Have you seen a car in the past 10 years? Changing a radio out or stereo system is far from easy now. Almost all of it is integrated into a nice big screen. But, your sure welcome to try now. I used to change my radio and speakers myself. Then came all the integration. Not impossible, but harder to do nicely and at a greater cost. I would like my next ride to be a Ford F150 Lightning. But, changing the stereo in that?
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EU Planning to Force Apple to Give Developers Access to All Hardware and Software Features
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Sophisticatednut
macrumors 68030
is't the features the whole point? why does people use WhatsApp, signal, Viber, telegram, messages or iMessage?
is it the user base or the features and User interface they have the deciding factor?
how will DMA and DSA cement existing players when the result is smaller players gains more opportunities compared to the bigger players who have a literal Do's and Don't's they must follow?
if an upstart reaches a gatekeeper status, then the chance is they just replaced or became the new Facebook.
and why would "new facebook" have to be sold to existing Gatekeepers? it can be sold to literary any other multi-billion dollar company that don't exist in the market. And why would you even want the existing players to buy up small competitors to be killed?
Sophisticatednut
macrumors 68030
Razorpit
Suspended
For all those in Teams that want to communicate in Slack of course. No more walled gardens right?
Apologies, I meant the Xbox Series S but in my haste I incorrectly linked to an older device. Irregardless, your argument of "the consumer buys the digital-only version, they have made a choice to forgo the disk drive and the additional capabilities it adds" applies to iPhone and this entire discussion. Consumers that chose the iPhone forgo the ability to side-load applications and a more open operating system like Android.
CarlJ
Contributor
No "but" necessary in your reply, I completely agree. Tech is basically always built upon prior art (related, there's an awesome documentary miniseries from the 70's called "Connections"). There were hundreds/thousands of very talented engineers involved in creating the underpinnings of the internet. And we wouldn't have the ubiquitous internet that we have today without both all that hard technical work and the political work to move the internet from being a DoD-only thing to being available to everyone. I was merely pointing out that there are an awful lot of people who will misquote Al Gore and then use that misquote as a straw man to attack him, ignoring what he contributed.
And, yeah, I agree about legislating that away.
(In other news, tons of people like to complain about the woman who sued McDonalds after spilling coffee on herself in the drivethru, but the court case shows that McDonalds actually kept their coffee at undrinkably hot temperatures, hotter than other establishments, arguably in order to lower costs, and had had hundreds of other injury claims previously, and the woman in question suffered 3rd-degree burns and spent a week in the hospital getting skin grafts, and originally asked McDonalds for $20k to cover current and future medical expenses, while McDonalds refused to offer her more than $800. Just another case of things "everybody knows" where "everybody" often don't know the real truth.)
macar00n
macrumors 6502
They don't. They threaten to do it because lawmakers are trying to manipulate them into making their platform worse, and then those 800 million people convince their lawmakers to stop this nonsense rather than lose access to iPhones/features.
The "choice" that these people want already exists with Android phones, they just want to buy a non-crappy iPhone and then do whatever they want with it. But having a more cultivated ecosystem is part of what makes an iPhone non-crappy, and the vast vast majority of Apple's customers like it that way. 800 million people shouldn't have worse phones because a tiny minority of loud people and dumb lawmakers think that the iPhone should be more like Android.
CarlJ
Contributor
Yes, Apple could do so. And that is an entirely irrelevant point in this discussion - it would not satisfy the current demands to provide gateways between the systems. Otherwise, we could say, well, WhatsApp and Telegram already have iOS versions of their apps, every messaging system of note has a client on every platform, so, mission accomplished. Your point also has precisely zero to do with my comment that you quoted, which was entirely about the difficulties that lay ahead in implementing those gateways that look like they will be mandated.
As to why Apple hasn't made an Android client for iMessage, that's Apple's business (literally). Personally, I'd like it if they had, but I'm not running Apple.
Michael Scrip
macrumors G3
To be fair... Apple hasn't built an iMessage client for iOS either... 😉
iMessage is simply a protocol that runs on top of Apple's included "Messages" app that provides additional features in iPhone-to-iPhone conversations. (there's obviously more to it... but you get the drift)
You can just as easily send and receive messages with Android users as you can with iPhone users using this same singular "Messages" app. I do it all the time.
I can choose to turn off iMessage in Settings and the "Messages" app becomes a simple SMS client that still has the same ability to reach both Android users and iPhone users.
The point is... iPhone users are reachable by nearly any phone in the world. Already.
