The usage of iMessage in Europe is vastly inferior to the usage of it in America.
I think that was a reasonable argument from Apple and the European Commission agreed.
But the thing is, apple obviously wants for people to use iPhones in Europe and to use their services just like in America. But they are now very much aware that this sort of market dominance won't come for free like it does in the USA.
> Apple Messages for Business differs from the widely known iMessage by being a business to end-user service. Additionally, the encryption mechanism slightly differs from a traditional iMessage.
Given that businesses can interface with AMfB using APIs rather than the Messages app on an Apple device, it seems that would fall pretty far outside the iMessage gatekeeping definition.
it's too bad, i was hoping the USA could free ride off European regulation. i would like to see an iMessage app for Android.
for me, it's the opposite of the teenager status issues.
rather, a lot of older people seem not capable of understanding the difference between iMessage amd SMS - not colorblind, but they seem to not perceive green vs blue bubbles even after it is pointed out. and this has caused me big practical problems communicating with family due to failed message delivery (both SMS and iMessage).
Pretty sure Apple is not bringing side loading for apps in America, so I guess these changes won't necessarily trickle down.
I think the USB C change was done world wide simply because it's much more difficult to restrict hardware than software. A lot of software is geo locked.
In the U.S.A., people use iMessage by default, because they use text messaging. People don't use texts in Europe (we use WhatsApp and similar, but WhatsApp by a long margin).
The reason people still use texts in the U.S.A. is up for debate, and it's something I've thought about for a long time.
I think it's a historical artifact -- by the time that iMessage launched, the US was well into the phase of free, unlimited texting, so there was no barrier to "just texting". Since there was also no barrier (in terms of costs, subscriptions, or installation friction) to using iMessage, it was a drop-in upgrade of the user experience for SMS.
In contrast, I still have to pay a fee to send SMS messages to my European relatives, so there's a financial incentive to overcome that initial friction to switch messaging provider.
Yeah, as an American who actually knows a fair number of people overseas, there are probably a literal handful of people who I communicate with on a regular basis there and I use a variety of channels but SMS/iMessage works fine one a day-to-day basis for most folks.
The US probably moved to SMS being basically free (domestically) before Europe did. As a result it seems that the US standardized on SMS (and basically transparently iMessage) because that's what was just there. I never get a Whatsapp message from someone in the US and rarely anything other than SMS/iMessage. I suspect the vast majority of people I know don't have Whatsapp installed. I use it with people I know internationally.
> More importantly, most Americas do not text anyone outside of the country, and haven't really ever
As a dual-citizen of Canada and the US, I'd have to say that's massively overgeneralized. Pretty much every Canadian I know regularly texts with Americans (iMessage or not), which means those Americans are texting with people outside of the Country.
The USA and Canada are really the same country, as far as the telcos are concerned. They're part of the same North American phone system, and have the same +1 prefix. Calls between the countries are all free, and don't carry international charges. You might think they're separate countries, and the governments may agree, but the telecom companies disagree.
> by the time that iMessage launched, the US was well into the phase of free, unlimited texting
The iPhone itself launched with unlimited data, but limited text messages.
> keep in mind that AT&T's default rate plans for the iPhone don't include unlimited SMS messages: they include 200 messages per month unless you add an extra-SMS plan. Chatting this way can easily rack up your SMS charges if you're not careful.
When iMessage launched as part of iOS 5, free unlimited SMS was still not a normal thing.
> iMessage is Apple's answer to SMS and MMS—a way to send text and multimedia messages to other iOS device users without relying on a cell carrier. Any kind of text-type message between iOS users can be sent for free in unlimited amounts without chipping away at those overpriced text messages that you pay for through your carrier.
> When iMessage launched as part of iOS 5, free unlimited SMS was still not a normal thing.
It wasn’t universal on all wireless plans, for sure, but by 2011, in the U.S., it was definitely more common that at least for smartphone plans, which were starting to shift into charging for amounts of data usage rather than blanket “unlimited” buckets and were also starting to charge extra fees for tethering (this is also the time that LTE became real and usable in the U.S.), you’d get unlimited or seemingly nearly unlimited messaging plans as part of the fee.
Carriers had been offering large or unlimited text plans for years at this point — my SideKick in high school had unlimited texting as part of the $20 a month fee that T-Mobile charged on top of the minutes plan to operate the software. BlackBerry took advantage of this too with its BIS plans on carriers and the “free texting” lure of BlackBerry via BBM and SMS was a big selling point of those devices for sure.
But the key here is “for smartphone plans.” You still had a lot of non-smartphone users in 2011 and so part of the pitch to get them to spend $500 on a phone that would require a $50 a month plan was unlimited texts. iMessage was a nice carrot here
What I think iMessage did was not only spur carriers to cut the SMS fees even further (again, for smartphone plans), but it was a great additional reason to get people to adopt smartphones. Because the sort of unspoken rule was that if you had a smartphone in the U.S., you had unlimited texting. Most people in the U.S. don’t text people outside the U.S. so unless you have family or friends in other countries or you do a lot of international business, I think SMS was just sort of an accepted default for a lot of people.
