EU Planning to Force Apple to Give Developers Access to All Hardware and Software Features

[BaldiMac]

That is why I provided the number of sold consoles globally. The question is does the Xbox have CPS with more than 45 million active users in a month? Plus the other requirements

Which is why I pointed out that there are far more subscribers than the number you point out for consoles sold. And more users than subscribers.

the fact you can purchase games brand new without ever using the Xbox store is a very important metric

1) No, it has nothing to do with the requirements posted.
2) Microsoft gets a cut of every new game sold no matter what store it comes from.
3) I said second-hand. Not brand new.

the Xbox store is not an important gateway to reach Xbox end users.

But the games still pay a cut to Microsoft as a platform fee. Much like the Apple proposal that you called anti-competitive.

 

[M3gatron]

There is little doubt you have never used it for anything significant since it doesn't allow you to do much more than view and clear codes, and view limited statistics by itself. Unless you buy the vehicle manufacturers super expensive tool and software to make any changes. I guess that's a model Apple could use.

OBDII is definitely not as limited as you are suggesting. You can do quite a lot of significant stuff with it.

 

[I7guy]

The mental gymnastics are amusing. If Apple follows the rules and laws defined by EU they have to add features and functionality not cripple the current functionality of their smartphones, like it was constantly suggested in this thread as a way to force apple's EU users to revolt(which won't happen anyway).


[…]

Sure they could cripple their product and follow the rules. No more hardware, and security fixes only. Support runs out when the last iPhone dies.

 

[BaldiMac]

WhatsApp and telegram can attract users by having the best messaging service and functions, instead of the most users.

WhatsApp has 2 billion users. It's primary appeal is that it has the most users.

 

[CarlJ]

Engineers didn't build the internet. Al Gore did

You jest, but a lot of people, still to this day, deride him for making a claim that he never made (there are likely people reading this thread who assume you're making fun of him), while failing to give him credit for what he actually did do - this article, "Did Al Gore Invent the Internet?", covers it pretty well (with lengthy quotes from a couple of the top engineers): a bunch of engineers invented the underlying technology for the internet, but Gore did a lot of pushing and legislating on the political side to make that network widely available to people outside of the military and academia, which gave us the internet we have today. It took technical work and political work to bring about the modern "Internet", and he was instrumental in a lot of the political work.

The rest of your post is spot on. Casting technology in the stone of law, before there is an actual pressing need to do so (and "this seems like a good idea" is not an actual pressing need), just makes technological progress harder. It's legislating a false-consensus on technology, rather than actually letting the companies inventing the technology reach a consensus when it becomes clear than one technology is the right choice.

 

[Razorpit]

And once again the last time I checked having a console that didn't take discs is an option. Unlike the iPhone I can choose to purchase a slightly more expensive variant that does take physical media. And even with a digital-only console I can still purchase discounted game codes from CDKeys et al.

And if I want to play online I won't bother because I have the consumer choice of playing free to play titles like Rocket League and Fortnite which don't require a subscription at all. Heck, Microsoft's own Halo Infinite doesn't even require Xbox Live. £40 a year for Xbox Live is a bargain though because Xbox Live is brilliant!

At every point in the games industry I have a choice of what console to buy, where I buy my games and whether or not I want to pony up for their respective online service which many popular titles do not require. My point was they are nothing alike because none of the console manufacturers operate a monopolised marketplace.

They also support devices well past their market prime. Nintendo still repairs the 3DS (launched 2011), Microsoft patched an error in the Xbox 360 (launched 2005) last week and Sony are going to honour purchased PS1 and PSP titles from as far back as 2008 outside of their new subscription. Good luck getting your OG iPhone repaired at the Apple Store.

It currently is an option, just like purchasing a phone is. Difference being there are many more phones out there than gaming consoles. The odds of you finding a phone that does exactly what YOU want are pretty good.

