Well at which point there is no point to 3rd Party Messaging apps and no one has need to install them and the EU will want to prosecute Apple for being Anti-competitive as just killed the 3rd party messaging app market.
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Apple Files Motion to Dismiss Department of Justice Antitrust Lawsuit
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You've got that totally mixed up because 3rd party messaging apps only came about because of Apple's refusal to allow Android to use imessage. If Apple had done what iphone and android users had wanted in the first place, a way for text messaging to work flawlessly between both operating systems then there would not be this problem today and there would not have been any 3rd party text messaging app's because there would have been no need for one.
3rd party apps filled a void that Apple refused to fill. Don't try and play the 3rd party boohoo sob card because they will be the ones affected. They took advantage of the situation and now that situation is close to coming to a stop.
And they do with what is required to connect to the network and not cause problems. However, that doesn't mean they can't add features that use the infrastructure but may be unique to their device - Apple complies with the industry standard SMS protocol but has it's own for iMessage. Phone companies did something similar to the old "Push to Talk" which fortunately died a well deserved death. Apple has FaceTime. Google extended RCS.
Your basic premise is a company should not be allowed to innovate to differentiate their products; just stick to industry standards because if you do innovate you must share with your competitors.
Which, of course, is not unusual as countries vie to get companies to locate their. The rest of the EU is just pissed the Irish got the better of them to which I say sláinte is táinte. Ireland is not unique in its actions either nor is Apple, although Apple's case was probably the most egregious example of a country helping a company avoid taxes. Other EU countries give various preferential treatment as well; and I suspect even with all the hand writing, none of them really want the EU to eliminate their ability to offer special deals to companies or industries; even at the expense of the rest of the EU.
I was referring to the 1990s DOJ case against Microsoft which primarily focused on how the company used its dominance in desktop OS (with Windows) to try to control or gain share of other markets they competed in.
As far as browsers, which got a lot of attention, the issue was with MS bundling IE with Windows, offering IE for "free" (when Netscape had largely been charging for Navigator in the early years), and incentivizing computer OEMs (although not outright preventing them) not to include Navigator or other browsers with machines they sold. MS was using its dominance in Windows to try to gain greater share of the browser market. End users, however, were at least still able to install Navigator or other browsers if they wanted to.
Apple tries to exert even more market control with iOS in the U.S. This includes bundling several Apple apps, preventing retailers of iPhones (AT&T, Best Buy, etc.) from pre-installing alternative apps/stores or uninstalling apps like Safari, etc. Apple even restricts consumers (iPhone users) from doing things like accessing apps outside the App Store, using alternative browser engines, uninstalling Safari, etc. While certainly not perfect (hence the 1990s DOJ antitrust investigation and lawsuit against MS), Windows offered more flexibly to companies and end users than iOS does.
The big difference in MS controlled almost all of the desktop market; which gave it the power to dictate what happened in other markets as well. If you were a PC builder and didn't have Windows on you box you were not going to sell a lot.
Apple doesn't have that kind of clout. If a retailer decides it doesn't like Apple's terms it can still sell cell phones. A developer can develop for other OS's. Apple, unlike MS, can't leverage its position to force out competitors like MS could and did.
Even if you consider iOS to be a monopoly, which I think is a tenuous argument at best, there is nothing illegal about being a monopoly, in the US at least.
Unfortunately that is the price businesses have to pay if they want to operate in an industry that uses a common standard for all. Whilst Apple wrote the code for imessage they did so with the premise that it would work on a common telecommunication messaging standard. Apple did not create text messaging therefore they do not have the right to use a common standard then put blocks on it's software so others cannot use it. That is not how it works and it is why you will find not many businesses in the EU flouting anti-competitive practices because they know what's required to operate in the EU. Unfortunately many of the tech companies do not because they come from countries that do not have the same competition rules as the EU does.
What does Microsoft or Google actually have to release year after year to survive other than just to milk people? Amazon? They have been coasting and bean-counting and pushing out ways to "innovatively milk" their captives for years with no real competition. What for? Perhaps innovating ways to keep their captives "engaged" in their platforms and using the scale of their platforms to beat everyone else to a pulp.