So the timing for iMessage in the U.S. was perfect because it used the same default app everyone used, could work on your Mac or iPad or iPod touch too AND it worked internationally with other iPhones. Plus blue bubbles and the many significant technical and security improvements over the old way. But mostly blue bubbles.
But as the other poster said, the lure of BBM and later WhatsApp in the rest of the world was largely that you could use it internationally for free. And the iPhone didn’t get its strong international adoption until after things like WhatsApp had already landed.
The iPhone’s initial carrier restrictions didn’t start to lift until 2011-ish and 2012 so you had Android growing extremely quickly in Europe and Latin America and Asia, where a thing like WhatsApp (which debuted first on iPhone in 2009, it then came to BlackBerry and then in 2010 Android and Symbian) could grow like a weed and have hundreds of millions of users before most people in the U.S. had even heard of it. (I was on CNN and Fox Business in 2014 explaining what WhatsApp was and why Facebook had just spent $20b on it).
So I think timing on iMessage was perfect for U.S. domination (where iPhone marketshare is over 50% but depending on your demographic/age, is probably even higher) but it might have just missed being the defacto tool in the rest of the world.
No one cared about blue bubbles when iMessage launched, because it hadn't yet become symbolic of "in the ecosystem, can be in group chats without breaking certain features." (In fact, I'm not even sure how many of the user-facing group chat features that break with SMS were even present in 2011...)
The idea that "blue bubbles" were somehow a major driver of iMessage adoption when it first debuted is rank historical revisionism to fit a narrative that isn't even all that universal today.
> In contrast, I still have to pay a fee to send SMS messages to my European relatives, so there's a financial incentive to overcome that initial friction to switch messaging provider.
In addition to the financial disincentive for SMS in the EU, communications iMessage to iMessage are E2EE whereas SMS messages are not, even in the context of iMessage to SMS and vice versa.
Also also, Whatsapp’s E2EE is not as reassuring given Meta/Facebook owns Whatsapp.
> In contrast, I still have to pay a fee to send SMS messages to my European relatives
Oh wow, yeah that's definitely a big reason people would use what's app instead. That's wild to think about and makes no sense. Any idea why that is? Is it regulatory reasons maybe?
The reason is simply that phone calls across Europe were and are usually not free/included in flat rate plans. Telcos just never found a way to agree on something that makes sense: It's quite common to get unlimited domestic calls, but pay 10-30 cents per minute to a neighboring country.
Nobody (other than businesses) actually pays that; people just ended up using WhatsApp for both calls and texts instead.
So in a way it's the absence of regulation: Data roaming is free within the EU, thanks to a corresponding EU regulation; before that, it wasn't unusual to pay more than EUR 10 per Megabyte (yes, Megabyte, not Gigabyte).
Regulation 2018/1971 limits the price for outgoing calls within the EEA to 0.19 ct/minute (excl. VAT). Interestingly enough, there doesn't seem to be a limit on incoming calls, though most providers don't charge for incoming calls.
There's no charge for incoming calls from abroad while at home: All EU countries use "caller pays" billing (unlike the US, which historically has used shared cost for mobile phones).
That's why there are prepaid SIMs without a monthly fee and unlimited incoming calls: The caller's operator pays the called operator a termination charge by the minute.
There is an incoming call charge while roaming, the rationale being that the caller doesn't know where you are and needs predictability in pricing (so the called party pays for the leg from their home country to where they are), but the EU has capped that to zero within the EEA.
Yes. Most of the plans of the provider that I use in the US (T-Mobile) include free SMS and MMS to any country (also free data roaming in almost any country). I think it's similar for other providers (Verizon and AT&T), but I'm not sure as I'm not familiar with their plans.
Makes sense. Another thing that occurred to me a while ago was that iPhones have a 61% market share in the U.S.A., whereas Android dominates in Europe (65%). So it could well be that people in Europe with iPhones don't bother trying to use iMessage because it's statistically unlikely the recipient has an iPhone.
Agreed, and additionally, at that time there were no significant SMS alternatives in the US, most people had dumb phones, and no messaging apps came with the sort of supplementary features we have grown accustomed to in the past ten years.
Yeah, actually until I finally haggled for a better plan maybe ~5 years ago, it used to cost me $0.25 to send an SMS to anyone, even in my own country (Canada)...
Canada IMO does take the crown of having the absolute worst telecoms. It’s absolutely astounding to see some of the stuff they pull sometimes. I remember being younger and wanting to unlock a phone from Rogers. They wanted $125 for this act of changing a row in a database
Yeah, this reminds me, mine and my wife's bills inexplicably went up by like $5 this month, so now I have to investigate as to why our plans that have been locked in at a certain rate for years on end are now suddenly costing us more, without any notification to us. Gotta love it.