"I have the consumer choice of playing free to play titles like Rocket League and Fortnite which don't require a subscription at all." As someone much dumber than me 'once' said, come'on man. ? So your defense of the gaming system's monopolistic practices is "locked in gaming services are ok because it doesn't effect how I use the product".

To say none of the manufactures operate a monopolized marketplace is wrong. I cannot log in to the Microsoft store with a PlayStation, and an XBox cannot log in to the PlayStation Store. In fact Microsoft is threating the gaming space by purchasing many cross platform developers. You think Xbox Live is a bargain (and I agree) but it's still a lock-in. Guess what Sony had to recently with thier online program to compete? What-if Microsoft never offered that program, you think Sony ever would? Years later they're finally submitting to the pressure.

As far as support goes, Nintendo goes above any beyond just about any company I know of, including Apple. But they have a completely different business model. The 3DS was in production for 9 years. Production stopped in 2020. Right now the iPhone 6S is still considered "not vintage" and were released in 2015. Even still Apple still offers repairs. That's pretty awesome considering the lifecycle of phones and constant hardware updates versus gaming systems which remain static for several years.

 

[visualseed]

How can Apple remove themselves Europe that has almost 800 million people in total .

You jest, but a lot of people, still to this day, deride him for making a claim that he never made (there are likely people reading this thread who assume you're making fun of him), while failing to give him credit for what he actually did do - this article, "Did Al Gore Invent the Internet?", covers it pretty well (with lengthy quotes from a couple of the top engineers): a bunch of engineers invented the underlying technology for the internet, but Gore did a lot of pushing and legislating on the political side to make that network widely available to people outside of the military and academia, which gave us the internet we have today. It took technical work and political work to bring about the modern "Internet", and he was instrumental in a lot of the political work.

The rest of your post is spot on. Casting technology in the stone of law, before there is an actual pressing need to do so (and "this seems like a good idea" is not an actual pressing need), just makes technological progress harder. It's legislating a false-consensus on technology, rather than actually letting the companies inventing the technology reach a consensus when it becomes clear than one technology is the right choice.

I was more making fun of the 'meme' and those that mock him for what actually didn't say. I used to play pickup basketball with him in Nashville years ago. He's a really thoughtful and intelligent guy. He would have probably been one of the most technologically-versed presidents we ever had in our lifetimes.

 

[I7guy]

You jest, but a lot of people, still to this day, deride him for making a claim that he never made (there are likely people reading this thread who assume you're making fun of him), while failing to give him credit for what he actually did do - this article, "Did Al Gore Invent the Internet?", covers it pretty well (with lengthy quotes from a couple of the top engineers): a bunch of engineers invented the underlying technology for the internet, but Gore did a lot of pushing and legislating on the political side to make that network widely available to people outside of the military and academia, which gave us the internet we have today. It took technical work and political work to bring about the modern "Internet", and he was instrumental in a lot of the political work.

The rest of your post is spot on. Casting technology in the stone of law, before there is an actual pressing need to do so (and "this seems like a good idea" is not an actual pressing need), just makes technological progress harder. It's legislating a false-consensus on technology, rather than actually letting the companies inventing the technology reach a consensus when it becomes clear than one technology is the right choice.

And without Robert Metcalfs’ invention in the 1970s Al gore wouldn’t have had a bill in 1991. Got your point and good read, but tech is built on a foundation of building in prior art.

The EU wants to legislate that away.

 

[Sophisticatednut]

Which is why I pointed out that there are far more subscribers than the number you point out for consoles sold. And more users than subscribers.

i agree, but still the number must be more than 45 million active users, monthly. And unless the USA and Eu shares ~50/50 split of the user base, I would say they are not even close. But lest grant this point, they still must fulfill every other requirement to be covered by the DMA.

