For folks who don't have time to read a 90 page document, the case rests on specific claims, not just the general claim that iPhone is a monopoly because it's so big. Here are those claims:
1. "Super Apps"
Apple has restrictions on what they allow on the App Store as far as "Super Apps", which are apps that might offer a wide variety of different services (specifically, an app which has several "mini programs" within it, like apps within an app). In China, WeChat does many different things, for example, from messaging to payments. This complaint alleges that Apple makes it difficult or impossible to offer this kind of app on their platform. Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.
2. Cloud streaming apps
Similar to "super apps", the document alleges that Apple restricts apps which might stream different apps directly to the phone (like video games). It seems there are several roadblocks that Apple has added that make these kinds of apps difficult to release and promote - and of course, Apple offers their own gaming subscription service called Apple Arcade which might be threatened by such a service.
3. Messaging interoperability
Probably most people are familiar with this already, how messages between (for example) iOS and Android devices do not share the same feature-set.
4. Smartwatches
Other smart watches than the Apple Watch exist, but the document alleges that Apple restricts the functionality that these devices have access to so that they are less useful than the Apple Watch. Also, the Apple Watch itself does not offer compatibility with Android.
5. Digital wallets
It is claimed that Apple restricts the APIs available so that only Apple Pay can implement "tap to pay" on iOS. In addition to lock-in, note that Apple also collects fees from banks for using Apple Pay, so they get direct financial benefit in addition to the more nebulous benefit of enhancing the Apple platform.
This feels like it reflects similar actions taken against companies that are dominant in a market. The first one I heard about[1] was IBM versus Memorex which was making IBM 360 "compatible" disk drives. IBM lost and it generated some solid case law that has been relied on in this sort of prosecution.
In the IBM case it opened up an entire industry of third party "compatible" peripherals and saved consumers a ton of money.
[1] I had a summer intern position in Field Engineering Services in 1978 and it was what all the FEs were talking about how it was going to "destroy" IBM's field service organization.
> This feels like it reflects similar actions taken against companies that are dominant in a market.
Not simply that a company is dominant; it is more about how and why they are dominant.
Update 2:40 pm ET: After some research, the practices below may capture much (though not necessarily all) of what the Department of Justice views unfavorably:
* horizontal agreements between competitors such as price fixing and market allocation
* vertical agreements between firms at different levels of the supply chain such as resale price maintenance and exclusive dealing
* unilateral exclusionary conduct such as predatory pricing, refusal to deal with competitors, and limiting interoperability
* conditional sales practices such as tying and bundling
* monopoly leveraging where a firm uses its dominance in one market to gain an unfair advantage in another
Any of these behaviors undermines the conditions necessary for a competitive market. I'd be happy to have the list above expanded, contracted, or modified. Let me know.
> This feels like it reflects similar actions taken against companies that are dominant in a market.
Maybe they should be. Our societies are ostensibly consumer-centric. It's about time our laws and organisations strongly sided with consumers against any opposition, especially against business.
Ironic that Jobs started by fighting the big, fat, corporate IBM, and now they turned the company he founded, Apple, into a big, fat, corporation with despicable practices...
Interesting, I've had 2 Garmin Smart Watches and never felt like Apple was restricting them.
I am curious what things the iPhone does that others aren't allowed to do.
Most of the differences between Garmin and Apple Watch seem like they were conscious decisions where they each decided to take a different direction.
It's one of those weird things where it seems like the case has a bunch of holes. You can use an iPhone with some but not all non-Apple Smart watches. You can use a non-Apple phone with non-Apple smartwatches. There are other non-Apple smart watches that those manufacturers have decided can't be used with an iPhone, no different than Apple. Lots of choices in the market, I certainly don't feel restricted.
I am not sure how requiring something like WeChat to break into multiple apps would be a big issue. Apple even breaks it's own apps up into different apps.
The Pebble was very obviously hampered by iOS limitations. In order to offload any code to the phone, you either had to write the code in Javascript (so it was basically a web app) or direct the user to manually download a separate companion app from the App Store. If iOS killed the companion app because it hadn't been opened on the iPhone recently (because, y'know, you were using it on your watch and not your phone), you had to manually relaunch the app on your phone.
This is all before even getting into things like ecosystem integration.
With non-Apple Watches, you can't 1) reply to texts, 2) answer phone calls (or place calls), 3) interact with other native iPhone applications (like Apple Health).
You'll pry my Garmin from my cold, dead hands but there's no mistaking it for an actual "smart"-watch. I value it entirely for health & fitness, and the very few "smart" things it can do are just nice-to-have icing on the cake.
My guess is around notifications and handoff to iPhone apps.
I tried Garmin watches, and they're certainly better as "exercise tracking devices" than anything Apple offers, but they weren't tightly enough integrated with my iPhone to make it "worth it" to me to wear them all the time.
An Apple Watch Ultra - on the other hand - is a poorer exercise tracking device, but gives me enough "integrated with my iPhone" benefit to become the first watch I've worn consistently in 30+ years.
I assumed this was the result of design and development choices by Garmin, but it'll be interesting to see if their are meaningful ways that Apple restricts smartwatch developers from including similar levels of integration.
> Interesting, I've had 2 Garmin Smart Watches and never felt like Apple was restricting them.
>
The two main differences are notifications filtering (choosing which apps can send notifications to the watch) and actioning notifications from the watch.
Yeah, there are some inconsistencies with Apple products interop-ing with non-Apple stuff.
I've noticed this with wireless bluetooth headphone pairing. Sometimes it works, othertimes there are odd limitations and devices unpair randomly.
Also Samsung's Adaptive Fast Charging sends lower wattage through the cable if it detects a non-Samsung device. So Apple is not the only offender here.
I’ve got an iPhone and an Apple Watch. Wife has an iPhone and a Garmin.
The Garmin sadly misses out on notification filtering, focus modes, replies, solid Bluetooth (it drops out from time to time and the app needs reopening).
I've had friends that have trouble syncing their Garmin devices with syncing to their iPhone. I've wondered if this is caused by their wireless communication protocol that is proprietary and only available on other apple devices.
Airpods and other bluetooth Apple devices seamlessly sync with iPhones because of a wireless protocol they use that is only available on Apple devices. I forget what it's called, but this definitely limits connectivity of devices that aren't made by Apple.
I used to be able to approve my duo notifications from my Garmin when I had an Android phone, but that functionality isn't available when using an iPhone. I found out recently that you can still do that from an apple watch on an iPhone, when my wife got one. So there is at least one area of functionality that Apple is likely restricting.
I like the app store, I like the restrictions, I don't want apple to change anything about it. I sort of think apple shouldn't try to comply with these sorts of potential lawsuits by making their app store worse, they should just let people jail break the phone and offer zero support for it.
If people want to buy an iphone and shit it up, let them do it.
I want iOS to be like macOS in that there's one "blessed" store, but I can sell, distribute, and install apps outside of it without giving Apple a cut.
macOS has proven for decades that a reasonably proprietary OS can be distributed and kept reasonably secure when apps are installed on it outside of an App Store. There's even third-party App Stores on macOS like Steam, Homebrew, and a few more that Indie developers use to distribute apps.
I am very pro-users-owning-their-computers, which makes me highly critical of Apple's behavior. However, these sorts of lawsuits or regulations that seek to force Apple to change App Store policies feel so wrong-headed and out of touch. The problem with Apple is not that they take a 30% cut of app sales in their store, or that they don't allow alternative browser engines or wallets apps or superapps or whatever in their store. It's their store and they ought to be able to curate it however they like. The problem is that users cannot reasonably install software through any means other than that single store. The problem is that Apple reserves special permissions and system integrations for their own apps and denies them to anyone else. That is not an acceptable way for a computer to work.
> If people want to buy an iphone and shit it up, let them do it.
The next generation isn't necessarily choosing, though.
Their parents are giving into their demands for *an iPhone due to social pressures entirely originated by Apple's monopolistic behavior (iMessage green bubbles).
Then, when they're locked into the Apple ecosystem from the start, it's almost impossible to break out -- even if you grow up into a mature adult that doesn't give a shit about bubble colors.
Interoperability (being able to exit an ecosystem without massive downsides, specifically) between the only two parties in a de facto duopoly is absolutely necessary and morally right, and it's a shame market failures force the judiciary to intervene. But we are where we are and there's no use putting lipstick on a pig -- the system as it stands is broken, and if left alone will feed on itself and become even more broken.
> I like the app store, I like the restrictions, I don't want apple to change anything about it.
This is basically saying you only use TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, Tinder, Gmail, Google Maps, and play zero to some handful of mega huge F2P games.
Why have an App Store at all then? You don't use it. It's an installation wizard for you, not a store.
Don't you see? This stuff doesn't interact with restrictions at all. The problem with the App Store is that it sucks, not that it's restricted.
> making their app store worse
I've heard this take from so many people. It is already as bad as it gets. The App Store is an utter disaster. They have failed in every aspect to make a thriving ecosystem. It is just the absolute largest, hugest, best capitalized, least innovative apps and games.
This doesn't have to be the case at all. Look at Steam. Even Linux package managers have more diversity with more apps that thrive.
Same here. I use linux VMs and containers for all my "hacking" where I need total control and customizability of the OS. On my workstation and phone, where I do my banking and read emails, I'm willing to trade control and customizability for an extremely locked down high trust operating environment. I feel like Apple's closed ecosystem, despite all its flaws, gets this compromise right.
Is Macbook less secure because I can install whatever app I want, even my own app? No, it's not. I want to be able to do the same with my iPhone. It's as simple as that.
That's the biggest thing, allowing sideloading is 100% optional and lets people stay in the walled garden if they want. Apple not allowing it is absolutely about suppressing competition, which given their >50% market share is a blatant abuse of their monopoly.
Doubtful, Google got dinged pretty hard in part because there were too many steps to allow other app stores to exist, and becsuse app stores couldn't auto-update apps like Google Play could.
And all that is way easier than rooting/jailbreaking. I doubt that will be enough of a deterrent considering the anti-trust angle being that you can't compete with apple's native software
If they would only verify quality and provide safe APIs and paths to safely integrate they can have their platform. The issue is that they are both managing the plantform and (unfairly) participating themselves.
If they had one set of APIs for smartwatches that can be used by them for the apple watch and everyone else for their smartwatches they wouldn’t get sued. But instead they give themselves deep integration into the OS and limit everyone elses access. When you are one of the only available platforms thats not okay.
I like the iPhone in general but there’s a ton of things I need to keep an old Android around for, because of functionality apple blocks for no good reason: connecting to many non approved bluetooth devices, vehicle gauges and other useful driving data in carplay, etc.
Does this chain of thought apply to any company or just to Apple? At what market share does this become a problem in your opinion? Or are we assuming that the market is ‘free’ and people wouldn’t buy such a device/service because of these ‘restrictions’?
The suit is not about user choice between iPhone and Android. The suit is about control 60% of the digital market. Sure, a user can go buy a different phone. But, an App developer can not reasonable not support iPhone given it has 60% of the market and apple requires 30% of all digital transactions on that market.
I agree people should be able to choose different things. But I also agree with the suit, that once someone gets in the position to control the market of 1000s and 1000s of companies, it's not longer just about user choice in phones. It's about the digital goods (apps/subscribtions/IaP) market itself.
None of these require allowing alternative app stores. Just allowing more apps in. You don’t have to use these apps, and theres nothing inherently insecure about it.