How much does the cheapest mobile plan that offers "free and unlimited" texting cost in the US? Quick look at t-mobile shows $15/month for unlimited texts.
Exactly. When my wife and I were younger we would easily send over 3000 sms messages to each other per month; I remember the number because my family saw it on my phone bill and thought it was absurd. Jumping on an unlimited sms plan for an extra $10-15 per month was a no brainer versus paying $0.10 per sms.
US was a first-mover and had early telcom penetration, so SMS became culturally ubiquitous since it was the tech of the era. Late-movers could skip that and go straight to data-based telcoms and never had to deal with the critical culture mass of SMS while the US was stuck bolting on to and bridging SMS.
It's like being able to skip over copper and go straight to fiber optics.
> US was a first-mover and had early telcom penetration, so SMS became culturally ubiquitous since it was the tech of the era.
Telco penetration – yes, the US had a upper hand. SMS (and messaging) – no, the US lagged behind for many years.
DAMPS (the 2nd generation mobile standard in the US) and early CDMA US networks did not support SMS/text messaging at all whereas European telco users had already been happily texting each other since the introduction of GSM (2G, early 90s). Americans used the phone answering machines and the voicemail instead, which has been widely depicted in Hollywood movies and was a source of amusement for non-US watchers.
GSM was later introduced in the US with very limited coverage on east and west coasts to support roaming for European users (roaming was non-existand in DAMPS and in CDMA networks, either) and operated on a frequency band (1900 MHz) that was incompatible with GSM 2G 900/1800 MHz bands and required a tri-band handset but it introduced SMS to the US mobile networks users for the first time.
There was also a pricing barrier that hampered adoption of SMS in the US – European and Asian users had to pay for SMS's they have sent, but not receive one (the cost was zero), whereas the US users had to pay to send AND to receive text messages. Gradually, 3G came to the US, brought SMS out of the box, gradually replaced DAMPS and CDMA networks in the US and the US users got SMS out of the box.
The US did not lead the cultural revolution that SMS had brought about in Europe/Asia.
I don't know about that. I remember back in the nineties we were all using SMS in England. Pretty much all my friends had a mobile, and we treated SMS like social media DMs.
One really weird way that you can see that is looking at Denmark, which has historically been used as a test market for telcos. SMS was practically free when iMessage was announced, not entirely, but enough people had unlimited SMS plans at that time. Denmark was the testing ground for different phones and pricing plans, better to screw up in a market with 5 million people, compared to one with 80 million.
I believe that the "free" SMSs at the time is a pretty big reason why iMessage is huge in Denmark, but not in the countries surrounding us. It's not the biggest messaging platform, that would be Facebook and Facebook messenger, not WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal. It seems like people want Europe to be all in on "alternative" platforms, but it's frequently all Facebook properties.
IOS is the dominating mobile OS in Denmark, everyone I know uses iMessage.
I wonder if the 0.5 cent fee on free installs will change anything, will the train ticketing app start charging a subscription fee on IOS now that they need to pay per install Apple?
That fee is only if the developer opts into the new terms. They are welcome to continue with the current App Store terms indefinitely and pay nothing per install.
Aside from status-conscious teenagers (eww, green vs. blue) pretty much no one in the US cares whether you're on standard SMS vs. iMessage. But I pretty much only use WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger with friends overseas.
In Italy, in 2005-2007 text messages were WIDELY used by teenagers in (like me at the time) too - they weren't free but really cheap (4000 for 2€/month) so pretty much everyone used them.
Then a couple years later... gone, replaced by WhatsApp.
In that the EU does not sit idle once you become a significantly popular player in a given market, not in the sense that they were given free userbase. E.g. in this case if iPhones became more popular then they'd have to open up iMessage where as in the US having market dominance comes with significantly fewer strings attached.
In certain demographics in the USA (teenagers, young adults) the usage of iMessage is around 90%.
It's a defacto monopoly but nothing is done about it from an anti-monopoly perspective. Such as forcing Apple to adopt open standards and interoperability. This market dominance does have a very real impact in which products people will and can realistically consume.
I think maybe coming from a geeky background we might be quick to think such things are irrelevant but I don't think they are.
I believe the assertion suggesting that iMessage plays a pivotal role in the success of the iPhone and contributes significantly to Apple's business is inaccurate. The iMessage platform, in itself, does not possess an inherent quality that renders the iPhone more appealing to consumers. On the contrary, it is the iPhone's inherent appeal that enhances the attractiveness of iMessage. The prestige of the iPhone imparts a certain allure to iMessage, establishing a relationship where the iPhone acts as the catalyst for iMessage's appeal, rather than the reverse. This is why the the iPhone is still a status symbol among the middle class and richest people in the EU, Asia and India - even though they couldn't care less about iMessage over there.