1) No, it has nothing to do with the requirements posted.
2) Microsoft gets a cut of every new game sold no matter what store it comes from.
3) I said second-hand. Not brand new.

sigh,
There are three overarching qualitative criteria to qualify a provider of CPS as a gatekeeper, namely:

1. The undertaking has a significant impact on the internal market;
2. It provides a CPS which is an important gateway for business users to reach end users; and
3. It enjoys an entrenched and durable position in its operations or it is foreseeable that it will enjoy such a position in the near future (i.e., “emerging” gatekeepers).

A company is presumed to satisfy these requirements if the following quantitative thresholds are met:

1. Significant impact on the internal market: Presumed to be the case if the undertaking achieved an annual turnover of at least €7.5 billion within the EU in each of the last three financial years or a market capitalization of at least €75 billion in the last financial year and it provides the same CPS in at least three Member States.
2. Control of an important gateway for business users towards final consumers: Presumed to be the case if the company has at least 45 million monthly active end users established in the EU and at least 10,000 yearly active business users established in the EU in the last financial year; and
3. Entrenched and durable position: Presumed to be the case if the thresholds in point (2) were met in each of the last three financial years.

does xbox fitt these things?

But the games still pay a cut to Microsoft as a platform fee. Much like the Apple proposal that you called anti-competitive.

Whilst the DMA applies on an ex ante basis to all undertakings designated as gatekeepers, competition law is based on an individualized ex post assessment of the market conduct of one or more specific undertakings.


The DMA provides that it is without prejudice to the application of EU or national competition rules, including merger control rules. The DMA purports to pursue complementary objectives to competition rules and to protect a different legal interest from those rules.

and Apple would be required not only app stores, but also search engines(google) and social networking platforms(facebook) to apply fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) conditions to business users.

microsoft would not need to do this with the Xbox as the DMA is writen now

In this context, it is noteworthy that, just days before the EU institutions reached political agreement on the DMA, the Court of Justice of the EU ruled on the application of the ne bis in idem (double jeopardy) principle to a parallel application of ex ante regulation and competition law (judgment of 22 March 2022 in case C-117/20, bpost). In this judgment, the Court held that provided certain conditions are met an undertaking can be fined for an infringement of competition law where, on the same facts, it has already been fined for a breach of sectoral regulation. In particular, a double investigation and fine is possible provided that there are clear and precise rules making it possible to predict which acts or omissions are liable to be subject to such duplication; that the two sets of proceedings are conducted in a sufficiently coordinated manner and within a proximate timeframe; and that the overall penalties imposed correspond to the seriousness of the offenses committed. This case law can be expected to also be relevant for the parallel application of the DMA and EU and/or national competition rules.


National authorities (including courts) must abstain from taking decisions which run counter to decisions adopted by the EC under the DMA. However, the DMA provides for close cooperation and information exchange between the EC and national competition authorities.


Since the DMA is directly applicable in the Member States, national courts will also be competent to rule on claims of alleged non-compliance with the DMA.

 

[BaldiMac]

i agree, but still the number must be more than 45 million active users, monthly. And unless the USA and Eu shares ~50/50 split of the user base, I would say they are not even close. But lest grant this point, they still must fulfill every other requirement to be covered by the DMA.

sigh,
There are three overarching qualitative criteria to qualify a provider of CPS as a gatekeeper, namely:

A company is presumed to satisfy these requirements if the following quantitative thresholds are met:

does xbox fitt these things?

Whilst the DMA applies on an ex ante basis to all undertakings designated as gatekeepers, competition law is based on an individualized ex post assessment of the market conduct of one or more specific undertakings.


The DMA provides that it is without prejudice to the application of EU or national competition rules, including merger control rules. The DMA purports to pursue complementary objectives to competition rules and to protect a different legal interest from those rules.

I understand that there are arbitrary requirements for gatekeepers in the proposal. I understand that Xbox is possibly not covered by the arbitrary requirements. Hence, the reason I said "seems" like it qualifies in my original post which was about second-hand games before going off on your tangent.