I agree with this take. My one concern is it has the potential to diminish the entire brand. Even with giant warnings about losing warranty/support when installing 3rd party app stores or side loading apps, at the end of the day the back of the phone has a big Apple logo on it. So when the customer fucks it up and Apple refuses to fix it, they’ll still blame Apple.
Yeah exactly, for some of us this is a feature not a bug. And I say this as a customer that also supports open source software. Yes it's possible to support both.
Like damn, what if I intend to build this ecosystem from the outset, does that mean as soon as it reaches critical mass the government is going to come in and dismantle it? It's bullshit. This is essentially saying you're not allowed to build ecosystems.
Consumer products don't demand the same flexibility in this regard that enterprise products do. This is just other companies crying that they want a slice of the pie.
Mostly agree with this except for "... and offer zero support for it."
Nope, that's covered by basic consumer protections. Apple still has to offer support if the user has issues that weren't likely to have been caused by the modifications.
Your car maker doesn't get to refuse to honor your powertrain warranty just because you put in a custom stereo.
I'm sure this comment will get downvoted and dunked on, but I agree and I would be that if Apple is forced to make changes like these, many peoples' only experience of it would be their iPhone/Apple Watch/etc getting worse.
Some examples:
- A lot of these changes are like mandating that cars have a manual transmission option. Sure, there are plenty of people that love the control, but there are many, many more that appreciate not having to deal with it.
- Every dollar and engineering hour that Apple spends complying with these new requirements is time they won't spend on things people actually want, as well as increasing the surface area for bugs and security holes.
- Apple is the intermediary between other companies like FB, Google, ad networks, data harvesting, government apps, etc. They can't do things on my phone because Apple forbids it. The more Apple is forced to open up, the less protection I have from other powerful players in the tech market.
- Every place where Apple is forced to open up is a place where there's a choice that many users didn't ask for but will have to make (e.g. default browser).
- I've never had to help a relative with their phone. I've had many of them come to me for help with their computers. Their and my experience with computing platforms is worse without the guardrails
I think many computer savvy people don't realize how freeing and liberating it is for normal people to have an "appliance" computer.
It doesn't matter if you like it. It doesn't matter if you don't like it. What matters is their actions and behavior are against the law. It can be proven,/according to the US Gov.
>If people want to buy an iphone and shit it up, let them do it.
Those choices also affect me, though. Any shared albums, messages or other data I transmit with these users has a higher risk of being leaked.
There's some security in knowing almost all phones are not jailbroken and thanks to regular os upgrades, have a pretty solid security floor.
One way to handle this would be to decorate the comms ID, email / phone name whatever to show they aren't running a standard iOS. But I would want to know as easily as I do that messages I exchange with someone are going to an android device.
if you like your prison, that's your thing, you have the right to stay in it, just don't force other people to live in misery under your preferences when they'd rather live in freedom. we also have rules and regulations which decide if something is lawful or not, so it's not just about what you personally like or not.
> they should just let people jail break the phone and offer zero support for it.
Just let people wipe the phone completely - no drivers, no kernel, nothing, and bring their own. That's the proper solution to people wanting to own their hardware and do whatever they want with it. Want to install a different app store/browser/etc? Go for it, start by installing the new kernel and drivers.
Almost none of the "free" apps are actually free. However, the App store makes it impossible to find this out without first supplying credit card information and installing the app, and possibly setting up an account with an app.
> Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.
Not sure I buy this point. Competitors can also offer their own suite of apps. Apple has an advantage that they can come pre-installed. But they aren't really building super-apps, just a variety of default apps - nothing stops third parties from offering multiple apps on the platform, that is actually a common thing to do.
> Apple has an advantage that they can come pre-installed.
Not only that, apparently updates automatically push their apps on you as well, without even asking. Suddenly I had a "Journal" app added to my homescreen from nowhere, and I thought my device had been hacked before I realized what was going on.
Apple also have the advantage of not having to follow their own rules. Their apps can send notifications without asking for permission about it. "Journal" again is an example here where the app sent me a notification and after going to the app, then they asked me for permission to send notifications.
EDIT: My comment was wrong, please see helpful corrections below!
I think there are technical limitations when you have different apps vs. one app. Simples being you need to log in to multiple different apps, but things like data moving between them etc are also complications.
I think it refers more to a hypothetical app that, when you're using it, would allow you to completely ignore the entire Apple software ecosystem. It would have its own home screen with launchers to things like a web browser, office tools, media, etc. I think this sort of thing never came to fruition because (aside from it being very hard to make) it would be way too bulky what with having to come in the form of a single app package. The ban on third party stores means it wouldn't be able to offer its own app store or come in segments so you can pick only the apps you want.
I bet the Apple apps have much, much, better background activity/services support. Doing "background" uploads is nothing short of painful compared to Android.
While we never want to compete with core Apple apps, we're constantly having to say 'sorry that's the restrictions running on Apple' with background support.
(our usecase is we have a B2B app that has visual progress reports - so we'll have the same people on a team - the Android ones get their progress reports uploaded instantly, the iOS ones 'sorry keep your phone open'.)
You also have to buy all apps through Apple's app store to natively download to a device. The Digital Markets Act addressed something similar, requesting that developers can sell through alternate marketplaces. Apple came back with a proposal to (1) stick with the status quo with 30 percent commission on sales, (2) reduce commission to 17 percent with a 50 cent charge on downloads over a million, (3) sell through a competing app store and pay the download fee every time. (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/technology/app-store-euro....)
I've designed several apps (Fitstar, Fitbit, theSkimm) that were dependent on the Apple ecosystem. While it's a huge tax to comply with their rules, they also do a TON to help developers succeed, especially early on. They maintain components, provide developer tools, build entire languages, design new paradigms, and ensure quality. I've had a respect for the tax on a service they provide to both developers and end users. At this point though - they're acting as a monopoly, and it feels anti-competitive.
It's not just the developer tax that's a problem. Hiding behind a veil of privacy also doesn't forgive the introduction of "dark pattern" end user experiences - such as the inability to have a group chat with non Apple users. And no non-Apple share links on Apple Photo albums. These create digital "haves" vs "have-nots" - and not everyone in the world can afford to buy physical Apple devices. There must be protocols that allow information to be more interoperable so people have optionality and control over their digital identities.
One thing I hope they mention: Apple put in proprietary extensions to give Apple-made Bluetooth headphones an advantage over all others, then removed the headphone jacks.
It's hard to tie all that together. Generic Bluetooth devices work just like you are used to everywhere else -- that is, kinda shitty and unreliable. Must we suffer a universally crappy experience by preventing Apple from improving BT for their own headsets?
Maybe they should be required to license the tech, if they are not already. But I don't want to degrade my experience just because that's the only way to have a level playing field. Maybe the BT standards group could get off their ass and make the underlying protocol better.
“Apple improved upon the notoriously unreliable Bluetooth standard and then slightly degraded wired listening by requiring a $9 dongle” is quite a weak anti-trust argument. Almost all innovation comes from this type of vertical integration.
All of these look important to me, but I've been particularly frustrated recently by the smartwatch issue. I've been a Fitbit user for several years and briefly tried an Apple Watch before returning it and resume Fitbit use— I had a few issues with the Apple Watch, most notably around battery life. But that brief experience showed me really starkly how much Apple is able to lock out third parties from doing things that their own stuff can do trivially by hooking right into private operating system APIs:
- Apple Watch can directly use your credit cards without needing to separately add them to Fitbit/Google Pay.
- Apple Watch can "find my" your phone, whereas Fitbit's version of this is limited to just making it beep, and even that only works if the phone is running the Fitbit app in the background (which it often isn't).
- Apple Watch can stream data to the phone all the time, whereas Fitbit relies on the app being opened, meaning your morning sleep data isn't available immediately since opening the app (to look at it) just enables it to begin transferring.
- Apple Watch can unlock itself when your phone unlocks.
- Apple Watch gets much richer notification integration.
And yeah, you can argue that all of this is optional "extra" stuff that is just Apple's prerogative to take advantage of as the platform holder, and maybe that's so to some degree... but these little things do add up. Particularly when Apple doesn't even have a device that competes with Fitbit, it feels unfair that they shouldn't be made to open up all the APIs necessary for this kind of interoperability.
I believe Apple needs more regulatory action taken against it for abusing it's dominant position. But apart from cloud streaming apps (which they've resolved recently by allowing them), I find these claims to be pretty weak and not significantly market-affecting.
I strongly believe Apple is under no obligation to make iMessage cross-platform. It's their service they invented, and they get to run it how they chose. SMS is the interoperable standard between different platforms, and RCS is the new standard which they've comitted to supporting.
I would much rather action taken on Apple for the anti-steering provisions restricting competition for payments. I think this has had a much bigger market impact than limitations on game streaming or smart watches.
As sibling points out and I have argued strongly for in past discussions here, at issue is Apple's control of texting: That is, the ability for a phone to message any other phone with a text message without requiring the other participant to use a custom app. Only iMessage can do this on the iPhone.
In the consumer's eye, all phones can text, so it is a universal way to reach someone who has a phone number. It removes the complexity of having to coordinate ahead of time with a contact about what messaging service they both have. It's why texting is so popular in the US (along with historical actions by US carriers to make texting extremely cheap and ultimately free)
Once they had this control, they then used it to make texting better only when the conversation participants each had iPhones, which produced a network effect where friends would be incentivized to pressure their contacts to also use iPhones. Apple leveraged convenience, features and security to make this happen.
I don't anticipate Apple's upcoming RCS support to materially change this. If we're lucky, we'll get higher quality pictures out of it, but it's possible to support RCS while not supporting a lot of the features that make RCS better than SMS, such as read receipts, replies, typing indicators, and yes, encryption. Encryption is not a standard part of RCS yet, but it could be made so by Apple forcing Google to standardize their encryption and then implementing it. But it's not in Apple's interest given the above to bother. More likely they will do as their initial complaint/announcement about RCS hinted at: Not even engage on encryption because it's "not part of the spec", leaving iPhone/Android messaging unencrypted.
Google is not blameless here, it's insane that they haven't worked themselves to standardize encryption.
That's one of the things I like about this complaint - it points out that they don't allow any other apps to support SMS, so only iMessage has the ability to message anyone with just a phone number, seamlessly upgrading if the other party has iMessage and using SMS otherwise.
It's not solely about iMessage not being open, it's about reserving key features for only iMessage to give it a significant advantage. (Also mentioned are other key bits like running in the background, etc)
> I strongly believe Apple is under no obligation to make iMessage cross-platform. It's their service they invented, and they get to run it how they chose.
So if it were up to you all telecom operators would be on separate networks, because you can always use smoke signals to get your message across?
(I'm with you for niche applications where the number of users is small. But we're talking mainstream communication here.)
My biggest problem is how hard it is to get my data out of apps in usable formats, move it between apps, or put in custom apps. My iPhone would be great if I could use my own data and apps as easily (and freely) as my old Samsung Galaxy.
I think they are hitting apple pretty broadly on all things you're mentioning. I don't think everyone will agree on all of them but many will agree on various ones and it's left up to courts after that.
Where does that "dominant position" idea come from, that you and others are claiming in this thread? Apple is nowhere near having a dominant position in any of the markest where they compete, such as cell phones or computers.
With regards to the "super apps", Apple can just as well argue that it aspires to retain access for multiple players ("avoiding monopoles", ironically), so naturally it does not want only a single app becoming the majority of all downloads, which leads the app store idea ad absurdum.