> This is why the the iPhone is still a status symbol among the middle class and richest people in the EU
wat?
iPhone costs as much as an equivalent Android (and has for some time), and since you can get it with your phone subscription for a rather low monthly payment, it hasn't been a status symbol for a decade or more.
> since you can get it with your phone subscription for a rather low monthly payment
This is not (anymore) how people buy their phones in many countries. Even on relatively expensive post-paid plans in some European countries, you don't get a discounted phone anymore: All they offer is an interest-free installment plan.
> iPhone costs as much as an equivalent Android
What's an equivalent iPhone to e.g. a Galaxy A54 (~1 year old, EUR ~300-350)?
The iPhone SE (2022) is twice as old and starts at EUR 500.
> It has nothing to do with the contract discounts that phone providers used to offer.
It has a lot to do with that. Many US providers offer significant discounts on iPhones when buying them on a (new or renewed) contract. This was a very commonplace thing in Europe as well, but I believe it's become less common.
Installment payments change nothing about the base price.
But they still make it much more accessible to buy an iPhone for someone who doesn't have €500 or $1000 or whatever at one time to comfortably spend on one.
The idea that iPhones could be a meaningful "status symbol" by this point in their lifetime, given all the ways one can obtain one cheaply if that is what one wants, and the percentage of people who own them, just doesn't hold up under scrutiny. It's a meme repeated by people who need some reason to believe that people don't buy Apple's products on their own merits—much like the idea that it's a "cult".
If you can't see the huge difference between "you can pay $1500+/month to own an expensive car" and "you can pay $30/month to own an iPhone" in terms of accessibility, then I'm not sure what to say.
Lunch being expensive too in Sweden does not make the iPhone more affordable across Europe. In some European countries an iPhone SE costs a third of the average monthly net salary.
That's bullshit. You still get the phone thrown after you with a Phone Contract, and often it's the same price as buying the phone in a store.
Even with a 2 year contract
Only flagships, But decent Androids can be had for much less than an iPhone. Like the Samsung A54 for example. Apple doesn't have ~300 Euro phones with OLED screens in its offer.
> Apple doesn't have ~300 Euro phones with OLED screens in its offer.
Sure they do, the iPhone 12 is still widely available and it’s at least twice as fast as an A54.
The prestige argument just hold up when you look at the data unless you scope it to say flagships. Google and Samsung charge just as much, and they have the same decreasingly small prestige that conveys. We’re 15 years into the touchscreen era so you’re just not impressing anyone.
Now, maybe that extra hundred euros is really critical to you but on the other hand the iPhone will have a service life years longer (it’s over twice as fast), but also neither of these is in a price range where you’re moving into prestige territory. This is like arguing Toyota vs. VW in an alternate universe where Mercedes and Bentley don’t exist. Phones are an impressively flat market in that regard: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai have the same phones as millions of people who earn many orders of magnitude less than either of them.
I assumed you meant yearly because the idea that someone would be able to afford a €400 phone but not a €500 phone just doesn’t make sense when you’re talking about monthly income. Someone making €2k monthly is looking at less 1% of their annual income difference for a device they’ll buy once or twice per decade. It’s a noticeable amount of money, sure, but I’d be quite surprised if that was the area they’d feel a priority to economize.
Yes, but that doesn't make them "status phones for middle class people". The latest iPhone 15 can be had for 30 EUR/month even in Sweden (Sweden is very expensive) [1]. That's a single lunch for two.
Sweden also has some of the highest salaries in Europe/the world, that's why they're not a status symbol, because even a pizza delivery boy can afford an iPhone 15 Pro Max.
But they very much are a status symbol in less developed countries with lower wages: Eastern Europe, Latin America, etc. Lower and middle class people there will save for over a year just to get the latest iPhone, which is why there's a huge market there for clones.
The original claim was about "the EU" as a whole. Now it's "less developed countries with lowest wages".
Even in Eastern Europe it's much less of a status symbol than let's say 10 years ago: installment plans are much more affordable to a larger part of the population. Source: am from Eastern Europe (though I live in Sweden now).
> Lower and middle class people there will save for over a year just to get the latest iPhone
Yup, because the poor unwashed masses don't have discounts, instalment plans or phones included with subscriptions. Oh wait, they do.
Affordable doesn't mean financially sound. Going in debt to buy a phone you can't afford outright in cash, means you're too poor to afford it, that's why is a status symbol.
Non techie people who buy phones in the real world don't care about stuf they can't see or feel or don't understand, like long SW updates, since it's not like Androids stop working once you stop getting updates.
They do care about stuff the can actually see, like having big bright high resolution OLLED display, not that dim low-res display on the SE pulled straight out of a 2008 parts bin.
Especially that phones are now the main computing and content consumption platforms for most people. and if you put a 6.2 inch 1000 nits 1080p OLED vs 4.7 inch 720p 400 nits IPS, the difference will be as big as the grand canion and sway purchasing decisions way more than years of SW updates.