Intel is now paying for its lack of innovation with ARM chips leapfrogging them, and that is 100% thanks to Apple. And Google is feeling its lack of innovation as well with people fed up with how bad Search is and by their tactics to keep people "engaged" in their platform searching in circles instead of actual useful results or actual innovation. Hopefully, with AI helping create an alternative, we can finally rid ourselves of these complacent monopolies.
Except they haven't blocked the standard. It works as designed. RCS will work as the standard requires; but may not with Google's extensions.
They have created their own tool for messaging, and it works fine with their tools.
Right, cause Spotify would never prevent 3rd party DJ apps from playing music, which has an industry standard protocol for its format.
Apple have never had that kind of clout with the Mac, but they absolutely have that kind of clout in the phone market - something like a 1/3 share of active users - you don't need a 95% market share to be able to distort the market.
Anyway, Apple are not on the EU "gatekeeper" list for selling phones - they're on it because they control iOS and a bunch of services that are linked with their phones - not least the App Store. Google Play Store and Apple App Store together account for the vast majority of the "mobile app store" market, with Apple a long way ahead of Google.
(It's interesting to note that, even though Android has always supported 'sideloading' and independent app stores, Google Play is still massively dominant on that platform... so its not clear why 3rd party app stores on iOS would bring about the iPocalypse)
...so, in reality, although Android gives you a choice of hardware, in terms of App Stores, the choice is still only between Apple and Google - Google who also provide search facilities for iOS and are one of the main providers of email and personal productivity apps (alongside Microsoft, who are also on the naughty list). Google have already been fined by the EU for telling "independent" manufacturers that they can could use the Play Store if they agreed to bundle Google's productivity apps.
Apple did a lot of it to themselves in this case. They were already under heavy scrutiny and decided to play ballsy by kicking out Epic Games from the App Store. When you're already under so much scrutiny you try to avoid that. I don't believe they deserve as much pressure as has been applied especially by the EU and going as far as to dictate product design as a government is outrageous, but they could have scraped by better if they didn't get that cocky. In any case Apple is a corporation like all others, just particularly well greenwashed, that's been reporting endless growth on the backs of workers, the DRC, etc. etc. and will continue finding ways to screw over consumers and raise prices, so they will be fine.
Ever so true. Apple will not care if they lose because any financial loss they occur they will just raise the price of something. shareholders and/or banks do not bail out companies when things go wrong, the consumers do. Yes in the short term shareholders and banks dip into their pockets to provide the funds BUT in the long term those funds are paid back to the shareholder and the banks by increase prices on products, meaning us the consumer are the ones who bail out the companies.
It will be no different here. Apple will fight and fight and fight and fight. If they win great, they can claim legal expenses from the other side but if they lose, not to worry, lets get the consumers to pay for our losses with price increases of some of our products.
If the DOJ wins this case, it will do a lot worse than that.
Such irony; tech firms like NOKIA lost in part due to the business environment created by the heavy hand of EU and European overregulation. In a very reals sense, tech in the EU has been forced to pull out. The EU tends to think no regulation is too stringent, that nothing goes too far, so far as it is in service of the Utopian ideals of the EU regulators.
So no, Apple et al may not pull out immediately, but make no mistake that the EU makes itself business-unfriendly.
Are you serious? Business fuels the revenue that pays the taxes to build roads, hospitals, powerlines etc. On its own, the EU generates no revenue. Those "great products for profit" are the entire source of tax revenue.
By your own admission there are only 3rd Party Messaging Apps on iPhone BECAUSE Apple created a requirement for them by not having iMessage fully compatible with other messaging apps On other platforms.
You even posted how they only came about because there was a requirement for them, and that if iMessage fully interacted with other Apps then there would not even be 3rd Party messaging apps on Apple iPhone.
that is your post saying that not mine.
but then deny that if iMessage had done that then wouldn’t kill the market for 3rd party messaging apps despite posting that they would never have existed in the first place if iMessage had done that.
you are contradicting yourself in the same post.
Are you trying to argue against the best arguments or are you trying to argue against the worst arguments? Because I'm confident that there are meaningful arguments against the forceful opening of IOS to third parties. One of those cry-wolf scenarios was witnessed last week with Crowdstrike and Microsoft, and the openness of third party access to core elements in an OS.