Makes you wonder about something else: Could Apple one day be broken apart like "Ma Bell"? It seems the Apple brand is inconsistent with notions of modularity and openness (which brings with itself a certain messiness), everything is supposed to look at feel alike up to the slightly silly (as a problem to solve, as long as there are still children starving on this planet at the same time) device unpacking experience.
It's good that the U.S. government are doing their job as expected, in this case that's relevant for all other countries, where a lot of the device owners/users are based.
My ultimate wish would be some someone to launch a third mobile platform - beside Apple IOS and Alphabet-Google Android - based on a new open W3C standard (not HTML).
Such a standard would get a chance to grow with the support of the legal apparatus: judges should force the oligopolists to implement said standard, and then people might just say "hey, I can just implement ONE app, and catch all THREE platforms."
>Also, the Apple Watch itself does not offer compatibility with Android.
This is the reason I am now on an iPhone after being on Android since ~2009. But this could also apply to Samsung too. There were two watches I was considering - Samsung's and Apple's (for health monitoring reasons, I have a family history of heart problems, and am already nearly 10 years older than my dad was when he died). I would either have to buy a Samsung phone or an iPhone to get the functionality I wanted, and TBH I really don't like Samsung's take on Android (I've been either Cyanogenmod or Motorola for over a decade), so an iPhone it was. But I would have preferred to get an Apple Watch and have that work fully with my Android phone, but that's not even a starter, let alone the limited-functionality you would get with a Samsung watch with another Android phone.
I'm happy with the watch, and I now like a lot about the iPhone. But it was 4x the price of my previous phone.
Was this before the Google Pixel Watch, or did you eliminate it for other reasons? Also, newer Galaxy watches run Androids WearOS instead of Tizen, and from what I understand, work much better with other Android phones.
It is interesting that in this case "pro-competitive" does not necessarily mean "pro-consumer". I am not sure how stuff like "super apps" are a good thing for consumers (sounds like a nightmare mass surveillance scenario to me). Similar cloud streaming apps where the whole fuss is really about microtransactions in games or less regulation. Message interoperability is not a bad thing, but not sure why we still talk about "MMS" in 2024 when so many different chat apps are around. I don't know about smartwatches, maybe that is a fair point. And as for digital wallets, I already trust apple for the OS, I would not see why I would put the effort to download an extra app from a third party I would need to also trust to put bank details, except if we were talking about some open source gold standard of trust and privacy. I do not care if it is apple or a third party that gets a commission from banks or who gets my transaction history to sell to brokers.
On the other hand, I would like to see interoperability in stuff like airdrop. But that would not be something that other FAANG would make money of, so that is probably not so interesting for these regulators.
> And as for digital wallets, I already trust apple for the OS, I would not see why I would put the effort to download an extra app from a third party I would need to also trust to put bank details
Do you think no one else should be able to build a mobile payment service? Should banks be block from making, say, ChasePay?
It's fine to prefer Apple Pay and to choose Apple Pay even if there are other options. The question is, should everyone be locked into Apple Pay vs choosing Apple Pay because it is better than ChasePay?
Thanks for summarizing. As someone deeply entrenched in Apple's ecosystem, and who admittedly prefers the walled garden, I really have no problem if any of these five things were struck down.
Better competition for cloud streaming apps? Seems good for me as a user. Better messaging interoperability? I don't have anyone in my family or friends group who wasn't already on an iPhone, and I thought this was coming already with RCS anyway, but sure let's go. Better smartwatch support? If it makes Apple want to build even better Apple Watches, I'm all for it. And all of my cards already work with Apple Wallet so this has no bearing on me either.
The only one that's really ambiguous is "Super Apps". I'd be greatly inconvenienced if Apple things stopped working so well together, but I wouldn't be inconvenienced at all if others get a chance to build their own "super apps".
> I don't have anyone in my family or friends group who wasn't already on an iPhone, and I thought this was coming already with RCS anyway, but sure let's go.
I'm skeptical that adding RCS will actually fix the problems because of how Apple is likely to implement it. Their malicious compliance in the EU strongly hints that they are going to hobble their RCS implementation just enough to maintain the status quo just like they are with the DMA requirements. Hopefully legal efforts like this push Apple more towards actual interoperability.
> Apple’s smartwatch—Apple Watch—is only compatible with the iPhone. So, if Apple can steer a user towards buying an Apple Watch, it becomes more costly for that user to purchase a different kind of smartphone because doing so requires the user to abandon their costly Apple Watch and purchase a new, Android-compatible smartwatch.
1. Samsung watch actually used to support iPhones. They dropped the support, likely due to business reasons and the limitations as described here
2. My naive understanding is that the question is not forcing anyone to support anything, but rather the ability to make it possible to do so. If Apple wants to have full support for Android phones, they are welcome to do so, but not vice versa -- nobody can possibly create a smartwatch that works as well as Apple Watch with iPhones.
> Apple also collects fees from banks for using Apple Pay
15 basis points (0.15%) from the issuing bank on something that _undoubtably_ increases tx volume and associated interchange revenue. Sure, the issuing banks would like tx volume for absolutely free. Sure, DOJ should argue the point on NFC access. But 15bp from the party that's making more money on a service that's free and beneficial for {consumer, merchant, card network} just seems like good business.
That's the point of the lawsuit. Chase can't currently make Chase Pay to compete with Apple Pay and offer a mobile payment service with less than 15 basis points.
And fine, let apple collect their fee, but also open up payments on iPhone to other providers. Why can't my native bank app use the nfc hardware itself, hmmmmmmmmm? Oh Apple lock in so they can collect their $$$ for literally no reason; the payment network already exists, Apple is just a middleman.
Did they mention copying photos from your phone to a PC via USB? This is intentionally crippled and such an unpleasant experience in comparison to the experience if you have a Mac, for me at least.
> The company “undermines” the ability of iPhone users to message with owners of other types of smartphones, like those running the Android operating system, the government said. That divide — epitomized by the green bubbles that show an Android owner’s messages — sent a signal that other smartphones were lower quality than the iPhone, according to the lawsuit.
I read that as 'interop' is a secondary issue, if an issue at all; the actual case is the green/blue segregation. If Apple embedded a fingerprint in every interoperable message and shown blue messages for iMessage-sent content, green background for others, it'd still be a problem even if messages are otherwise identical - unless all the features truly work on both, in which case the color split is purely status signaling.
I’ve never understood the messaging interop angle when there are so many non-phone network based messaging apps available. It’s just always seemed the weakest of the arguments against Apple w.r.t. the iPhone. SMS/MMS/RCS standardization was historically a train wreck so it made sense to me for Apple to just support the minimum and be done with it. All of my groups chats that involve a mixture of iPhone and Android users has usually been on something like WhatsApp for this reason.
The other points seem much more specific and actionable.
To be fair, Apple has said a lot of things. Wasn't FaceTime supposed to be an open standard and that never happened? If they give a specific target date I'd feel more encouraged.
That would be an interesting development, because apparently the other monopolist in this game is implementing RCS with some proprietary crap, and Apple will deliberately implement the current standard feature set. So they will continue being incompatible but now because of Google. I'll continue investing in the popcorn futures :) .
The richest company in the world is purposefully generating social and psychology stress for young people so they can edge up their market share just a little bit more. In a just world, people would be imprisoned over this.
Or alternatively in a just world we would teach our children not to be little shits to each other because of their tech choices. I just can't wrap my head around how the whole SMS vs iMessage color thing has become such a dominant "problem". It's been that way for as long as there was any distinction to be made between SMS and non SMS messaging. It's valuable information to the end user, and it's easily dealt with by using any other messaging system other than SMS to communicate, like apparently the entire rest of the world does. But somehow it's too difficult for american teenagers to figure out how to install Signal, or Whats App, or Telegram, or Facebook Messenger, or use email, or Discord, or IRC, or Matrix, or Skype, or Google Chat or literally any other of a few hundred messaging / chat systems that are out there.
In terms of (4) Why would the apple watch want to have to build and maintain their apple watch on the google platform. Its funny that a company not wanting to work on another platform (probably due to business costs of doing that) is being considered anti-competitive.
Making it difficult for 3rd party .. sure but trying to force apple to have their hardware work on other platforms is a business decision .
1. Seems odd, given WeChat is on iOS… the example you used is literally a counterpoint for the allegation.
3. Messages do interop. But it’d be hilarious if the US created some kind of precedent where everything has to work on everything.
4. Samsung, and Google both fall into this trap, where more functionality is available between like devices.
5. So when my Amex isn’t accepted, that’s Visa or Mastercard restricting APIs - and causing lock in right?
These strange legal cases are odd to me. If we think these large tech conglomerates should be regulated, then write laws for them, don’t use the court system to muck things up for no reason.
"For folks who don't have time to read a 90 page document, the case rests on specific claims, not just _the general claim that iPhone is a monopoly because it's so big_. "
But that's not a claim. It might be a fact that supports a claim. One which Apple might contest. It seems that no matter how many times web publications in spades remind readers that monopolies are not per se illegal, i.e., something more is required, e.g., anti-competitive conduct, forum commenters remain convinced of some other reality.
- Monopolization: actual, attempted, conspiracies, etc.
- Restraints of trade. Horizontal (rigging bids, fixing prices, allocating markets to avoid competition) and Vertical (resale price limits, exclusive deals)
- Tying: leveraging one monopoly to gain another
- Merger, where the resulting market would not be competitive
- other Unfair Competition (FTC)
While lawsuits are not uncommon, actual relief is rare, in part because the few judgments are overturned on appeal. Antitrust has been steadily eroded for decades.
Recent relief includes US v AT&T 2018 (imposed conditions on the Time Warner acquisition), but there are many more overturned.
So: 1. Super apps and 2 cloud streaming apps (restraint of trade): it's hard to compare all of apple to all of these multi-function apps. One question is whether all the apple functionality in fact complies with whatever constraints are imposed. I suppose the theory is restraint of trade. In NCAA v. Alston (2021) the NCAA lost their ability to restrict student compensation, but that was a blanket restriction.
3. Message interoperability: Apple also color-codes SMS messages, and will argue it helps to indicate the kind of data that can be transferred. That's a losing argument.
4. Smart watches (Restraint and tying): Unclear what limits are placed on other watches. Easy to fix with an updated API, but some risk the court will try to order Apple to license WatchOS. As with patent, watches may end up adding more legal exposure than the product is really worth in the portfolio.
5. Digital wallets (tying): Hard to see the courts requiring openness here when they have not done so for other financial networks, and the government doesn't really want this.
Most are based on tying, but tying has not been effective for some time. Virtually every successful tying case lacked a distinct business or technical rationale. (The right to repair and maintain (from Xerox on) is the furthest they go in rebutting technical rationale's, and they still permit technical standards.)
To be honest, I never got why the message interop was such a big deal. Do people still use text messages in 2024 as opposed to a third party app like Signal, Discord, Whatsapp, Telegram, etc?
I just find it a bit questionable that Apple is being forced open this much. If you want a super app, why don't you just use the browser? Also, is cloud streaming apps such a big deal?
And re smartwatches, isn't it somehow expected that apps made by the same company will always have an edge? You can see this in the Windows+Microsoft Auth combo where Microsoft apps can do stuff that non-Microsoft apps can't just because it is a Microsoft app.
Maybe iPhones are much more popular in the US, but I feel Apple doesn't have such a strong hold of the mobile market in Europe.
My worry is that Apple is be forced open and will have to allow everyone to access the same APIs with all the security implications of it. Surely, if people don't like the way iPhones work they can move to Android or Tizen. I personally wish people moved away from iPhones AND Androids so we could have the thriving and healthy competition we had at the beginning of the smartphone revolution with Android, iOs, Symbian and similar. Support a market full of mobile OSes competitors and not a duopoly with open APIs.
