Hacker News Reader

Comment by commoner | Hacker News Reader

It is obviously absurd to compare messaging protocols to airline lounges. Messaging protocols are digital and required for text message communications, an essential technology used by almost every smartphone user. Airline lounges are luxury physical spaces and nobody needs an airline lounge to get on a plane.

Apple's anticompetitive conduct is that it bans third-party SMS/MMS clients as a way to boost usage of its iMessage protocol and disadvantage competing cross-platform messenger services. Microsoft never banned competing web browsers from accessing any protocol (e.g. HTTP or FTP) on Windows, so Apple's conduct in the messaging space is more egregious than Microsoft's previous conduct in the browser space.

View on HN

You’ll need to provide evidence that 3rd party messaging clients (Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Instagram, Snapchat etc.) are actually harmed by this. Frankly, I don’t buy your argument at all, nor does it have anything to do with the issue of Beeper.

As a user I don’t want these other apps getting access to my incoming SMS messages. I’m fine with one app getting all the messages. It really doesn’t make any difference whether my messages have green or blue bubbles (and people complaining about that are really stretching).

As for the argument that 3rd parties should be allowed access to the iMessage network. When are all those other apps coming aboard that plan? When can I write my own app for Messenger instead using Meta’s?

As a user, I do want an alternative to Apple's Messages app (such as Beeper Cloud or a standalone SMS/MMS client with additional features) that can handle SMS/MMS messaging on iOS. Your choice to use Apple's Messages app does not justify Apple's anticompetitive measures to ban competing SMS/MMS apps on iOS for me or anyone else. If you don't want to switch to a non-Apple SMS/MMS app, then simply don't do it.

It's common sense that when Apple forbids competitors from implementing a feature that they use for their own product, competitors are harmed. Apple previously made Apple Mail the default email client on iOS with no option to change it. After Apple removed this anticompetitive restriction in iOS 14, competing apps such as Proton Mail and Tuta (which used their own protocols instead of the default IMAP/SMTP protocol to support end-to-end encryption) immediately became more convenient to use on iOS.

The issue with Apple's SMS/MMS client restriction is more severe. Not only am I not able to designate a different messenger as the default SMS/MMS app on iOS, I cannot install one in the first place because Apple has banned them altogether.

> When are all those other apps coming aboard that plan?

Am I the only one who remembers 2006-era Google Talk with federated XMPP? As a user, it was amazing, and I want that level of interoperability back across the board.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com