> Non techie people who buy phones in the real world don't care about stuf they can't see or feel or don't understand, like long SW updates, since it's not like Androids stop working once you stop getting updates.
No, they care when apps stop allowing them to watch DRMed content or they can’t get the latest version anymore because it requires a newer API version. They also care that Android apps cost more to develop because the developers have to avoid using newer APIs or spend more time on QA testing multiple versions. I’ve seen that enough times to know it’s a real problem, and it’s WAY more frustrating to the average person to learn that the phone they “just” bought is no longer supported. This is especially true for older users who are used to keeping a PC for a decade.
> In which universe your Android you just bough becomes outdated?
The real one? I know multiple people who paid decent money ($2-300) for phones they saw on sale while shopping, not realizing that they were close to the end of the manufacturer’s run and about to stop getting updates. I used to have a Lenovo tablet which never saw an update to the version of Android released a couple months before the hardware shipped, and stopped getting updates within a year.
I know about this because things like banking apps started nagging them and they asked me for help. Transferring to a new device is scary for a lot of people so this is not a great experience all around.
Another big step function was when security standards started dropping TLS 1.0 or 1.1 and so people who’d been using older devices started getting errors from things they’d been using for years. That’s a bit old by now, but this is still an issue for users of some assistive devices and “smart” appliances which aren’t easy to replace, and is representative of the problems you can hit with an unresponsive vendor and outside services changing due to factors outside of the user’s control - you might scoff and say “that’s so old, who cares?” but that blind person with a Braille display which costs a grand or two to replace probably feels differently.
>The real one? I know multiple people who paid decent money ($2-300) for phones they saw on sale while shopping, not realizing that they were close to the end of the manufacturer’s run and about to stop getting updates.
Please stop dramatizing things with poor examples that are at best anecdotal. But let's say anecdotally, you do buy an old Android phone today by accident, something that gets no updates, something on Android 11 that >3 years old that some shop still has in stock for some reason. All banking apps will still work on Android 11 today and most likely will well into the future. So will Netflix. You're probably thinking of the days of Android KitKat or Jelly bean. In no way buying an older Android today will mean your popular apps will immediately stop working due to APIs getting deprecated. Things don't get deprecated so quickly as you imagine anymore.
I've had phones that hadn't received OEM updates in a half-decade but still ran Netflix just fine. Quite literally, the only thing you're describing right here is the TLS cutoff which also exists for Apple devices.
>Non techie folks care when their insecure phone allows something as important as their bank account to be hacked.
How many times are we gonna play this boogieman card? As if everyone gets their bank account instantly emptied by hackers the moment their Android is a day out of it's support window.
How many times has that actually happened to users of older un-updated Androids in the real world, documented? I know about over half a dozen people with out of date Androids and they seem to still be solvent with their banks accounts intact. One of them is me.
Hackers in the real world wanting to steal your savings are more likely to use phishing to get you to hand over your banking credentials voluntarily, rather than to build some elaborate malware targeting some unpatched flaw in your phone's OS to steal your banking credentials. Not that the latter isn't a risk, but it's being blown way out of proportion.
>The original Google Pixel also came out in 2016, and was completely dropped from support at the end of 2019.
We're talking here about buying modern phones today, not buying phones from the past. Google and Samsung did a 180 recently where they promise 7 years of updates to their lates phones. What argument are you gonna use 6 years from when those phones will still get updates?
Did you seriously just pivot from "nobody cares about updates" to bragging that a company with Google's track record in regards to keeping it's promises has made another one?
I said most average users don't know or care about updates. Then I said that If you happend to be amongst those who does care bout updates, like you, then you need not worry cause the popular new Androids have started offering 7 years of updates. One statement does not contradict the other.
If text comprehension is challenging for you might I suggest using a LLM to summarize things and extract the bullet points.
Parent's arguing that a minority of users have different motives and view it as a Veblen good. Might be true, but what about the rest of the iPhone users ?
It isn't a status symbol in western Europe. Really
Every moron can get one with their 30-50€/Mo contracts, and you see many poor people running around with it
I also use WhatsApp and Signal as a daily driver. iMessage is legitimately superior to all other messaging platforms I've used, and it isn't close.
iMessage isn't just a text messaging app, it also serves as a shared application fabric. The many iOS objects and apps are integrated into iMessage as first-class things that can be securely shared and seamlessly collaborated on between groups of people over the iMessage backbone. It isn't just group chats but also group content. If you have non-iMessage users in the group then all of this is disabled and it reverts to being a text message app. I know many average people that live in those collaboration features without even really thinking about it because they work so much more seamlessly than the alternatives.
No, it has rather obvious technical implications that people like to pretend do not exist. Those features people use are effectively not portable to other platforms short of making iOS run on other people's hardware. Sure, the messaging might be portable, ignoring the security concerns, but iMessage is used for a lot more than that.