2 - OK, but only if the user is willing to accept the security risk to their apps, Apple and non-Apple. Apple has an interest in keeping the apps they create, or sell for others, secure but should bear no responsibility if a third-party fails to keep to the same standard.
3 - OK. I personally kind of like it because I am a bad person, but OK.
4 - Aren't most of them behind Apple's watches, anyway? I don't have an issue with Apple Watch not being compatible with Android - while Apple shouldn't prevent a third-party (see 2 above) from creating a bridge, they should, in no way, be forced to do it themselves.
5 - (see 2 above) And I don't have an issue with Apple torquing the nuts of banks - the banks do the same to us. And yes, it's my money they're taking from banks, but the banks don't like that, so ... I'm gonna call that one a tie.
>Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.
Isn't this .. not "super apps" then? If it's multiple apps? Said 3rd party super apps could instead be multiple apps people install a la carte. But companies want to do uber apps for funnel purposes etc.
The "messaging interoperability" point strikes me as a weird one.
In the US, people tend to use iMessages, which is not interoperable with other ecosystems. But iPhone place no limitation on third party messaging apps. Indeed, the rest of the world simply ignores the existence of iMessages and uses other applications for messaging (these vary per country/region, but I don't think that iMessages has any significant market share in any other country).
There's not technical reason preventing people in the US from using another messaging platform, and there are no limitations imposed on third party messaging apps. It's really just a cultural issue of people _choosing_ iMessages. Probably just network effect.
Most of this sounds like the DOJ doesn't understand the tech at all.
iMessage is an Apple service, created as a way to provide additional value to people on Apple platforms so that they aren't limited by SMS. The DOJ argument appears to be "oh, you made a better mousetrap, and now you have to let people outside your platform use it." Why? What's the rational argument there?
They then extend that argument to the watch, which is just bananas. It's designed to work with one set of platforms. The tightly coupled nature of Watch/Phone/Mac provides benefits, but Apple is never going to open the technical kimono up to Samsung (e.g.) watches to use the same hooks, and they shouldn't be required to do so.
For a second, let's just assume that Apple is 100% guilty. What will the fine be? If it's anything less than many billions of dollars, there is zero incentive for Apple to do anything at all different in the future.
Suing Apple(or any other company over stuff like this) when the fines will be a tiny slap on the wrist at worst will not incentivize proper behaviour, so there is literally zero reason for doing this except for the govt to feel good about itself, see!! we got a few hundred million from that evil corp for doing bad things. LOL. Apple could plead guilty tomorrow, pay the fine and continue doing business and not even notice.
Ongoing fines until they achieve compliance, or legally barring them from operating in the US. I think that's usually how rulings go in these kinds of cases.
Page 76 of the lawsuit PDF goes into some specifics under the section "Request for relief".
1. Super Apps are notorious for tracking the user across the "mini" apps within it, which is the argument made by Apple for making them hard to get approval for. I'm on Apple's side here
2. I was able to use PS Remote Play on my iPhone even many years ago (pre-COVID). A quick google search shows that Steam Link and Shadow PC (my ATF) are also available on iOS. I'm on Apple's side here too
3. I think the situation has recently changed here as someone else has commented, so this feels solvable without a lawsuit. Also it's hard to single out Apple here when everyone out there has their own messaging platforms. It's not like WhatsApp is encouraging third-party clients. An argument can be made that iMessage blurs the line between what's Apple-provided vs. carrier-provided, so I can see the user confusion and the issues that come with it. I'm on the FTC's side here
4. Who cares about smartwatches. It's niche at best. Besides, there are countless other watches you can use and they work with many devices. I'm on Apple's side here
5. It's not like you can't tap your card instead of your phone. I don't think the phone needs to be just a husk with apps created by third parties, especially for things like wallets. I'm happy to trade away that freedom for increased security, Benjamin Franklin's quote notwithstanding. The payments ecosystem is made up of players charging fees from the next player down the chain, so also hard to single out Apple here, but I can see why there's need for increased transparency (I wasn't explicitly aware they charged any fees, even if I would probably guess they were if prompted). I'm on neither side here.
So based on my biases and incomplete understanding of the facts, Apple wins 3-1
It's worth remembering that this administration is suing seemingly everyone in Tech, in what I can only assume is being done in the hopes they can make a name for themselves. Lena Khan literally said "you miss all the shots you don't take".
I would prefer a more focused approach with higher signal to noise ratio.
1) Apple makes an exception if you're China, unfortunately. This is how WeChat has taken off, and I bet WeChat could bully its way around the App Store rules to the detriment of competitors, another "special deal" from Apple.
2) This is about cloud gaming, when you're streaming the game from hardware in the cloud, like Xbox Game Pass. Streaming the game from your own hardware isn't as competitive to Apple since it requires you buy a $500 console or gaming PC.
3) The biggest issue was Apple not implementing RCS and defaulting every iOS user to iMessage, which has created a two-tier messaging system, friends getting locked out of chat groups, etc simply because Apple doesn't want to use the standard.
4) "Who cares" is not a valid argument in using your dominance in one market to dominate another, which is textbook anticompetitive behavior. They also do this with AirTags, Airpods, any accessory where the Apple product gets to use integrations with the OS and third-parties are forbidden from doing so.
5) Tapping your phone is more secure because the card number is randomized and single-use, protecting it from replay attacks.
I love how whenever Apple makes a clearly anti-trust move it's always about privacy.
That would be true, if Apple couldn't literally write any TOS they want that allows other App stores or billing methods and then add "but you can't include tracking that invades our users privacy or resell their data".
That's just as enforceable on their end, and not anti-competitive, assuming Apple themselves don't launch their own ad platform and tracking...
It's not just this administration going after tech. The other guys got the ball rolling, although they use a different narrative to sell it. I think most people recognize there are various problems with the industry that essentially all boil down to the amount of power big tech has. There have been warnings from governments and other players in the private sector for years. I happen to like my iPhone a lot, but it's about time Apple and the rest of them get their teeth kicked in.
Every single group chat that I use on a day-to-day basis has a non iPhone participant. The biggest argument against the way apple treats SMS vs iMessage I see is people feel ostracized for having green bubbles. I just don't understand why this rises to anti-trust.
> 1. Super Apps are notorious for tracking the user across the "mini" apps within it, which is the argument made by Apple for making them hard to get approval for. I'm on Apple's side here
Never heard this argument, could you name an example of this? I figured the reason for the ban was that it would sidestep most of the Apple software that comes with an iPhone, which Apple obviously wouldn't want since they would prefer to lock users in.
> It's worth remembering that this administration is suing seemingly everyone in Tech, in what I can only assume is being done in the hopes they can make a name for themselves
Of all the points in your low-effort manifesto I find this the most absurd. Even if you don't see any merit in the case, you must admit that it's likely that the DoJ does.
From what I'm seeing in other places, there are also some pretty weak claims being made beyond this.
The first is their attempt to redefine what the market is in order to declare Apple a "monopoly": they've posited a completely separate market for "performance smartphones", and tried to use total revenue rather than number of units sold in order to push Apple up to having a very high percentage of this invented market.
The second is their characterization of how Apple got to where they are. Like them or not, you have to be seriously down a conspiracy rabbit hole to believe that the iPhone became as popular as it is primarily through anticompetitive tactics, rather than because it's a very good product that lots and lots of people like. Regardless of whether you, personally, find that value proposition to be compelling.
They also point at some of Apple's offerings and make absolutely absurd claims about how they're anticompetitive—for instance, that they're going to somehow take over the auto market with CarPlay 2.0 and the fact that AppleTV+ exercises control over the content it serves.
There are some things Apple does that are genuinely concerning and deserve more antitrust scrutiny (for instance, their anti-steering provisions for the App Store are pretty egregious), but so far as I can tell, they're not even mentioned in this suit. I'm frankly disappointed in the DoJ for how they've put this together, and would have loved to see something that was narrower and much more robust.
This is like nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. They missed the one actual example of Apple abusing its ownership in one industry (the OS) to then give itself a monopoly over another industry (app stores/app store fees).
I love the current US government. Cracking down on pretty much all of Apples bullshit in one fell-swoop. Now just stop them from offering 8gb of ram on the base model macbooks, and apple might be the perfect tech company.
This is somewhat aligned with the recent trouble they had in EU as well, so now two different regulatory agencies call them out for the same topics. Are they going to claim "security reasons" again?
> "Apple has restrictions on what they allow on the App Store as far as "Super Apps" ... In China, WeChat does many different things, for example, from messaging to payments."
The WeChat super-app is available on iOS, complete with installable "mini apps", and most of the same functionality that is available on Android. So it's not clear exactly what the complaint is here. Unless Apple makes exceptions for WeChat and China that are not available to developers elsewhere?
I am sure each of these items are a pain for a different sets of people. The most irritating one for someone who moved recently is: NFC lock down.
Like my Xiaomi phone was able to store any card I wanted and do a Tap to Pay, but I have to use Apple Pay and I can’t do that because my region is locked to somewhere Apple Pay isn’t a thing. Here in Melbourne even public transport is affected by this. The local myki transport cards can be digitally carried on an Android phone but not an iPhone.
Yet the most important issue for many is missing (unless something changed recently) - inability to access filtered cesspool of scam, malware and annoyance that modern ad-infested internet is.
Jihad against anything actually working well (ie firefox and ublock origin) due to to be polite dubious reasons. Apple gatekeeping is just a move to ads for themselves, it was already multibillion business for them last year. Thats monopolistic behavior in plain sight.
I'd be more sympathetic to the government's arguments if Android phones didn't exist. But they do, and people can use them if they don't like Apple's walled garden.
As things are, this lawsuit seems like the government striking an aggressive posture torwards tech companies for no good reason. It's almost like -- as the tech companies get bigger and more powerful -- the government wants to remind them who's really in charge.
If phone OSes and ecosystems were fungible, then I'd agree. It's reasonable to prefer iOS for many reasons, but still be disappointed in the walled-garden, non-interoperable aspects.
Customers don't really have great choices right now when it comes to smartphones:
1. One OS is locked down, has a walled-garden ecosystem, but has many privacy-protecting features.
2. The other OS more open (interop & user-choice-wise, not really in the FOSS sense), but is run by a company that seems hell-bent on eroding user privacy.
These properties are dictated by Apple and Google. But due to the barrier for entry, there are no alternatives that come even close to duplicating Android's and iOS's feature sets. Even simply using a community-developed Android-based OS can cause you to lose access to many useful features Android provides.
I guess I went off on a little tangent here, but my position is that the existence of Android is only a defense if switching between the two doesn't incur high costs, both financial and non-. That's demonstrably not the case.
You see this as about two major phone companies when in reality it is about all the small phone/os/app companies(competition is good in a free market) that get pushed out because the only two major companies (apple and google) share insane contracts between eachother essentially creating a horizontal monopoly that squashes competition.
Individually, yes. But each app has its own app store approoval process and fees. Also they are jailed privately so they cannot share information with each other. Only Apple Apps are the ones that can do that.
I don’t see Messaging interoperability of the iMessage protocol in the complaint.
I see:
* third-party apps not being able to send/receive carrier messages (SMS)
* only Messages getting background running
* blue/green colored bubbles.
The background running thing is a bit of a surprise. If you had asked me, I’d have said iMessages didn’t run in the background given it’s load delay for new messages.