And that's why I find it funny that there's this idea that "iMessage is an impenetrable wall that must be torn down!"
Is it though?
WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and other proprietary messaging platforms are walled gardens. You cannot send a message to a user of those platforms without being a member yourself. It's the very essence of a walled garden.
Meanwhile... iMessage is simply a set of instructions that enhance regular SMS conversations. And anyone can send me a message if they know my phone number. Already.
😛
visualseed
macrumors 65816
At one time features were the primary differentiators but as user expectations have evolved almost all messengers implement the same core features, albeit in different user interfaces. If WhatsApp were to become interoperable with iMessage, I'd ditch the WhatsApp client and use the iMessage client to reach my WhatsApp contacts mainly because there is no WhatApp client on my iPad and it's my preferred device. If Viber and WhatApp became interoperable I'd ditch the Viber App and all of their annoying ads and commercial sticker packs. It would probably put a serious dent in their monetization model if a lot of people did the same. Almost all of the monetization models of the different messaging services are implemented through the client apps. E.g. Advertising, tracking, subscriptions for group content access, stickers packs, etc... If I could have access to all these communities through a clean unencumbered and relatively private and tracking-free interface like iMessage, I would do it in a heartbeat. That is good for me as a user, but really bad for these services that want to stay in businesses.
They would become the Facebook of 2013-2014 which was was stock-rich but operating on very slim profit margins. A Facebook mostly leveraging their stock value for acquisitions and revenue acquisition. Amazon was not profitable at all when they reached gatekeeper status. Neither was Snapchat based on user count and valuation, but I can't remember if they are considered an important enough market for the DMA to apply to them... kidding.
It mostly depends on the business model and the company's growth plan but its very easy to have a $30-100 valuation per active user during the growth state where a company could foreseeable reach the active user and global market cap threshold and yet be still hemorrhaging cash with an un-solidified and unproven business model now encumbered by a new set of regulations.
There are a lot companies like Telegram that exceed the EU active user criteria and are well over the halfway mark in global valuation, but have no revenue. Telegram isn't even planning to start booking revenue until next year. But an influx of users paired with irrationally exuberant investors could easily bring them over the gatekeeper line without them having to do anything.
Even if Telegram doesn't make gateway status on its own, it's hard to imagine any company that would be in a position to buy them that wasn't already a gateway or wouldn't become a gateway soon after closing the deal.
While I guess it is possible that a random rich dude or company in an unregulated industry could buy one of these tech companies it rarely happens and when it does happen it's a fire sales that nets investors far less than the premium they would get from an in-industry merger.
The reality is that most businesses fail. Seasoned investors want to see they have as many opportunities to recoup something when that happens. The prevailing idea is you place and many reasonable bets as you can and mitigate as many risks as you can so the wins will outpace the losses. When you reduce the options for mitigating losses you change the dynamic of the investors' winning formula and they place less bets on things that have fewer exit strategies. Nobody wants to sell their company, but having that option is sometimes the difference between getting the startup capital you need or not.
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CarlJ
Contributor
No, I completely understand, was simplifying the point for others.
iMessage originally came about because wireless carriers were making huge windfall profits charging customers 10 cents per message for SMS (or you could prepay for larger blocks of messages). Apple designed a protocol (iMessage) that, if it detected that users on both ends were using Apple's Messages app, it'd opportunistically short-circuit the connection, sending the "text" messages as snippets of data (and most users had plenty of data allowance on their plan) rather than as 10cent-per-message SMS messages. It was a brilliant end-run around the carrier's greed, for the benefit of iPhone users. That they were able to add encryption, longer messages, images and video, and message history transfer to new devices, was just icing on the cake. I expect that it's one piece of what led the carriers to shift to charging primarily for data and just throwing in SMS for free on most plans.
(5,000 text messages might work out to 1 MB of data, instead of $500 in individual SMS charges.)
Up until the iPhone, phones were (almost exclusively) made/sold for the benefit of the carriers, not for the end users. Any service on the phone was seen by the carrier as a way for them to extract money from the end user. Apple's customers, on the other hand, were the end users, and they could sell more phones if they made the phones better for the end users. It was a paradigm shift that few seem to remember these days.
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Michael Scrip
macrumors G3
Yep. I, also, was simplifying it for others. 😉
iMessage can certainly add additional features to iPhone conversations... but I can also turn it off completely and still have messaging capability. Any phone on Earth can reach me.
I don't put iMessage in the same camp as services like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, or others.
