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Elizabeth Warren slammed for wanting to ‘break up Apple’s smartphone monopoly’
(www.bostonherald.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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Technology
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I didn't know Apple was a monopoly...
They are absolute dicks with iMessage, but they are not a monopoly.
I am an iPhone user, and I don't get why people look down on the green bubbles, I have several friends with Android phones, we can all send images and texts to eachother, sure the photos are reduced in size, but it's fine.
Just implement the new message standard, Apple and stop being dicks
You kinda walked that back by yourself, I think. The point of anticompetitive practices isn't having a 100% market share, it's having a position of strength to enforce your control of the market.
So... you know, being dicks.
Enforcing a single form of in-platform commerce where you get a share and banning all other ways to sell or install software, downgrading the quality of media generated by your competitors, bundling your own unrelated software and adding roadblocks to competing alternatives... all of that is part of what's being discussed here.
The point is that there is a resonable alternative in Android, no one is forcing you to buy an iPhone, nor is the market lacking in available alternatives.
Yes, Apple are dicks, but they don't have a monopoly.
See, that's the problem with modern politics. Warren knows very well that "a monopoly" understood as "the single remaining actor in a market" is imprecise and not the bar needed for antitrust laws to kick in. But she also knows that "an anticompetitive position of strength in the market" will not make the same headlines and confuse people.
So she says "a monopoly".
So you say "not a monopoly".
So this is a sterile conversation.
Antitrust laws are in place to prevent the specific behaviors Apple has been engaging in for ages. From the muscling out of third party repair shops to the attempt to bundle together every piece of software and hardware they make in-house, Apple is blatantly violating competition rules all over the place. The only reason they haven't been more aggressively regulated already elsewhere is their monopolistic price-hiking doesn't play in territories that are more sensitive to pricing for tech. Maybe on purpose? Hard to tell. If Apple had the type of market share across the EU it has in the US one can only imagine what sort of fines or threats to split it up it would have received by this point.
They haven't implemented RCS because it's a dumpster fire with no redeeming qualities.
"RCS" only works on Android because Google did a bunch of their own shit outside the spec to make it remotely functional. They're trying to use legislature to bully their way into controlling the standard by forcing Apple to use it.
Yup, and pretending otherwise is just head burying
Google Messages is to RCS what WhatsApp is to XMPP.
And Apple is going to be no different as they deal with Google and plug into their system.
Well, it partialy works, but it just uses google's servers and there isn't any alternative apps for it.
I'm so surprised by the way this has gone in the US. The weird ass blend of SMS and messaging iMessage uses for no reason and the fact that it's sorta-kinda platform exclusive but not really is just an absolute mess of dumb engineering.
The fact that RCS is even part of this conversation seems so weird. Surely the real answer is for iMessage to just... have an Android port that works like the iOS port, right? That's how every other messaging app does it. I mean, sure, over here in Androidland where everybody uses Whatsapp (which has its own issues), RCS is a thing. If you open your text messaging app for some reason there is a Google prompt to switch it to RCS as a one-time optional choice. I just... never bothered. Because who the hell uses either SMS or RCS anyway?
Would I switch to iMessage if there was an Android port? No. Because everybody I've ever known with an iPhone uses Whatsapp, so that'd be as useful as switching to carrier pigeons. But it's worth pointing out that the only reason the EU hasn't forced interoperability for iMessage is exactly that. If it hadn't already lost the messenger app wars in Europe they would have been forced to sort this out one way or another.