Yeah, iMessage completely craps out when sending messages without signal. A red dot and manual “retry now” button? What is this? ICQ in 1995?
WhatsApp on iOS does a much better job, ironically (it just sends all queued outgoing messages once connectivity is back in the background, like every email client did back in dialup days).
I remember how Apple Watch wouldn't let you download podcasts or songs on Spotify. Apparently they changed that to allow some recently, but that change did get me to switch to the Apple Podcast app for awhile, which I feel like is inferior.
Thats for the writeup. I tend to agree with most of those, although the "super app" things is weird to me...I don't like the idea of "super apps" because it is hard for the user to share only the minimal permissions.
Epic losing their suit pretty much torpedoed that plank. The findings there would basically tread the same ground and were already found in Apple's favor as a matter of law.
> Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.
...if that counts, is the suit claiming that they somehow don't let other developers have multiple related apps? Because it seems that something like Meta's suite of apps (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) that all share login data and suchlike should qualify if "the Apple ecosystem of apps" does.
I presume the question is about impact: At Apple's scale, restricting competition has a very broad impact on the economy. In contrast, a movie theater not allowing outside food is probably not reducing all that much food-related competition in aggregate.
I don't think there's a good real-world "venue/food" analogy. However, hypothetically: Imagine if half of all homes/apartments were controlled by the same company and they also happened to be the largest food producer. They then decided to limit what food could be brought into your home, saying "We have the safest food, so you can only buy our food." Now, they might even be right that their food is the safest, but the market impact would be significant enough to warrant anti-trust action.
- Should the government force marketplaces to allow competing marketplaces to set up shop within their area, collect fees, but not pay any fees to the larger market?
- Should the government make laws to require restaurants to allow competing chefs to bring a hot plate and start cooking food at the tables and serve them to their customers?
- Should Google be forced by the government to include support for formats in Android that are used by Apple such a HEIF and HEIC? What about Microsoft and Linux?
These rules are not about individual choice or freedom. This is about giant corporations using the government to give them a way into the walled garden built by a competing mega corporation. This is completely self-serving and in no shape, way, or form serves the common good.
As an iPhone user I do not want government interference in a market place that has been kept mostly free of malware precisely because it keeps out the riff-raff. I want the hucksters and the scammers blocked. I really don't care if they scream "unfair!" at the top of their lungs from outside of the fence.
Similarly, general SMS messaging is a cesspit of unceasing spam precisely because it is so interoperable. Because Apple keeps out garbage devices with zero security, I've seen precisely zero iMessage spam in the last decade. I got a spam SMS in the last hour. I'll get several more today.
None of these arguments are very satisfactory to me as a consumer and this appears to be more Mafia like behaviour than a genuine concern for market based competition.
What's stopping people from buying or using any other kind of phone, new or old? Or from producing one? None of what's listed here is relevant to that regard.
Absolutely nothing. The claim that Apple has a monopoly on the smartphone market is just laughable. Android has 40% market share in the US and 70% globally.
Thanks for the summary. My "Open Apple" wishlist includes:
• Allowing alternate web browser implementations, including alternate Javascript and WebAssembly implementations.
• Which would include third party developer access to the memory allocation/permissions API used for JIT compilers. Make iOS a first class ARM development OS. Please.
Perhaps removing restrictions to general APIs for competitive apps and "Super apps" would implicitly include those changes?
Interesting that this doesn't address Apple's iOS "taxation" of tangential non-web transactions, or the lack of App Store alternatives. If Apple has monopoly power, those seem like suitable concerns.
Do they mention CarPlay? It drives me crazy that it only integrates notifications with Apple first party apps. It will send me notifications for iMessage or Apple calendar, but completely silences and hides Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Google calendar, Google voice, etc no matter what settings I try. It's frankly dangerous because it forces me to check my phone while driving in case of an urgent message or call. Meanwhile Android auto will show me all notifications and I can silence them while driving if I choose.
CarPlay supports notifications with non-first party apps like Microsoft Teams. I don't use everything on your list, but WhatsApp definitely supports CarPlay notifications. You may have them muted. You can mute/unmute on a per-app basis -- go to the app settings and adjust the "Show in CarPlay" toggle.
As someone who never uses Apple devices, iMessage is the only true form of monopoly based control that Apple imposes. Apple's 30% costs are harsh, but it is not like Google or MSFT charge anything less.
Such cases always seem to reach a pre-determined conclusion, that has more to do with the political winds of the era, than true legal determinism.
Looking at the accusations from that lens:
1. Super Apps - I don't see how 'Apple doesn't share enough data with Chinese super apps' is going to fly 2024 America. It also has huge security and privacy impliciations. This accusation seems DOA.
2. Streaming games is tricky, but it isn't a big revenue stream. The outcome for this point appears immaterail to Apple stock.
3. iMessage - This is the big one. I see the whole case hinging on this point.
4. Smartwatches. Meh, Apple might add inter-op for apple smartwatches on android. I don't think this will lead to any users switching over or an actually pleasing experience.
5. Digital Wallets. This seems tacked on. Apps are PhonePe and PayTm work just fine on Apple and Android. I have never heard of anyone using a Digital Wallet that is not Apple pay, Google Pay or Samsung Pay. Are digital wallets a big revenue stream for Apple ?
You can't possibly equate the situation on windows or android with iOS. It's trivial to install an app from outside of the app stores on both, whereas it's entirely impossible on iOS.
> When you download Chrome, Firefox or any other browser that isn't Safari on an Apple device, that browser is forced to use Safari's rendering engine WebKit. Chrome normally uses Chromium, and Firefox Gecko. However, Apple will not allow those browsers to use their own engines. Without the ability to use their own engines, those browsers are unable to bring you their latest and greatest features, and can only go so far as whatever WebKit has added.
Your second paragraph is incorrect and is explained why in your quote. Apple does allow alternative browsers, it does however restrict the rendering engine. Saying there is only one browser on iOS is like saying Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are the same browser because they both use chromium.
That’s a specific strategic choice, wanted by Steve Jobs himself to maintain leverage on the browser ecosystem.
If Chrome was let loose indiscriminately on any platform, how long before it became a Macromedia Flash, hobbling battery life and performance on whatever platform didn’t align to Alphabet’s strategy?
Also, how long before Alphabet began prime-timing Android, leaving Apple versions trailing months of not years behind, and restoring the “Works best on IE” experience of the ‘00s?
That is stretching the definition of a browser. Superapps enable all the miniapps in them to access the same user data, the history of app interactions (e.g., message history, shopping history), and to integrate closely. Webapps are nowhere close to that.
Arguably, F-Droid is a (Android-only, not possible to make such an app on iOS) super app that very much exists in the western world.
> Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.
To be fair to Apple, both Google and Meta have loads of apps for iOS that compare to the Apple suite of apps. Although there is definitely a pre-installed advantage for the Apple apps.
apple does have full NFC support for their products but for other apps there are tons of road blocks for using anything close to full NFC functionality
- Bluetooth
same, similar more usable, but some functionality is still not available for 3rd party apps at all meaning certain things can only be provided 1st party by Apple
- Strange behaviour when releasing questionable competive Apps
There had been multiple cases where Apple released 1st party apps and it "happened" that the previous leader(s) of previous existing 3rd party apps "happened" to have issues with releasing updates around that time (or similar strange coincidental behavior). Additionally such new apps often had some new non-documented non public APIs which makes it harder for 3rd parties to compete.
- Questionable app store reviews
Stories of apps running in arbitrary you could say outright despotic harassment when wrt. the app store reviews are more then just few (to be clear legal non malicious apps which should be fully legal on the apple app store).
EDIT: To be clear for the first 2 points apple always have excuses which seem reasonable on the surface until you think it through a bit more (e.g. similar to there excuse for banning PWAs in the EU, I think they might have undid that by now). And for the other points it's always arbitrary enough so that in any specific case you could call it coincidence, but there is a pattern.
Bluetooth remains my biggest gripe with my iphone. When I walk out of range of any connected device, my call switches from my headset to the phone, and I have to manually go in and reconnect to my headset every third or fourth time I want to connect to it.
It stands in stark contrast to literally everything else about the device, which is almost universally easy and thoughtless.
One of the big reasons I buy into the Apple ecosystem is for that next level of first-party interoperability. It works far better than any collection of more open systems I’ve even seen/used.
I don’t use Apple in spite of this, I use it because of this. Trying to support everything will likely lead to a worse experience for everyone in a multi-device world.
Apple is a hardware company making their own software to run that hardware, much like a game console. It seems like many of the criticisms here could be adapted and applied to Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation. Why can’t my PS VR work with my Xbox… it’s a Sony monopoly /s
There are areas where I think Apple can improve, such as right to repair and reliability in general. But it seems like some of what these governments are trying to kill is the very reason some people went to Apple in the first place. That doesn’t lead to more choice, it leads to less choice… as the government tries to turn iOS into an Android clone. Kind of odd that Apple is being told to act more like the platform that has the lead in global market share.
I just don’t understand the appeal of “Super Apps”. Do users really want to hire a taxi with the same application they use to message their friends, and have that be the same application they use to buy household goods, and have that be the same application they use to control their garage door? It doesn’t make sense to me. These are totally different tasks. Why would a user want to use the same app to do them?
Imagine the extreme end result of this: You buy a phone, and it’s OS comes with only one app installed: The Super App which you launch and do everything through it. How is that Super App not in fact the OS at that point?
The answer is clearly yes in a lot of markets, even if purpose-built apps might be better at a specific tasks, a single app that does dozens of things "well enough" is more convenient than having to juggle dozens of login infos and para-relationships with app developers (managing graymail etc).
The extreme result is indeed what Apple wants to avoid because you would more or less have a custom operating system at that point and could ignore Apple's software, which they would hate. Obviously it is not as good as being able to flash an actual new OS onto the device but it would still impact Apple's bottom line.
Google itself is a superapp at this point as you only have one account. But to answer your question, I think it’s because of interoperability issues. Why can’t my calendar services message me? Or why can’t I quickly create an event inside a chat? If you remember PDAs, they fell under the definition of one ecosystem to manage your communication and time, but now you have several services that refuses to talk to each other. One of the core strength of Apple is that kind of integration. It’s not that you want one company managing it all, you just want an integrated app ecosystem.
The one area I have concerns about is superapps. I’m of the opinion that user experience is better when an app does one thing and does it well. WeChat and Facebook as platforms or just a digital variant of platform lock-ins.
> In China, WeChat does many different things, for example, from messaging to payments. This complaint alleges that Apple makes it difficult or impossible to offer this kind of app on their platform.
But WeChat is available on iOS isn't it? If not the iPhone would be pretty impossible to sell there, just like Huawei's android without Google play don't sell here in the west.
Because its bad for consumers to have to choose a different device solely because of Apple's anti-competitive practices. This is exactly the sort of scenario when regulation is good - Apple is acting in their best interest, but its on-the-whole bad for the American consumer. We can have the good of Apple without the anti-competitive bullshit like a lack of message interoperability. We just need the government to enforce it
This makes me so angry. You have a choice in the market! Everything on this list is a feature which I am choosing as the customer. If I didn't want these features and benefits then I would make a different choice as a consumer. As a consumer I am not a victim. I can choose between iOS, Android, or something else.
It isn't about you, it's about me who can't install iMessage on an Andorid phone or a Linux desktop and participate in your group chats in reasonable capacity.
Many victim are adamant that they are not actually a victim no matter what evidence is provided. Luckily anti-trust law doesn't care about your opinion.