 

[Sophisticatednut]

I understand that there are arbitrary requirements for gatekeepers in the proposal. I understand that Xbox is possibly not covered by the arbitrary requirements. Hence, the reason I said "seems" like it qualifies in my original post which was about second-hand games before going off on your tangent.

My first response was that they aren't covered with 100% certainty

 

[CarlJ]

The problem is many people assume that all messengers are drop-in replacements for each other when in reality they are all streamlined social networks with their own communities, unique technological infrastructure, and business models. The irony is that the DMA and DSA will decimate many of their business models more than forcing interoperability will weaken iMessage use on the iPhone.

Yep, people rail against the "indignity" of non-Apple users getting green bubbles in the Messages app, but this system will necessarily result in something similar - Apple cannot verify the identity of a user sending a message from, say, WhatsApp, so the message will have to be presented as "Message from someone that WhatsApp says is named 'John Doe'". So, maybe a red bubble for these? And they won't have access to every "nice" feature of Apple's iMessage ecosystem, because it'll necessarily be a "least common denominator" of what the systems at both ends can support well enough to convert between the two.

(To be clear, Apple cannot just show these messages with whatever name WhatsApp sends, in a blue bubble - what if there's a name collision between the two - if you regularly get messages via iMessage from John Smith, your boss, and you get a message from your long lost college friend, John Smith, via WhatsApp, in Europe, clearly you don't want those two message streams combined - at the very minimum there would be massive confusion, at worst, there would/will be legal action against the messaging services for getting someone fired for replying to the wrong person, or for someone sneaking in via a gateway to masquerade as someone you know to get information - so... we'll need clear identifiers both that these messages are coming in over a gateway, and that all Apple can verify about the identity is that "WhatsApp says this is X".)

Most people seem to be thinking, "oh, well, that's just whether or not to include images and video". I'm thinking: differences in handling of character sets/encodings, length of text messages, image formats and sizes, video formats and sizes (and retention policies for both images and video - are they stored on a server? only on the local device? I'd bet different systems handle it differently), how to handle marking and displaying in-line replies, how, exactly, can text, images, and video be interspersed... let's see...

How to handle reaction tags that can be attached to individual messages (thumbs up/down, etc) - who decides on what the common set of reaction tags is? How do you handle the situation where someone local uses a tag that isn't part of the agreed-upon set, on a message going across the gateway? Do you not display it on the remote end? Do you display a text description of it instead? Do you prevent the local user from applying that reaction tag if there's anybody in the group chat that is connected through a gateway (or for simplicity do we go to having just one universal government-mandated allowable set of reactions on messages, going forward)? And if you prevent tags that can't go through a gateway, how do you deal with a gatewayed user being added to an existing chat where such tags have been used? Do you retroactively remove those tags from the chat? And if a gatewayed user is added to a group chat - first off, some systems support that and some don't, how do you resolve that - but, second, the larger issue, what system is responsible for passing the scroll back history of that chat to the gatewayed user, and, and how far back does it go?

I'm sure, given a little time and effort, there are dozens of additional collisions that can be added to this list.

You can, of course, reduce all this to a least common denominator of, "well, just allow text, no reaction tags at all, can't add gatewayed users to group chats mid-chat" - and... that would be precisely what we have now with SMS - and pretty much any smartphone on the planet can already send an SMS message to any other smartphone on the planet. So, if that's what they want, congratulations, mission accomplished.

If they want more than that, then they're going to have to understand that this idea of, "well, just provide a messaging API" is actually a pretty complicated and very messy proposition. It's going to be a lot more work than people expect, it isn't going to support many of the niceties that people on each system will assume that it ought to handle, and it isn't going to work as well as what is being sold to people with these regulations.

All of the drive to do this very much has the feel to it of a group of politicians / bureaucrats (who don't really have the technical background to understand the ramifications of what they're asking) who are being nudged/lobbied to push this through, by one or more companies that think they will gain something from the resulting changes, rather than - as it is being presented to the public - being in the best interests of the end users who will be affected.