In short, any portable version would still be nerfed, just slightly less nerfed than the current situation. The green bubbles would still be there to indicate that their platform can't support core functionality of iOS inside of iMessage.
Because it has substantive features that don't exist on Android or any other mobile OS. Those features aren't trivial, would be difficult or impossible to replicate, and people use them for serious things.
I don't have a dog in this fight but no one complaining ever really addresses this. iMessage is not just a chat app, even though many people like to pretend it is. It only looks like a chat app if you are not on iOS.
I'd say imessage (and facetime) is about half of why I use an iphone in the end. It's just very good at communicating with my social network, which predominately uses iphones.
As someone in the US, it's totally irrelevant. I never use Facetime and Imessage vs. SMS is a just don't care. If I occasionally communicate internationally, it's via Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger.
It kind of sounds like you’re saying “as a representative sample of people in the US”. If this is the case you are wrong — plenty of people use these services.
If you’re just saying “you” then sure whatever, I put salsa on my toast.
Do you ever video chat with friends or family? In my experience this is almost entirely over FaceTime, though zoom had its moment there during the lockdown.
iMessage popularity has little to do with status and everything to do with iPhone users refusing to use other messaging apps. If you want to text an iPhone and you don’t have iMessage chances are you will be forced to use sms which is utterly trash. I’ve been unable to convince my friends to use a messaging app so if I want to text them I pretty much need an iPhone.
The fact that it's impossible to convince any of your friends to use something that works with all phones and not just iPhones arguably does have something to do with status.
In Europe, where less than half of all people (across social strata) use iPhones/iOS, this simply doesn't fly, so there is no "green bubble problem".
I think its more about the cultural critical mass than status. Most people already feel they have too many apps cluttering their screen, and at least in the US they have friends who only use iMessage, so they need iMessage. Once youve decided you need iMessage pretty easy to also decide not to bother with other messaging apps. The network effect is a huge problem for getting people to switch.
I'm not surprised by the iMessage decision*, but on the Bing case I'm personally still on the bench. I guess that API-only use is exempt from DMA?
* Americans, virtually no one uses iMessage outside your country, or at least to the point that it'll force you to get an iPhone. Even Japan, with their love with iPhones, uses a homegrown service for their messaging needs.
LINE is as homegrown as Tiktok with a front-end built by an American dev. It was initially owned by a Korean company (Naver), and a lot of the wikipedia article reads like a hagiography.
Calling LINE a win over iMessage is a huge stretch. The privacy policies on LINE were not good at all when I last looked at it several years ago; transferring your account from one phone to another was (is?) really annoying, and getting a username isn't necessarily that easy.
Say what you want, but Apple didn't punish me as much for having moved from Japan to Canada.
Swiss datapoint: my whole extended family/friends circle has iPhones and they only use WhatsApp (and FaceTime for video). I'm not even sure I ever heard the name "iMessage" before.
> I'm not even sure I ever heard the name "iMessage" before
Nobody I know colloquially calls it that in the US either. The app is called "messages", and people just call it "texting"... "on an iPhone". I don't think most people even realize it is not SMS/MMS.
French here. I still use iMessage for family and friends one to one discussions but group chats are exclusively on WhatsApp here… and I’ve got tons. Too much. For every circle and sometimes more than one per circle depending on the subject. Are US people using iMessage for this ?
WhatsApp is almost the de-facto standard for messaging in Europe, with cash transfers usually seconded to Revolut.
iMessage in the US is, to put it bluntly, a self-selecting cult. The amount of articles, podcasts and dating vlogs that detail how common it is to straight up discount a member of the opposite sex from dating based on not having an iPhone is testament to this.
In an OKCupid Poll (which is about as transparent as dating bigdata ever got) 27% of respondents felt that green bubbles were less desirable than mansplaining in terms of dealbreakers in a potential partner...
> I think iMessage is common in English speaking countries with high iPhone usage.
I can confirm that iMessage is extremely common in Australia. WhatsApp is very uncommon, outside of people with European (and maybe South American?) friends or family to keep in touch with. And given the country's demographics, I suspect there are far more people using WeChat to keep up with their overseas contacts in Aus than there are people using WhatsApp.
>Even Japan, with their love with iPhones, uses a homegrown service for their messaging needs.
Meanwhile Europe uses another US tech giant's service. The simple answer is that most of Europe is not wealthy enough to afford iPhones and not adept enough at developing competing services without first kneecapping competition with regulation.
European countries that have high disposable income like the US have higher market share of iPhones. In general, iPhones owners are wealthier across the board than Android phone owners.
No real surprise about iMessage and Bing. They are not dominant communication methods/search engines at all, at least within my social circles (in Sweden).
It's the opposite of protectionism. European competitors for these services existed at some point, but because they lacked the advantage of a sufficiently large home market and didn't get any extra protection to make up for it, they didn't do as well.
Depending on the strength of network effects, they either quickly lost users to the biggest platform, saw the writing on the wall and took an acquisition offer instead, or continue to hold their ground within a particular niche where expanding quickly is difficult (for both foreign and local companies).
