).

Google voice allows sms even on ios, so it’s not as simple as that. Why is what beeper is providing around sms different from google voice? Both cloud hosted etc - this is fine.

Also, google voice still doesnt have rcs by the way, and it’s safe to assume that they will finally sunset the service rather than follow through on “principled stand” around rcs lol. Much like the epic games case… there was never anything more than a ploy to look good to regulators/lawyers. People are tragically unable to identify even very blatant cases of special pleading, especially when they align with the anti-apple zeitgeist among large parts of the tech crowd.

Google Voice does not handle on-device SMS/MMS messages on iOS. Most phone users expect to use the phone number that comes with their cell phone plan, not a separate VoIP service like Google Voice that uses a different phone number. Special pleading is arguing that Apple is exempt from the same FTC regulations that bind other U.S. companies.

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