 

[BaldiMac]

My first response was that they aren't covered with 100% certainty

Nope. Your first response was "I'm sorry, but Xbox and PlayStation aren't even close to fulfilling the requirements. Globally there are 60 million sold Xbox One/series x consoles."

 

[Michael Scrip]

Will the EU force Teams and Slack to interoperate?

And where does Discord fit into to all this?

?

 

[dk001]

Will the EU force Teams and Slack to interoperate?

And where does Discord fit into to all this?

?

Why would they?

 

[lartola]

They actually did it in the UK with the O2 network as well. Curiously they also had exclusivity for the Palm Pre which, despite being heavily marketed in their stores (I brought one!) I always thought was an attempt to neuter a potential competitor to the iPhone or prevent a rival network from having a carrier exclusive which is highly anti-competitive.

Yeah they did it in every country they could get away with it, in the few countries where that first iphone was sold. Germany was one of the few cases where they already had laws banning the unlocking of phones, so Apple was forced to sell the original iphone unlocked there.

 

[CarlJ]

Now you are just making stuff up. AT&T has extremely innovative products and also had lucent labs. Apple in spite of being in a literal sea of competition managed to produce extremely innovative and popular products. My cable provider, a monopoly , not so much.

Indeed, AT&T, in the form of Bell Labs gave us Unix, which begat Linux, macOS, iOS, etc., and the C language, which is the underpinnings of much of the software written these days (yes, a lot of things are not written in C, but a lot of the languages they are written in, are themselves written in C). Plus, you know, little things like transistors and lasers. As the Wikipedia page points out, "Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories."

 

[lartola]

I can see the nudge and wink! I'm not sure how it is in the USA but it was mandated in recent years that all handsets sold in the UK must be carrier unlocked at purchase. This was only ever a good decision.

In the US too, but they only unlock immediately if the device isn’t financed (US Carriers offer financing to purchase a phone). If it is, they won’t unlock until the device is fully paid. Also, US Carriers don’t unlock before selling: you have to ask for it online once you’ve bought the device.

 

[lartola]

Yep, people rail against the "indignity" of non-Apple users getting green bubbles in the Messages app, but this system will necessarily result in something similar - Apple cannot verify the identity of a user sending a message from, say, WhatsApp, so the message will have to be presented as "Message from someone that WhatsApp says is named 'John Doe'". So, maybe a red bubble for these? And they won't have access to every "nice" feature of Apple's iMessage ecosystem, because it'll necessarily be a "least common denominator" of what the systems at both ends can support well enough to convert between the two.

(To be clear, Apple cannot just show these messages with whatever name WhatsApp sends, in a blue bubble - what if there's a name collision between the two - if you regularly get messages via iMessage from John Smith, your boss, and you get a message from your long lost college friend, John Smith, via WhatsApp, in Europe, clearly you don't want those two message streams combined - at the very minimum there would be massive confusion, at worst, there would/will be legal action against the messaging services for getting someone fired for replying to the wrong person, or for someone sneaking in via a gateway to masquerade as someone you know to get information - so... we'll need clear identifiers both that these messages are coming in over a gateway, and that all Apple can verify about the identity is that "WhatsApp says this is X".)

Most people seem to be thinking, "oh, well, that's just whether or not to include images and video". I'm thinking: differences in handling of character sets/encodings, length of text messages, image formats and sizes, video formats and sizes (and retention policies for both images and video - are they stored on a server? only on the local device? I'd bet different systems handle it differently), how to handle marking and displaying in-line replies, how, exactly, can text, images, and video be interspersed... let's see...

