https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/09/04/apple-allegedly-arguing-imessage-isnt-big-enough-to-be-eu-gatekeeper-service?
With just days to go before the European Union's Digital Markets Act designates gatekeepers, Apple is allegedly arguing iMessage isn't popular enough to be classified as a gatekeeper service.
tbf, Apple‘s iMessage dominance is mostly a US based phenomenon. In European countries, many people use WhatsApp and telegram. Anecdotal evidence: I don’t know anybody using iMessage.
Same in France. Apple or not, it’s still mostly WhatsApp and a bit of Telegram around me. Only old iPhone users who haven’t installed anything are using iMessage because it’s the default application.
I live in the states and I do not know a single person who still uses WhatsApp. Everyone uses iMessage.
Has WhatsApp ever been bigger than iMessage there? From what I heard it was basically SMS → iMessage
Part of the reason was because of sms pricing on thr earlier days. Sms was quickly free in the U.S, so they used sms because it was there. Many regions used whatsapp and similar to avoid sms charges in the early days. That usage habit still exists today
You also have a lot of movement of people between countries in the EU, and international SMS still isn’t unlimited/free for most mobile plans worldwide.
People in each country used whatever everyone else is using. In the US that became text/iMessage. This was partially driven by the way cell companies charged in the US with free texts but limits on data (iMessage uses data, but it came later).
In other countries the better at the time options won out. We talk to our friends in Europe and Africa with WhatsApp.
That’s not quite what I see in France. Many people use Whatsapp to text friends/family when they’re abroad. But everyday, I mostly see classic SMS texts (or iMessage)
I don’t know anyone in the UK that actually uses it as iMessage and not just as the SMS app.
I think this goes back to the time of 3G pay monthly SIMs (before the iPhone) that would come with unlimited data, but limited texts. That pushed people to use apps like WhatsApp that basically just allowed unlimited texts.
If Apple's iMessage does fall under the DMA ruleset, it means Apple will be required to open iMessage to third-party operators.
What does this look like in practice?
It could mean they make iMessage compatible with RCS for fucking once. Which would actually be a good thing for all Apple users.
How will it be a good thing for all Apple users since Apple users use iMessage and don’t give a crap about SMS or RCS?
Maybe it it was someone else besides google pushing RCS it might have a better adoption rate. But by this time next year google will have moved to another message app.
You’re absolutely right, but the knuckle-draggers are too busy with their FOMO to hear it.
iMessage supports a dense layer of features in excess of what’s possible with the RCS standard. RCS is a decent fallback, and maybe progress could be made towards supporting it as a fallback. But the issue is that not even all Android phones enable RCS by default, meaning iMessage would have to have a fallback and a second fallback.
And honestly, the bottom line is that Apple is unlikely to prioritize implementing RCS until their customer base is asking them to do so, which they largely aren’t. The vast majority of the anger towards Apple regarding RCS is from people who don’t buy Apple phones, or from Apple’s direct competitors seeking to improve their products. Apple users (myself included) don’t really care because a marginally better SMS experience is still going to be worse than iMessage, and if I’m really looking for rich cross-platform messaging, I can use any of the dozen widely-used apps that do exactly that.
They turn off iMessage in Europe. Or have argue it’s ability to fall back to SMS meets this. Or the industry invents a protocol that they all use and iMessage gets a new colored bubble.
What does this look like in practice?
An endless sea of spam that Apple is legally required to deliver.
Why are you getting downvoted wtf is wrong with lemmy? Apple is literally the largest shittiest company in the world.