The blue background on messages sent between two iMessage users has to be one of the most brilliant vendor lock-in strategies. It is an artificial form of discrimination. I feel a slight annoyance whenever a non-Apple user forms a group chat as I know that person will limit the messaging functionality.
In my opinion, the "monopolistic" aspect of it comes down to the fact that they tied it into an otherwise open messaging system - SMS. You cannot separate SMS messages from iMessages (to my knowledge). So, the only way to know a message was sent via SMS is the green background for incoming messages and the green background plus the "sent via SMS" for outgoing messages. This creates a disdain for SMS, and anyone who uses it over iMessage. It is such a strong feeling, that having green messages makes you "uncool", especially in the younger crowd.
On the other hand, I think the long-term sequalae of the blue-green message is to push people to use stand-alone apps like WhatsApp and FB Messenger. I think it'll be a hard sell at this point to convince a jury that iMessage is an overt monopoly.
The main question I want addressed is: If SMS messages can be directly shown in iMessage, and are not secure, then the argument of not allowing "insecure" 3rd-parties to integrate with iMessage goes out the window. All I want is Android messages to be shown in iMessage. Sure we can make them green, but at least they will be sent over the data network and not SMS.
> On the other hand, I think the long-term sequalae of the blue-green message is to push people to use stand-alone apps like WhatsApp and FB Messenger
I find it amusing that in 2024 people in the US still talk about WhatsApp as a future step. Where I'm from already 10+ years ago every single person you know would have a WhatsApp account.
With WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram etc. I think this is pretty much a solved problem in the rest of the world, really only the US is behind here.
What I find amusing is that all of those WhatsApp users don't know or don't care that they are uploading their entire list of contacts (with phone numbers) to Meta/Facebook and syncing it every day.
That "end-to-end encrypted" advertising has done its job, and most people don't want to be bothered with thinking too much anyway.
WhatsApp is a gold mine of real-world social graph data for Facebook/Meta. If you think for a moment how much you can infer by merging that data with other information you get from people using other FB apps and sites, it's incredible.
> I find it amusing that in 2024 people in the US still talk about WhatsApp as a future step.
One person said that. Almost nobody I know has any interest in WhatsApp. The infatuation with putting all of your messaging into Facebook's hands is a European thing. What I don't understand at all is why Europeans think Facebook is superior to Apple.
> With WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram etc. I think this is pretty much a solved problem in the rest of the world, really only the US is behind here.
I have a hard time believing that having multiple chat apps is any kind of solution to the problem. The nice thing about iMessage in the US is that it covers about 90% of everyone I talk to. Right out of the box, no asking what ecosystem someone else is using, it just works. And if I'm talking to someone who does not have iMessage ... it still just works, albeit with fewer features.
I heartily disagree that Europe or the rest of the world has a better system. Best would be if every phone from every manufacturer supported a modern protocol equivalent to iMessage or Google's proprietary RCS. Until then, iMessage in the US is the closest things to universal modern messaging.
Could also say it was 'solved' 30 years ago with ICQ (OK, I know it was centralized and insecure, but from a strictly user-experience perspective I honestly liked it better than anything that came since) or maybe 35 years ago with IRC.
Except for all the US people that keep in touch with Europeans! Source: me (a European) that has a GF in the US. They all get converted to WhatsApp :')
> With WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram etc. I think this is pretty much a solved problem in the rest of the world, really only the US is behind here.
I don't think this is accurate. In ANZ at least it's fairly uncommon, and I'd imagine there are a number of other similar countries. I would be surprised if the number isn't 100m+ first world users who don't fall into that bucket, not including the US.
I can't speak for everything else, but LINE was not well known for privacy.
Everything people complain about WRT Meta was being done with impunity; their privacy policy basically said that they could read your messages and tailor ads based on them.
I really don't understand why people are crowing about using platforms like LINE and WhatsApp and sneering at Americans; they are not better.
> This creates a disdain for SMS, and anyone who uses it over iMessage. It is such a strong feeling, that having green messages makes you "uncool", especially in the younger crowd.
The thing is, I think it's perfectly fine, reasonable, and correct to have a disdain for SMS. The problem is that people transfer this disdain onto anyone they are "forced" to communicate with over SMS.
> I think the long-term sequalae of the blue-green message is to push people to use stand-alone apps...
Defaults matter. The friction to using iMessage on a brand-new iPhone is zero: it's right there, front and center, and doesn't require anyone to download anything new or confer with family and friends to figure out what the "right" other messaging platform is.
> ... like WhatsApp and FB Messenger
Oof, no thanks. I'd rather not be pushed toward using messaging apps owned by a company known to do shady things with user data. I've managed to get a few friends and group chats off those platforms and onto something else, but unfortunately there are still a few on them that I don't want to just cut ties with.
I find this whole debate over what is essentially the background color of chat messages to be rather silly.
iPhones implement SMS/MMS, which are both standards set forth by the GSM specification. That's the level of message exchange the underlying protocol offers. RCS is the "next gen" SMS, which is also being implemented. SMS/MMS/RCS does not support E2E encryption.
Apple then offers iMessage as a seperate service, on par with WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger, etc. It is literally just a messaging service running over the internet, using some form of identifier to identify you, which might be your phone number, like signal, or your email.
iMessage also offers proper E2E encryption, which is hit or miss with competitors. The challenge with E2E encryption is peer discovery. iMessage has made encryption easy, to the point that nobody thinks about it, but that's really what the blue bubble indicates, that your message is E2E encrypted.
There is literally no monopoly there other than Apple offering the superior tool. There is open communication with other phones, using SMS/MMS, which is the lowest common denominator when you're talking phones. That is literally the level of capability you can guarantee when talking over GSM.
> I find this whole debate over what is essentially the background color of chat messages to be rather silly.
Are you aware that it's actually so serious that Apple officially uses it in their marketing? They quite literally say "iMessages are blue. So you're not." and most notably: "SMS texters will be green with envy."
You cannot separate SMS messages from iMessages (to my knowledge)
I have only had an iphone for a few months, and I haven’t tried it yet, but when I enabled imessage I had the option of using an email address instead of my phone number. and From an android users perspective texting an iphone user is terrible, because they are incapable of sending quality photos, i suspect they just default to over compression for mms
…on a side note, the overall iphone experience is not great, everything just feels like it is trying to stop me from doing what i want. Not that android was all that better, but I definitely felt a bit more free with even simple things like how copy/paste works.
I’m actually thinking I will switch after my iPhone 8 packs it in. iPhone is now about extracting money not providing the best phone. Every app has an in app purchase. Let us have root to our iPhones so we can install open source projects.
It seems like DOJ might force Apple to make separate "SMS" and "iMessage" apps, and perhaps forbid preinstalling iMessage so users have to download it from the App Store when they get a new phone (giving it equal footing with its competitors). This would diffuse the claim that iOS is downgrading Android users within the same app.
I would prefer they just require Apple implement RCS (which they've already agreed to do), and -- crucially -- require feature parity with Android's RCS implementation. Which means standardizing Google's proprietary E2EE extension, and implementing that as well.
While I'd prefer being able to install a standalone Android iMessage app over the current situation, I really don't need or want another chat app.
Possibly split Messages and SMS in to distinct apps.
Have the latter handle SMS/MMS/RCS with options (in its settings area) to enable/disable each of the three, such that any or all of them may be individually allowed (or not).
Then also have an additional pair of options in the SMS app to indicate which other message app can operate as a proxy. Said proxy being able to send or receive SMS/MMS/RCS as appropriate. Possibly have the default set to Messages, but allow it to be set to any other app which has opted in.
Remove all of the SMS/MMS options from Messages, except the 'Send as SMS', which would then try to do the existing fall back when there is no data service.
The default behaviour would be as now. Disabling the 'Send as SMS' option would keep Messages and SMS as two distinct services, and one could then run the that way. Further flipping the config in SMS would allow any other app to be the preferred primary contact point.
I'm not sure how one would handle 'Group Chats' in such a situation.
With such a situation, I'd split the two and operate as distinct systems, iMessages in its own app, SMS/MMS/RCS in the SMS app, all other message facilities confined to their own playpen.
I know some relatives who would prefer to keep the proposed defaults such that everything appears in the Messages app.
The DOJ can’t really force Apple to do anything here without a consent decree, and with the case they just filed I’ll be surprised if they even get that much. Although, who knows, maybe a New Jersey district court will be a friendlier jurisdiction for this spaghetti case.
Man that would so awesome. The lack of control over what I'm actually sending the message on is annoying as hell on iPhone's. I want to explictly send and receive SMSes at points.
The annoying thing about any other messaging service except SMS is that if you're out in BFE, as long as you can ping a tower, you can get a message out ... or in.
The person not using iMessage doesn't limit anything, in most cases, now that RCS is a thing on most Androids. Apple is the one that breaks the experience for everyone and then implies it was the non-iMessage user.
The main thing I miss about having an iPhone is the ability to send full resolution pictures and videos over iMessage. In practice, SMS and MMS are seriously limited in the size of files they can send.
> This creates a disdain for SMS, and anyone who uses it over iMessage. It is such a strong feeling, that having green messages makes you "uncool", especially in the younger crowd.
When iMessage was introduced it was at a time SMS and MMS incurred extra charges, or, at best, came out of a fixed monthly allowance.
Making the user aware of whether they were using SMS/MMS or iMessage was actually a technically important feature, not a way to shame Android users.
My guess is even if iMessage bubbles were green, the sheer horribleness of SMS would still make communicating with Android a second class experience in a way everyone found frustrating. Sure RCS might make that better (I’m skeptical — standards support in the Android ecosystem is very inconsistent and varying in quality), but it’s a decade late. The basic argument is: Apple can’t make anything better for iPhone users until they can make it a standard for every mobile computing platform and competing service provider. About as absurd as it sounds.
>Sure RCS might make that better (I’m skeptical — standards support in the Android ecosystem is very inconsistent and varying in quality)
Maybe, but my old mom and her old Huawei phone works with zero problems with my brand new OnePlus and whatever mix of phones her friends have. All of them on RCS. The only one that has a problem is a friend with an iPhone that cannot receive images in the size everyone else shares them in. No-one here uses zuckerware - it is all SMS (IE. all RCS except for the few that likes old style Nokias so they get it as a SMS).
The blue background isn't lock-in -- it's branding and fashion. It's labeling the in-group and the out-group. The cool kids with their Nike shoes and the kids who got their shoes from Payless Shoe Store. The Abercrombie & Fitch wearing kids vs Costco or Walmart wearing kids.
The sooner it can be learned that a symbol on a shoe is ... kind of a silly status symbol, the better. Same with blue background or blue check mark.
I fear that's a losing battle. Forming cliques seems to be basic human behavior. It's not so much about the status symbol itself, as it's about being able to "other" people for whatever reason du jour.
This seems especially true for children, who lack the maturity to judge social interaction less superficially. Not saying adults are immune to this sort of thing, of course.
This strategy doesn't work in all the other more sophisticated markets, where WhatsApp/Telegram/FB Messenger/etc are the most popular communication apps.
It's not artificial. SMS is terrible on its own, and that's none of Apple's fault. It's not like Android users are getting together and happily having SMS/RCS group chats.
> It's not artificial. SMS is terrible on its own, and that's none of Apple's fault. It's not like Android users are getting together and happily having SMS/RCS group chats.
What? RCS is a real thing that works between Android users. It is Apple's choice to not support (or contribute to it or improve the standard) it because it locks people in and creates a very cozy, very real in-group sentiment.