How to handle reaction tags that can be attached to individual messages (thumbs up/down, etc) - who decides on what the common set of reaction tags is? How do you handle the situation where someone local uses a tag that isn't part of the agreed-upon set, on a message going across the gateway? Do you not display it on the remote end? Do you display a text description of it instead? Do you prevent the local user from applying that reaction tag if there's anybody in the group chat that is connected through a gateway (or for simplicity do we go to having just one universal government-mandated allowable set of reactions on messages, going forward)? And if you prevent tags that can't go through a gateway, how do you deal with a gatewayed user being added to an existing chat where such tags have been used? Do you retroactively remove those tags from the chat? And if a gatewayed user is added to a group chat - first off, some systems support that and some don't, how do you resolve that - but, second, the larger issue, what system is responsible for passing the scroll back history of that chat to the gatewayed user, and, and how far back does it go?

I'm sure, given a little time and effort, there are dozens of additional collisions that can be added to this list.

You can, of course, reduce all this to a least common denominator of, "well, just allow text, no reaction tags at all, can't add gatewayed users to group chats mid-chat" - and... that would be precisely what we have now with SMS - and pretty much any smartphone on the planet can already send an SMS message to any other smartphone on the planet. So, if that's what they want, congratulations, mission accomplished.

If they want more than that, then they're going to have to understand that this idea of, "well, just provide a messaging API" is actually a pretty complicated and very messy proposition. It's going to be a lot more work than people expect, it isn't going to support many of the niceties that people on each system will assume that it ought to handle, and it isn't going to work as well as what is being sold to people with these regulations.

All of the drive to do this very much has the feel to it of a group of politicians / bureaucrats (who don't really have the technical background to understand the ramifications of what they're asking) who are being nudged/lobbied to push this through, by one or more companies that think they will gain something from the resulting changes, rather than - as it is being presented to the public - being in the best interests of the end users who will be affected.

Apple could easily create a version of the Messages app for Android, as they did with Music or TV. They just don’t want to. Too bad, because messages is good and if it were available for Android users it may as well even beat all the others.

 

[visualseed]

If they want more than that, then they're going to have to understand that this idea of, "well, just provide a messaging API" is actually a pretty complicated and very messy proposition. It's going to be a lot more work than people expect, it isn't going to support many of the niceties that people on each system will assume that it ought to handle, and it isn't going to work as well as what is being sold to people with these regulations.

Facebook / Meta has't managed to successfully provide interoperability between three messengers where they own all the users and source code in over four years. Expecting dozens of companies with vastly different business models, client features, and infrastructures to agree on some standard APIs, portable format for user data, and privacy safeguards and implement them by an arbitrary deadline ain't gonna happen no matter how much legal pressure you put on them.

Quite honestly, I don't see many of them actually wanting this. We may see some small players demand interoperability with the big guys because they have nothing to lose, but if you truly have a competitive service the last thing you would want to do is expose your users to a rival's network and risk losing your monetization leverage if they switch clients because they see them as interchangeable and they like some arbitrary feature in the other's that your's doesn't have.

In the end, the DMA and DSA may cement the existing big players in the market, but it will likely kill upstart messaging services and social networks that will have a hard time attracting capital investment because they will reach gatekeeper status before they reach profitability. And even if they don't meet all the gatekeeper thresholds it removes a very significant exit strategy that investors count on because if they want to sell the company, all the likely buyers will be gatekeepers and will be subject the EU's right to stricter M&A review which will undoubtedly kill the deal.

 

[0924487]

Perfect is the enemy of good or even great. Ya mess still have a home court advantage. Every business that sells another’s merchandise has a home court advantage….regardless of “nope.” A legal home court advantage.

It's possible, through regulation, to make this advantage a disadvantage.

For example, Asians are pretty good at getting good grades and being admitted to prestigious universities, by introducing affirmative action laws, they now have a significant disadvantage at applying to Ivy League colleges. All because of a regulation.

 

[CarlJ]

You sure that's the defense you want to use?

[...]