It's more of an Apple "special sauce" or "enhancement" rather than a standalone product.
And I also agree with the rest of your comment.
🙂
Apple Keeps iMessage Exclusive to Its Products Because It Is an Effective Differentiator – Pixel Envy
In a court filing from Epic in support of its lawsuit against Apple, many Apple executives are on the record in emails stating the obvious: iMessage is not offered on non-Apple platforms because it is a compelling exclusive feature. For some reason, this is being seen as a shocking admission...
dk001
macrumors demi-god
I've used both and these are primarily business tools. Not seeing much of a scenario where you would have that level of interaction. Would be cool, just not seeing any real need.
dk001
macrumors demi-god
But doesn't that miss the whole point? So iMessage can send SMS/MMS. Doesn't really help.
iMessage is the default on my iPhone. I have no choice in that. If I want to contact someone on ... [insert app name here], I have to basically use that app. Anything they send me uses that app.
btw - on Android I can send text (I use Signal) to someone who doesn't have that app. I lose the encryption though on that message.
Michael Scrip
macrumors G3
Apple's "Messages" app is for SMS/MMS and iPhone-to-iPhone iMessage purposes. That's all.
So to your next point:
Correct.
Maybe your best friend uses Signal... but you don't have Signal.
Alright... is that Apple's problem?
Does this require regulation?
I guess there could be a new communication standard that everyone follows... where every communication platform is compatible with every other communication platform.
That'll be fun...
Relevant XKCD comic...
🤣
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BaldiMac
macrumors G3
Having a “compelling exclusive feature” isn’t “lock-in”. It’s creating a product people like.Apple Keeps iMessage Exclusive to Its Products Because It Is an Effective Differentiator – Pixel Envy
In a court filing from Epic in support of its lawsuit against Apple, many Apple executives are on the record in emails stating the obvious: iMessage is not offered on non-Apple platforms because it is a compelling exclusive feature. For some reason, this is being seen as a shocking admission...pxlnv.com
CarlJ
Contributor
Yep, by some people's definition, no company should be allowed to have any compelling exclusive features.
So what's the endgame here? Every smartphone is 99% the same and you just pick by what color you like?
visualseed
macrumors 65816
In the US, the carriers mandate that all phones sold should have a default SMS client and phone dialer that must operate when the phone is in setup mode, unactivated, or locked. On the iPhone, for SMS, the carries are all happy with it being the built-in message app. On Android I think all of carriers ship their phones with Google Messages as the default. Google goes the extra step of allowing users to set a new default app to handle SMS. But ultimately the SMS network belongs to the carriers and is regulated by the FCC. Carriers have the final say as to what apps are allowed to use the SMS network and from time to time have blocked SMS clients that have not played by the rules. Now the FCC has raised the issue about abusive apps that allow spoofing of the sender ID, bulk SMS spamming, interception of private data, and violating other aspects of TCPA. They are putting pressure on the carriers and Google to close the holes. In light of this, it seems Apple was right to avoid opening this can of worms for as long as legally possible.
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I7guy
macrumors Westmere
dk001
macrumors demi-god
Apple’s problem. It will become Apple’s and all other affect tech companies if this is put into play.
If Apple allowed other default text apps it might be a moot point.
New com std … that might not be a bad thing. A to A - private / public key. A to all else - public key.
That might be a benefit… a step up from std SMS/MMS.
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dk001
macrumors demi-god
But it isn’t for messaging.
I would love to have iMessage be able to handle texts from multiple apps and reply to them - Default text app to Default text app. But it doesn’t and I can’t. That is using position to limit the use of innovation.
BaldiMac
macrumors G3
The problem with innovation in messaging isn’t Apple. It’s Facebook. 2-3 billion users. Apple isn’t in the top five.
Forcing companies to support other messaging protocols seems like a horrible way to drive innovation. Not to mention the costs of hosting the protocol while not being able to monetize it is destructive.
I7guy
macrumors Westmere
That is creating a value add for the platform. If that is a deal breaker for one, vote with your $$$. Saying that apple is using iMessage to lock out competition is (in general you are against) companies enhancing their platforms.
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Of course you can, with manufacturer specific PID'S, which, unless you are using hacked software means you need the manufacturers expensive software to access it.
That is my point.
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Apple Never Made iMessage for Android to Lock-In iOS Users, Epic Court Docs Show
As part of the ongoing legal battle between Fortnite maker Epic and Apple, some new information has come to light confirming the most annoying thing about
gizmodo.com