That’s not Apple’s doing. They introduced iMessage as a direct result of telecom companies charging customers for text messages a la carte. If DoJ has issues with those blue bubbles then they should’ve sued telecom back then. This entire suit is a joke.
The problem isn't the messaging service, the problem is the artificial hardware requirement in order to use it. Second would be the inability to make another app the primary/default once you have said hardware.
Agree, but its also more importantly the (...) bubbles that people have become addicted to. Green doesnt show that.
So when you see (...) and then it goes away and comes back a bunch of times - peoples fear and anxieties project into that (...) -- and its that fear dopamine that people are addicted to wrt to gree/blue...
where people are annoyed at green when they basically send a UDP txt - whereas blue is a TCP txt, so to speak...
What I want to know is how there’s any legal basis to compel any business to implement and service specific, arbitrary software features. It would be one thing if there were a law that mandated a class of messaging apps interoperate on a certain standard if they use certain regulated communication networks. But “Apple messages must implement interoperability with Android messages” feels very hamfisted as an expression of that, and doesn’t strike me as legally defensible.
Sure it is. Anti-trust law gives the government (assuming they prevail in court) broad authority to require that a specific company take specific, tailored actions that the government believes will make it so the company can't abuse its market position to harm consumers anymore.
There's a long history of this, with Microsoft being a fairly recent, famous example.
There isn't, but the way anti-trust works it more or less says "You need to do X by Y date". That X usually nudges a path or least resistance towards iplementing and servicing a new feature (or undoing chokeholds on old features), but as we see with the DMA Apple can play with loopholes for months before getting with the program.
To your example (and excuse my lack of sound legalese), they wouldn't say "Apple must implement RCS", they would say "Apple must allow for an cross-compatible solution" or "Apple must document XYZ features keeping competitors from implementing a proper iMessage alternative".
They don't even need to mandate anything. They need to neuter intellectual property, unambiguously legalize reverse engineering and circumvention, and make it illegal for corporations to retaliate against consumers who exercise those rights. Then all this stuff will happen on its own via adversarial interoperability.
Want to use a custom client to connect to some service? Want to bridge two rival networks? Such things should be our rights.
> The blue background on messages sent between two iMessage users has to be one of the most brilliant vendor lock-in strategies. It is an artificial form of discrimination.
This is, always has been, and will always remain bullshit.
The problem isn't the blue vs green background. It would be the same if the backgrounds were purple and gold, red and gray, or just both blue.
The problem is the different capabilities between SMS and iMessage. And because those capabilities are different, it is useful and productive to communicate that in a clear, but unobtrusive way—like making their message bubbles different colors.
If they control how SMS is received and displayed, they absolutely do control the featureset of SMS. On Android it's trivial to use different SMS apps, the receiver gets to decide how, if at all, they'll be separated.
> The main question I want addressed is: If SMS messages can be directly shown in iMessage, and are not secure, then the argument of not allowing "insecure" 3rd-parties to integrate with iMessage goes out the window. All I want is Android messages to be shown in iMessage. Sure we can make them green, but at least they will be sent over the data network and not SMS.
There’s the Messages app and the iMessage protocol — two different things. How would Apple allow messages from Android that are not SMS? That’s by adding RCS support, which is coming later this year. It still won’t have end to end encryption (like the iMessage protocol does) because Apple isn’t going to support (as of now) the proprietary and closed extensions Google has developed for RCS. Any Android message that comes over the data network will have to have some sort of encryption. Otherwise SMS is just fine, as it is today.
> How would Apple allow messages from Android that are not SMS?
Quite easily: by releasing a standalone iMessage app on Android. The Beeper folks have shown this of course can be done (even if Apple doesn't like it and blocks them).
Doing this would certainly be orders of magnitude easier than implementing RCS. It's quite telling that Apple still wants to maintain iMessage as iOS-only. And if Apple doesn't work with Google to implement the E2EE extension (assuming Google is reasonable about it), that tells us all we need to know (and should have already known): Apple doesn't actually care about their users and user privacy. They just care about their market position and "prestige", and want to maintain these silly "class divisions".
Apple frustrates the hell out of me with their deceptive tactics to create walled gardens while pretending not to. They feign ignorance to keep you stuck and create the illusion of open doors out of their walled garden that are actually broken and they have no interest in fixing.
I've been paying for iCloud for my wife's iphone for the last several months because of how difficult Apple makes it for us to export our photos. Copying them off the phone with a usb cable is nearly impossible if you don't have a macbook, exporting them off of the website is nearly impossible if you have over 1k photos.. meanwhile google takeout allows me to download all of my photos in my browser in a couple clicks. In my experience, it feels like Apple makes getting out of their walled garden as difficult as legally possible.
If you're on linux I can only recommend ifuse with the libimobiledevice package. I followed the guide on the arch wiki[0] and could simply mount my iPhone to a directory[1] and then just drag and drop them over. For some reason there were 1000 pictures per folder so I had a few different folders, but otherwise it was super simple.
I connect and disconnect my iPhone often, so I prefer Gnome's default file manager Nautilus with gvfs-afc and or gvfs-gphoto2 (1).
My devices show up when I plug them in and I can see all my apps that expose storage in Apple's Files, with accompanying icons (2). Device folders like Downloads are off limits, though (3).
3: This entails much pointless duplication of files on the iPhone just to be able to see them from my PC. Apple would prefer, no doubt, that I use AirDrop or iCloud. But my Linux laptop means staying out of Apple's walled garden.
Can also testify to this, also works for transferring files to the device from Linux if app supports (ref VLC, etc). However, the speed is mind-numbingly slow.
Faster and easier to just sync with iCloud, then download from iCloud.
So, why not just vote with my wallet, and get a device that either is more friendly to 3rd party software interaction or simply allows saving to a movable SD card? Because overall things work very smoothly, and it is easy to find and manage settings. These things balance out well against the frustrations, especially when I know from experience that non-Apple devices will present their own frustrations.
To be fair, the philosophical/theoretical/economic foundations of antitrust legislation confuse me. This has not been helped by media bites a la NYT. Maybe if I had months and years of free time and good material I could form a worthy opinion. But for now, I just have trouble seeing how statements like this from OP are contradictory: "The company says this makes its iPhones more secure than other smartphones. But app developers and rival device makers say Apple uses its power to crush competition."
I do that as well (Android user, so it's pretty much the default), but aside from not having to pay Google, there isn't a meaningful difference here: it's just trading one company's propriety cloud backup for another's.
Some googling would find you several ways to do this (directly on the phone to external storage is possible, but yeah selecting all the photos on the iphone sucks as you have to click one and scroll-select them all):
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph480caa1f3/io...
The easiest way is to export them via photos for mac.
I have ~200K photos in iCloud and do not have this problem of exporting, I “export” regularly onto new backup media.
However, I don't really export, I turn on iCloud Photos on Windows and set it to store on an external media with sufficient space (over 2TB now) and then tell it to locally store all media in full quality.
Once it's synced, I have a local folder with all the media. I have accomplished an export. Then I can turn it off, remove the media, and go back to a c:\ folder and not saving locally.
Now, you wanted without iCloud, so then, Windows 10 or newer? Microsoft has a phone companion that can pull things, or there's file explorer for just photos.
But absent iCloud, what I've done is run OneDrive on the iPhone, and let that mirror everything to OneDrive.
(An alternative used to be Amazon Photos, but I can't keep track of their business model, and Google Photos I can't keep track of what makes them decide to replace my originals with badly compressed alternatives.)
I sort of don't understand buying an iPhone, though, if you're not buying into the ecosystem.
The ecosystem is the point.
The ease of use of iCloud, the paired camera roll for your family (not same thing as shared albums), the family sharing of apps and subscriptions, the bring-your-own domain email with "hide my email" throwaway accounts to put into spammy sites, it's all there increasingly seamless, increasingly secure, and none of it is selling you out into third party ad-tech.
If you're not into that, there are other phone systems and operating systems and other hardware all grounded on different and separate principles. There's only one place for a cohesive coherent curated "don't make me think" peace of mind, and consumers should have a right to choose that since it stands alone in opposition to the DIY bricolage everyone else offers.
I just want the auto-sync experience of iCloud photos to my own NAS. Paying Apple $2.99/mo forever just so I can have an offsite backup of my photos is so obnoxious.
I use photo sync for this, which was a one off payment. Of course you have to trigger it manually every few days because only Apple apps can actually work on iOS
Sorry this isn't a helpful answer but over in Android-land, Syncthing does exactly this for me right now. I paired Syncthing with a script that pushes any new photos to a self-hosted gallery. It's as fast if not faster than Google Photos and totally independent of any Google ecosystem. Add another offsite Syncthing machine and now you have a magical offsite backup.
an option for easy backup in addition to the already-mentioned google photos is to use a hosted nextcloud instance (hetzner, shadow.tech) to backup photos from your phone. the nextcloud app available on the ios store will backup to the configured remote nextcloud instance and the corresponding nextcloud app on your laptop etc. can then sync these photos to you.
It's amusing how often you see this sort of substantive claim which can be trivially disproven.
"Apple operates a walled garden! I can't get my photos out of iCloud!" [half a dozen ways to get the photos off the phone are proffered] "Well. Nevertheless!"
It is as much about perception and convenience as anything else. When I talk about smartphones with non-technical people, the top complaint (against both Apple and Google) is that they try to trap customers by making it hard to move your stuff from iOS to Android or vice versa. They're running into issues for different reasons (forgotten passwords, data migration tool not getting everything) but it's fundamentally the same complaint: why does this require some specific procedure instead of just working the way I expect it to work? This may just be the grumpy nerd in me talking, but all of this would be a lot easier if mobile apps dealing with interchangeable things like photos and text saved user data to files instead of inscrutable databases by default.
> Copying them off the phone with a usb cable is nearly impossible if you don't have a macbook
Even if you have a macbook, it is not much better. The photos app kept crashing on me if I tried to copy more than 500 photos. Also, copying to photos is not enough, you need to export everything too. And that messed up the metadata so bad for me.
Iphone is useless as a camera to me. There is simply no way to get original quality photos and videos out of it. What good is camera if you can't access the media you shot?
I also suspect that there isn't an easy way to reduce the resolution that the default iPhone camera app takes photographs at (that I could find) because Apple wants them to be big so that you will need to buy cloud storage.
I want to add how much difficult Apple makes it to delete content in general from an iPhone. Deleting simple things like email, which are just a swipe away on Android, are notoriously difficult on the native email app, simply because Apple doesn't give a fuck. And this is the company touted as some design genius? I think it's all a ploy to just grab more users for iCloud, or get users to upscale to a higher storage on their next iPhone.
> Deleting simple things like email, which are just a swipe away on Android, are notoriously difficult on the native email app,
Not sure what exactly you’re talking about, because deleting an email (from the mailbox list) is a long swipe to the left on iOS/iPadOS too, unless you have changed the settings for that to archive the mail instead of deleting. It has been this way for a very long time.
> In 2010, a top Apple executive emailed Apple’s then-CEO about an ad for the new
Kindle e-reader. The ad began with a woman who was using her iPhone to buy and read books
on the Kindle app. She then switches to an Android smartphone and continues to read her books using the same Kindle app. The executive wrote to Jobs: one “message that can’t be missed is that it is easy to switch from iPhone to Android. Not fun to watch.”
This attitude explains a lot. This logic applies to every app that's available on both iPhone and Android, and to every web app.
This behavior is so overt that I am constantly baffled that otherwise rational people continue to make up excuses for Apple. See also this article where they overtly state that the green bubble thing is deliberately intended to cause lock-in: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-an...