So where are you "plugging in" or "inserting" these new/second-hand discs/cartridges? And what if you want to play online with someone? Get your wallet out for either Sony's, Microsoft's, or Nintendo's "walled" online service.

You're listing a very clearly discontinued Xbox One S model. The current roughly-equivalent machine is the Xbox Series S.

Yes, there are two current gaming consoles, the Xbox Series S and the PS5 digital edition, that don't include disk drives, and thus can only download games. Those are the digital-only versions of their disk-equipped equivalents, the Xbox Series X and the PS5 disk edition, which do have disk drives, and can use second-hand discs and such (the Xbox Series X also add a few other niceties, the PS5 versions differ only in the disk drive, or lack thereof). If the consumer buys the digital-only version, they have made a choice to forgo the disk drive and the additional capabilities it adds.

You may have other valid points, but this assertion seems flawed.

 

[I7guy]

It's possible, through regulation, to make this advantage a disadvantage.

For example, Asians are pretty good at getting good grades and being admitted to prestigious universities, by introducing affirmative action laws, they now have a significant disadvantage at applying to Ivy League colleges. All because of a regulation.

Sure regulations don’t always perform the job their sponsors thought they would. I generally support regulation that are for the greater good. These regulations don’t meet that smell test. Don’t like apple products, don’t buy them.

 

[CarlJ]

They may not meet the 45 million EU citizen active monthly subscriber threshold. I think they are in the 25 million subscriber range globally. I have yet to see any reporting on the DMA applying to game console makers and they specifically exempted smart TVs so its difficult to know for sure what applies

Sounds like they're very carefully targeting the regulations to hit the companies they want, because if they just came out and wrote "this regulation requires Apple (and company B and company C, ...), by name, to have to jump through this series of hoops that several of our EU companies want them to jump through", they'd get told they can't write rules that only apply to specific companies by name. That suggests they're not really going after a behavior, they're going after a company.

 

[Sophisticatednut]

Yep, people rail against the "indignity" of non-Apple users getting green bubbles in the Messages app, but this system will necessarily result in something similar - Apple cannot verify the identity of a user sending a message from, say, WhatsApp, so the message will have to be presented as "Message from someone that WhatsApp says is named 'John Doe'". So, maybe a red bubble for these? And they won't have access to every "nice" feature of Apple's iMessage ecosystem, because it'll necessarily be a "least common denominator" of what the systems at both ends can support well enough to convert between the two.

Considering both uses a phone number as the anchor, it can simply be phone number x you don't have in your contacts. or as when you receive a random iMessage from a person you don't have in your contacts.

(To be clear, Apple cannot just show these messages with whatever name WhatsApp sends, in a blue bubble - what if there's a name collision between the two - if you regularly get messages via iMessage from John Smith, your boss, and you get a message from your long lost college friend, John Smith, via WhatsApp, in Europe, clearly you don't want those two message streams combined - at the very minimum there would be massive confusion, at worst, there would/will be legal action against the messaging services for getting someone fired for replying to the wrong person, or for someone sneaking in via a gateway to masquerade as someone you know to get information - so... we'll need clear identifiers both that these messages are coming in over a gateway, and that all Apple can verify about the identity is that "WhatsApp says this is X".)

or just the phone number. Green for SMS. Blue for iMessage and red for other like WhatsApp/telegram/messenger etc
there is 100% impossible for someone to "sneek" through a gateway. You would literally get a random string of text as they haven't been provided with the public encryption key. Every chat uses a unique public AND private keys

Most people seem to be thinking, "oh, well, that's just whether or not to include images and video". I'm thinking: differences in handling of character sets/encodings, length of text messages, image formats and sizes, video formats and sizes (and retention policies for both images and video - are they stored on a server? only on the local device? I'd bet different systems handle it differently), how to handle marking and displaying in-line replies, how, exactly, can text, images, and video be interspersed... let's see...

video and photos already uses a standard. Unicode(depending on language) is the standard we use. Emojis are Unicode standard, different systems have custom graphical representations of them. Look at a emoji you use n in iOS Facebook Messenger, Windows Facebook Messenger in the browser or android Facebook Messenger. Everyone stores it locally, otherwise the moment you lose Ethernet you would not have the ability to read the text, some store it online as well, it would completely depend on the receiving client does it.