Any new European internet companies wishing to make it big at home will probably need to concentrate mainly on the US market first in order to have those same network effects work in their favor instead of against them.
> Examples of the “do’s”: gatekeepers will for example have to:
> - allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services in certain specific situations;
> - allow their business users to access the data that they generate in their use of the gatekeeper’s platform;
> - provide companies advertising on their platform with the tools and information necessary for advertisers and publishers to carry out their own independent verification of their advertisements hosted by the gatekeeper;
> - allow their business users to promote their offer and conclude contracts with their customers outside the gatekeeper’s platform.
>
> Example of the “don'ts”: gatekeepers will for example no longer:
>
> - treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform;
> - prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms;
> - prevent users from un-installing any pre-installed software or app if they wish so;
> - track end users outside of the gatekeepers' core platform service for the purpose of targeted advertising, without effective consent having been granted.
---
> As an aside, it strikes me as vaguely protectionist to see that it’s only 6 companies and none of them are European… (maybe that’s a hot take?)
Simply put, there are no European companies on this level. If you want a phone, you are going to have to choose Android or iOS. To chat with people on your new phone, you will use what your friends & family are on - most often WhatsApp. When you want to search something on the internet, for most people it's going to be the default search engine, so Google Search. And when you want to go on a Social Network, it's going to be... etc, etc. The EU is of course part of the western world and so has not had the same requirements to develop their own companies, or lock American companies out, like China/Russia.
Perhaps the closest that could come to mind could be some messaging apps, e.g. Threema, or perhaps Mastodon as a social network (sure, it's federated, but anyway...). But these don't qualify as they are nowhere near big enough.
Finally, I'm quite optimistic about the DMA; not just for consumers in the EU but also in the US and worldwide. I feel there has been significant consolidation of market power and stagnation/coming stagnation, and competition is often considered the way to break out of this. Perhaps we will see a new generation of companies and ideas and more options for both consumers and small/medium businesses in the future.
I disagree about the benefits for folks in the US. The EU moves comparatively quickly in law and is quite comfortable experimenting with regulations. The US by comparison feels very slow and deferential—almost as if when it’s not explicitly illegal then we should presume there’s no harm. I think any “openness” that leaks out of the EU will just be exploited in the US by platform-level companies to the detriment of individuals, and I have no expectation that US policies or laws will catch up any time soon.
I get your point. But on the other hand you can look at GDPR and see after it that California passed the CCPA, Canada passed their own PIPEDA data privacy act, etc, so there is some precedent for other jurisdictions passing similar laws in the future.
Companies and services that come out of this regulation may end up competing in the US anyway and creating a more competitive landscape there anyway, even if there is no DMA-style legislation passed there.
> way more useful for me as a user than having "alternate app stores"
It's not only alternative app stores. It's browsers with ad-blockers, youtube clients that auto-skip sponsor messages in the middle of videos and apps for $0, that cost money on the main app store - although their code is open source.
> apps for $0, that cost money on the main app store - although their code is open source
Interesting, I'm generally very opposed to Apple's way, but this sounds like a real unexpected benefit (silver lining on the cloud maybe?). It enables what I've long asked for from devs, mainly that they make the source available to paying customers.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I think I mean something else. I'm talking about this phenomenon:
A software project is using an open source licence. And app gets made for Android, and because of culture or GPL, the app is open source, too. But on Google Play, the app costs money, contains ads, or there is sub-features, that you only get if you pay a (one time/monthly) fee.
But because it's trivial to sideload on Android, I can just get the app from github (or from the open source app store FDroid) and install it myself, for free. No ads, no locked content.
Installing it means installing a bundle or a package, which would come with all of the ads and intricacies you want to get away from.
There are almost no applications (at least that I've found) where you can download the source code of the app, build it and then install it locally to your device (except for testing of course).
I've been using FDRoid for many years now, so maybe it changed, but the two important examples always where:
* OSMand, the main openstreetmaps client on android: the version on Google Play comes just with the basics, if you want extras, like the topographic height contour lines overlaid on your maps, which is important for mountain sports, you had to pay, even that data is free and the feature is GPL-3.0.
* Simple Mobile Tools, a huge software suite of little tools (address book, voice recorder, calendar, ect.): if you get it from Google Play, it nags you to buy the "thank you" app, even if you already bought it. They has also started releasing "Pro" versions of the tools, which have more functionality and for which you have to pay - again. Everything is GPL-3.0., and therefor free on FDRoid.
This - they should just mandate RCS, or maybe actually invest in developing a modern European standard and then mandate that. It’s not like they don’t have research universities with CS departments who could be part of a standards body.
I don’t mean they should limit alternatives - just that they should require a modern, E2EE standard on all phones, and then we can all just shut up about this.