This again, is an argument that I've not seen made. Are you looking for the best arguments or for hyperbole? Anyone who thinks that Apple wasn't on the path to upgrade the iPhone to USB-C is simply ignoring reality. They had been implementing USB-C in the product line for several years. As for costing money...I had to spend a bunch of money when I got my new iPhone 15, since all my extra cables were lightning. I had to buy extra cables and extra adapters, and I have a whole bag full of lightning cables that are now simply trash. This was never about one single thing, and I still contend that Governments shouldn't be in this business of mandating data-transfer standards in a world where those things change way faster than governments move. But to pretend that there was simply no cogent argument against the EU is silly.
I have valid reasons, to me, the consumer who is buying my Apple products, for which I prefer the closed-system of IOS to the open system of Android. Security and privacy chief among them. Are you suggesting that I'm not intelligent enough to understand my own reasoning on these issues? That I'm unable to make buying decisions for myself and therefore need the DMA to hold my hand? Or is it possible that there are cogent arguments, outside of your strawman "wolf wolf" comments that raise some level of concern?
This feels like a bad faith effort to engage the actual arguments that disagree with you.
It's a win-win for Apple! Cheaper hardware costs and increased stickiness to the ecosystem.
The EU should be directing its firepower at Ireland, then, and not at Apple. Apple followed the law as it existed in Ireland. That's not Apple's fault.
I've been trying to follow your reasoning about iMessage for serval messages, and it simply doesn't make any sense to me. Apple instituted, from the beginning, the standard of SMS. Apple doesn't own that standard. Apple can't improve or change that standard, but that standard was the only capable universal standard, and Apple provided it.
3rd Party Messaging Apps didn't evolve because of Apple. They evolved for the same reason that Apple evolved iMessage— because SMS is a very limited technology. But since no company can build a universal standard, and because no universal standard existed, 3rd party messaging apps added features to enhance messaging. But they all, including iMessage, have the same limitation: they aren't standards.
To try to argue that it's Apple's responsibility to have built that standard is based on nothing. Nor would it have been likely that Meta, Google, etc. would simply have adopted Apple's iMessage as the standard. Just as Apple isn't obligated to adopt Google's standard of encryption for RCS, which would place the encryption servers in full control of Google. No way Apple was going to adopt that as a "standard" to a company who makes money on selling user data.
I simply do not understand, or better, don't agree, with the idea that Apple has done anything wrong with iMessage. They are not a government agency.
EPIC specifically and knowingly violated Apple's terms. The ballsy move was on Epic's part.
Once again going back to my original post, Apple's argument about there being alternatives does not negate antitrust laws. In the case of mobile OS, there are only two major players and the company with the larger share of the two in the U.S. (Apple) is even more restrictive than MS was with Windows in the 1990s especially for the end user for reasons already mentioned like restricting alternative browser engines, app/app store access, etc.
Being a monopoly or having monopoly power is not necessarily illegal. It's that combined with aniticompetitive behavior which could include things like restricting app access/app store competition, payment options, etc.
Sure, but it does negate the argument that there is a lack of competition.
That's irrelevant to the DOJ's case. Their case is explicitly based on alleged market power in the smartphone market. Not a mobile OS market. Apple has a great deal of competition in the US smartphone market.
The question is one of consumer harm. Has the consumer been harmed by higher prices? No, if anything the App Store drove prices to new lows for software. Has Apple driven out its competitors so it can fix prices in the market? No, as evidenced by the success of Android and the wide range of pricing options.
Every business establishes rules around what it will sell and how you can pay. This notion that somehow Apple's App Store business practices are bad becasue people don't like how Apple setup its ecosystem is misguided, IMHO.
YMMV
Take android away from licensing or open source. That will resolve the “only two major” operating systems each of which are different forks. Force manufacturers to develop their own ecosystem.
It’ll never stop being funny to me that for the first years of the App Store, the majority of commenters on message boards screamed that Apple was going to be doomed to lose to their many competitors if they didn’t change their business model to open up iOS like Android and Windows.
Now ten to fifteen years later, (probably the same) commenters are screaming governments should make Apple open iOS up like Android and Windows, even though iPhone isn’t a monopoly, because their many competitors can’t compete and Apple makes too much money.