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Comment by theamk | Hacker News Reader

The author seems to want a different result from iMessage antitrust: they want to be able to disable iMessage on the specific phone/email account (or even better, have this disablement happen automatically); while most other articles want to enable iMessage on new platforms.

The former is a great idea and I believe Apple should be forced it to do it ASAP. There is no reason to for Apple to "contaminate" phone numbers and force their iMessage on anyone.

The latter is a bad idea. Let's not make iMessage better, there are plenty of good messengers already. Let's make it easy to turn off and stop using.

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What is the argument for not making iMessage better? Especially given that the context of this is antitrust.

You can already remove a number from iMessage (because this exact problem came up back when iMessage first came out)

You cannot, however, deassociate the Apple ID email address when there is no associated iPhone and thus no registered phone number reachable via iMessage. (This is mentioned in the link.)

Isn’t it possible to click that checkbox next to one’s email to deregister it from iMessage from the Message app on a Mac?

I was under the impression it’s [1] possible but I’m away from my Mac to check.

Worse case one could change one’s Apple ID’s email.

Apple should make this stuff more obvious though

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38780442

You can’t remove your last option. It’s probably happening because her Apple ID is her real email so she’d have to first change that which is way unintuitive.

I think it’s best with Apple to log in with an iCloud email address even if you don’t use it.

Oh you're right, you can't remove the last option (just confirmed by trying).

It's the worse case then, and she'd have to change/remove her email from her Apple ID [1].

Apple should do better and make it easier in this kind of case. They already allow one to deregister a phone number from iMessage via a web page, how hard could it be for them to do the same for an email...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38780442

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