"forced" is a strong word when some of these games could have not existed or be delayed for a few years without EPIC's money, and you still get the choice to just not play them at all (it's a game, not a CAD tool mandated by a client)
While I don't think we'll see Meta do this for their apps, I do expect (if they can stomach the cost) Epic and Valve to build their own stores.
Epic didn't have much success getting Android users to sideload Fortnite, so I don't know how well it will go for either, but I know that gamers are a dedicated bunch and both Valve and Epic want to have the user-level connection.
From what I've seen, one of the requirements of a competing App Marketplace on iOS is that they allow any developer to submit apps to them—I'm unclear on whether they can restrict by category (eg, only allow games), but AIUI they can't just restrict their own marketplace to selling the apps they themselves publish.
This is a very interesting requirement, and will definitely at least make companies like Epic, Valve, and Facebook pause and think before deciding whether they actually want to be running an App Marketplace.
I wonder if this will lead to a reversal on supporting RCS, as I feel it was motivated to keep regulators at bay and now that iMessage is found to be exempt I don’t know if Apple has any incentive to follow through
RCS is there to head off further antitrust laws (e.g. in the US) that might force them to open up their messaging platform. Announcing RCS and then canning it the moment they head off one jurisdiction's first attempt at a law would be counterproductive.
RCS is a bad enough protocol to not present a real alternative to iMessage while allowing Apple to truthfully claim that they're supporting the thing that Google has been pointing to for message interoperability all these years.
Not really. If I'm a business and need to contact my customers and can just call them or text them on SMS or third party messenger platforms. Apple does not gatekeep me from reaching out to them. But if I'm a business and want to sell my customers an app, then Apple is the gatekeeper for the iOS platform, as I can't distribute my app to my customers with Apple devices any other way.
Similar with people. In EU nobody I know defaults to iMessages so it's not a big issue here.
To be fair to the EU, it's not widely used by people in the EU either.
Part of the issue is that here in the US we think Apple is bigger than it is. Maybe it's an important messaging network here in the US, but everywhere else, it's just a phone. A nice one. But still just a phone.
To be fair, it's not "just a phone". iPhone integrates with the whole Apple ecosystem, so I can copy text on my phone and paste it on my Mac without thinking about it, or AirDrop a large file, or use it as a remote control for my Apple TV, and so forth.
It's just as much part of the Apple ecosystem everywhere in the world, even if you don't use iMessage. You're not getting anything like that if you're using Android and a PC. Which may be fine depending on your needs. But iMessage isn't the only differentiator here.
Not a lot of people here uses a Mac either. Why spend 1500 euros on a Mac when you can buy a windows laptop for 500-700 that does everything the Mac does.
Because it tends to last for 2-3 times as long and still holds resale value when you finally choose to upgrade.
Because of this, entry-level Macs are often actually cheaper in the long run -- and with the M chips they're faster too. And of course generally provide a much higher-quality experience, like trackpad quality, screen quality, etc.
[citation needed] Lot of bold claims there about longevity.
You also forgot "still holds resale value until they drop support for your model in macOS, and then software stops supporting the macOS version you're able to run"
Yeah until they die because the not changeable SSDs has reached their cycles.
I see many old ThinkPads still humming in the university library, but not many old macs.
Extraordinarily few people reach the cycle limit of the SSD on their Mac. That's not something to worry about for probably 99.999% of people, so it's just a weird thing to bring up.
And how do you know you're not seeing many old MacBooks? The MBA was launched over a decade and a half ago and it still looks almost identical to a casual observer.
You may be thinking of the bugs that were present in the very first generation of M1s, that caused them to erroneously display a wear level much higher than they were actually experiencing.
And as long as you have the Silver color option, a MacBook Air from 2023 looks very much like a MacBook Air from 2014 if you're not stopping and looking closely at it.
If you have one of the colored ones, those date back to 2018 with, again, a very similar design to today's.
Except there aren't reports of that. Just tried googling and couldn't find anything about SSD failure actually happening. What I did find was some fearmongering back in 2021 about whether it might become a thing, but it seems like it was entirely hypothetical and never actually happened.
Also the M1 has only been around for a little over 3 years. They can't be dying after 4 years because they're not that old.
Where are you getting all this misinformation from? And why are you motivated to be repeating it?
You absolutely can do those kinds of things between Windows and Android. For clipboard, Microsoft has a cloud clipboard between SwiftKey and Windows. KDE connect lets you send your clipboard to another device on the local WiFi, or toss files over local WiFi to another device with KDE Connect.
KDE Connect also lets me use my phone as a remote for my Windows machine.
If the European Commission were to regulate something that almost nobody in the EU actually uses, Apple probably would have an easy time convincing courts that the EC overstepped their mandate.
I think that was a reasonable argument from Apple and the European Commission agreed.
But the thing is, apple obviously wants for people to use iPhones in Europe and to use their services just like in America. But they are now very much aware that this sort of market dominance won't come for free like it does in the USA.