How to handle reaction tags that can be attached to individual messages (thumbs up/down, etc) - who decides on what the common set of reaction tags is? How do you handle the situation where someone local uses a tag that isn't part of the agreed-upon set, on a message going across the gateway? Do you not display it on the remote end? Do you display a text description of it instead? Do you prevent the local user from applying that reaction tag if there's anybody in the group chat that is connected through a gateway (or for simplicity do we go to having just one universal government-mandated allowable set of reactions on messages, going forward)? And if you prevent tags that can't go through a gateway, how do you deal with a gatewayed user being added to an existing chat where such tags have been used? Do you retroactively remove those tags from the chat? And if a gatewayed user is added to a group chat - first off, some systems support that and some don't, how do you resolve that - but, second, the larger issue, what system is responsible for passing the scroll back history of that chat to the gatewayed user, and, and how far back does it go?

in the same way, iMessage reactions are shown on android today. do you know what happens if you send a new iMessage emoji from iOS 14 to an old iPhone with iOS 12? a square with a question mark as the new Unicode code doesn't exist or text.

and one simple thing could be that if you add a new person in an old group chat, they will only see messages from the moment they were invited, as is currently the standard. you seem to mix locally displayed things on your device and localy interpreted text on the receiving end, the receiver have no impact on your local representation of the conversation.

I'm sure, given a little time and effort, there are dozens of additional collisions that can be added to this list.

so far they have already been solved years ago.

You can, of course, reduce all this to a least common denominator of, "well, just allow text, no reaction tags at all, can't add gatewayed users to group chats mid-chat" - and... that would be precisely what we have now with SMS - and pretty much any smartphone on the planet can already send an SMS message to any other smartphone on the planet. So, if that's what they want, congratulations, mission accomplished.

common denominator= the functions that iMessage and WhatsApp support will be cross compatible. Unique iMessage things will not be supported by WhatsApp and vice versa.

Sending an animoji will just be a picture in android as it's iMessage/iOS unique function.

If they want more than that, then they're going to have to understand that this idea of, "well, just provide a messaging API" is actually a pretty complicated and very messy proposition. It's going to be a lot more work than people expect, it isn't going to support many of the niceties that people on each system will assume that it ought to handle, and it isn't going to work as well as what is being sold to people with these regulations.

you dont need to provide an API, you just need to allow others to be part of the handshake process that happens when an encrypted chat starts and use the same protocol. WhatsApp and signal uses the same protocol, but a different handshake protocol handled server side that prevents outside competitors servers to talk with your "group".

Just as how PlayStation, PC and Xbox players can have cross-platform interaction "activated unintentionally"

Fortnite Cross-Platform Play "Accidentally" Activates Again

Players are reporting that cross-platform play has once again been activated in the world of Fortnite when playing PvE. This is coming from PlayStation 4 and PC users reporting that they are seeing Xbox One players during their gameplay experience, making the “oops” from a few months ago once...

comicbook.com

even tho it's alwas y been told to be "impossible"

Crossplay Between Two Different Consoles Is Not Possible, Says Gaijin CEO

Don't ever expect crossplay between PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, because Gaijin CEO Anton Yudintsev said that it's just not possible.

wccftech.com

All of the drive to do this very much has the feel to it of a group of politicians / bureaucrats (who don't really have the technical background to understand the ramifications of what they're asking) who are being nudged/lobbied to push this through, by one or more companies that think they will gain something from the resulting changes, rather than - as it is being presented to the public - being in the best interests of the end users who will be affected.

I would recommend that you read up on how E2EE works.