I have been called a "violent criminal" on this very site because I criticized Apple's decision to remotely brick swapped components to prevent DIY repairs. I do not understand what it is about Apple that causes this behavior in people when they make it so, so, so obvious that they are just trying to lock people in for cash.
“Locking people in for cash” is a common business practice in tech and other industries. Try mounting a Nikon lens on a Canon camera, for example. You might not like it, but I’m not sure why Apple deserves special condemnation in this regard.
The green bubble complaining must have the lowest level of credibility among all the anti-apple complaints. The method of "monopolization" here is to make their product cooler than their competitors product. The idea that we need to government to step in and force apple to make android cool too is so silly.
You can buy an android. It’s not hard. You can eliminate all your problems. The solution exists. I do find any further argument temping when not only can you buy an Android, you can buy a cheaper phone that does all the same things.
I do not angry when I use Netflix and the program I wanna watch is on Hulu. I do not complain to Hulu. They offer a app/website and I can buy it that very day. You can, this very day, buy an Android
I wish everything good was free too and I only had one app and one computer OS and didn’t have to choose between car brands too but that’s not Reality
I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products, easy to make alternatives to Apple products and easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products.
In lieu of this what is the problem? If the government has a problem why not say any code should be able to be run on any device?
Honestly I’m curious - what’s the problem? There are android phones that are superior to iPhones and let you run anything you want. Why don’t people buy those?
The government seems to want to make it illegal to have a tight experience, but why? There are open alternatives. It’s like complaining that Teslas don’t support CarPlay. Valid, but does it require legislation? Buy another car.
FWIW I would love if the government made it so all devices should have an option to run any of your arbitrary code.
Please, go do it. You'll be very rich very quick and I'll eagerly buy your products once you succeed.
Unfortunately you'll find out it's not actually easy at all when you realize that consumers care about weight, size, temperature and battery life which are all things apple excels at. Their hardware is really quite good, unfortunately the software is horribly crippled.
This is how the free market is intended to work. This opens up the range for several android phones (which have a near split in the US, and a majority globally last I recall) to offer better hardware.
Modern Samsung phones are very good. You’re asserting that Apple should be punished purely because they make good hardware and are successful - and if their hardware wasn’t good and competitive then you wouldn’t care.
Part of why I have Apple devices as a tech enthusiast is the good software and the ecosystem that comes with it.
Would I like to run an IDE and code on an iPad? Absolutely. But I’d rather have the iPad than the android tablet.
"Easy" means there are no barriers to entry, not that it's trivial to make a good product.
In particular, there are no barriers to entry imposed by Apple. For any product Apple sell, there are numerous competing products in the same category. Apple's versions uniformly dominate third party rankings of these products, but all that means is that they're good at what they do.
> Unfortunately you'll find out it's not actually easy at all when you realize that consumers care about weight, size, temperature and battery life which are all things apple excels at. Their hardware is really quite good, unfortunately the software is horribly crippled.
They really don't. iPhone is a status symbol, especially for the new up-and-coming consumers (teens)
Apple + Google form a duopoly. Apple has locked down iOS to let them do whatever they want and overcharge as much as they like, and Google has no incentive to be any better, because there's no serious 3rd contender*.
For typical users not buying Apple means having to compromise on privacy with Google, which isn't a great option either. Both are trying their best to create vendor lock-in and make it hard for users to leave.
From developer perspective not having access to iOS users is a major problem. Apple inserts themselves between users and developers, even where neither users nor developers want it. Users and devs have no bargaining power there, because Play Store does the same, and boycotting both stores has a bunch of downsides for users and devs.
*) I expect people on HN to say that some AOSP fork with f-droid is perfectly fine, but that's not mainstream enough to make Apple and Google worried, especially that Google has created its certification program and proprietary PlayStore Services to make degoogling phones difficult.
It's an interesting perspective, but as I understand this case, the case is not interested in a developer's bargaining power against their distributor. The case is interested in the impact on consumers (fewer choices, higher prices). There's certainly no argument to make that consumers lack a variety of apps and app features.
I care about you as a developer, but I'm not sure this case does. Maybe I'm thinking about it wrong.
> *) I expect people on HN to say that some AOSP fork with f-droid is perfectly fine
As you explained yourself, it's not a real alternative, because it relies on Google itself, who can always decide to break it. A real alternative is GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone. And yes, they are very niche and not easy to make.
Your mobile device is a gateway to much of the world. You seem to think it would be okay for a car manufacture to make it impossible to use your car except to drive to business that pay the car maker 30% of every purchase. I'm guessing you'll say people should be able to opt into such a car if they want but if that car has 60% of the market now it's effectively influencing the entire economy. Prices of groceries are 30% higher. Prices of clothing are 30% higher. Any company who wants people to come to their store are forced to sign up to pay the car company 30% or else they won't have access to 60% of the population.
Can you see the issue now? It doesn't matter that people could by other cars. It matters that Apple's market is so large that its influence is too big to be left as is.
The question is, can you buy a car from a different manufacturer? When it comes to cars, yes you can.
Is apple a monopoly? Probably not, because you can also switch to android.
Does Apple have a large enough share of the market to influence the market? Likely, which is why the EU has DSA and DMA now.
Poor analogy. This is already an issue with servicing automobiles. Overly-complicated construction and proprietary tools that can only be acquired by licensed dealerships. Read: Audi, Mercedes-Benz.
> I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products
While it is easy to not buy Apple products, I think the thing that often gets missed is that once someone is significantly invested in Apple's ecosystem, getting out of that ecosystem is highly disruptive and difficult.
For example, suppose you are a person who for historical reasons owns a MacBook, and iPad, and an iPhone, and a large chunk of your friends group also has those. The default choice then for you to use a cloud storage solution is Apple's iCloud Drive. The default choice for you to store and share photos is Apple's Photos App. The default choice for you to message your friends is the iMessage App. The default way for you to store passwords is Apple's Keychain Manager.
If you then decide "you know what, I'm fed up with Apple, I'm going to buy an Android", suddenly your cloud storage solution, your photo storage and syncing solution, your messaging solution, and your password management solution are all not supported, so you not only need to find an alternative on your new device, but you also have to do so on all your other devices if you want your phone to be in sync with them. This is a really high friction environment, and makes it so that a lot of people feel trapped in Apple's ecosystem.
So you can be a person who would not choose to buy Apple products today if you were starting from scratch, but you can feel compelled to continue buying them because Apple has made it so that switching in the future is very inconvenient and impacts all your other devices. It's specifically people in this situation who are being taken advantage of by Apple and why Apple's practices are labelled as monopolistic.
Apple spent a long time acquiring customers and coaxing them into their walled garden, and now they're switching tactics to milking those customers now that it's inconvenient for them to leave the walled garden.
You seem to totally misunderstand the whole concept of what the competition law is about.
It's not about whether people can choose not to buy an iPhone, really at all. It's about once they do choose iPhone, is Apple unfairly using their control of the platform to influence whether they choose Apple's product vs a competitor for future things they buy.
Seems to me that if I already own an Android device and am in the market for a tablet, I would probably choose Android again because a lot of the apps that I have bought & paid for include a tablet version as well. Not sure if most would consider that anti-competitive.
I just bought Garmin GPS Watch. I'm appalled that it only let's me download apps from the Garmin watch app store. It's unfair that I can only install Garmin's OS on it. I bought the watch. I should be able to do anything I want to it. I need Garmin's software engineers to develop open solutions so that anyone can do anything on the watches they sell.
Do you see what the problem is with the above statement? How far does the government go? Shouldn't all products (electronic or not) be "open" if Apple loses?
For every thing that the DOJ is complaining about there’s a Google version: Chat, Wallet, Auto, Pixel, etc.
This suit reminds me of the phrase, “I’ve been convicted by a jury of my peers… who couldn’t get out of jury duty.”
Apple is under the gun because their main competitors (at least Google and Samsung) aren’t as good / successful, even when they have greater market shares.
The difference is that the underlying protocols in those android apps are open, and so can be communicated with by any other app that anyone chooses to write an app.
Apples apps are built on top of proprietary protocols which they do not allow anyone else to use, and so there are lots of features and functionality that can only be used by Apple giving them the edge over anybody else.
You assertions are immaterial to the fact that they are breaking the law. Monopolies and monopolistic practices are flatly illegal.
You're also viewing this exclusively through the lens of the "consumer" experience while fully ignoring the effects on the "labor" and "supplier" market.
> The government seems to want to make it illegal to have a tight experience
Is there some evidence that a monopoly is absolutely required to have a "tight experience?"
Your first sentence is incorrect. Monopolies are not illegal.
From the press conference this morning: "It is not illegal to hold a monopoly, Garland said. "
"That may sound counterintuitive in a case intended to fight monopolies. But under US antitrust law, it is only illegal when a monopolist resorts to anticompetitive tactics, or harms competition, in an effort to maintain that monopoly."
> Monopolies and monopolistic practices are flatly illegal.
You are mistaken.
Section 2 of the Sherman Act makes it unlawful for a company to "monopolize, or attempt to monopolize," trade or commerce. As that law has been interpreted, it is not illegal for a company to have a monopoly, to charge "high prices," or to try to achieve a monopoly position by what might be viewed by some as particularly aggressive methods. The law is violated only if the company tries to maintain or acquire a monopoly through unreasonable methods. For the courts, a key factor in determining what is unreasonable is whether the practice has a legitimate business justification.
This has absolutely nothing to do with consumer choice. Apple device popularity among consumers has created a market of apps and technology that exists. That market is larger than the GDP of most countries. It is governed by Apple’s policies, and those policies are anti-competitive against companies wishing to participate in that market.
Spotify, just by virtue of the fact that someone installs their app, must pay Apple 30% of their revenue. Imagine trying to compete in a market where you have to pay your largest direct competitor 30%… And on top of all that, Apple keeps the internal fancy APIs all to themselves. It’s insane this hasn’t come sooner
> The government seems to want to make it illegal to have a tight experience, but why? There are open alternatives.
> Buy another car.
That argument goes both ways.
Once Apple is forced by law to allow other app stores, then you are free to continue to just use the Apple app store.
Just don't install other app stores. It is even more trivial to do that. So please don't complain about other app stores in the future, as your own exact argument refutes it.
Apple and Tesla aren’t competing in the same market
> It’s like complaining that Teslas don’t support CarPlay
It would be like that if the Tesla dash App Store somehow generated $1.1T annual revenue while taking 30% off the top of third party app manufacturers, while using that revenue and their own competitive advantage (not paying 30%) to grow and erode secondary markets via their own first party apps
Why does the percent taken matter? How much is appropriate? Ultimately they’re transparent about the fee, the choice is the developers.
In any case there should be a way to put your phone into some insecure mode and then you can explicitly download any app you want, yes.
But about Tesla - if you could make money, lots of money, selling Tesla dash apps, who cares if they take 30%? The alternative is today, you don’t really make anything at all.
Irrelevant. Monopoly doesn't mean coercing people into the market.
> easy to make alternatives to Apple products and easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products
It's not only not easy, it's not possible. Your mistake is thinking of phones as computers. They are not computers, at least not to the vast majority of users. They are devices that connect to other compatible devices to do telecommunications. It's just like if plain old telephones ran a proprietary protocol and only one vendor could make them.
Let’s hear some examples? Even things like iMessage have fallback to SMS, not to mention dozens of alternatives that work on android, iOS and more. What’s the problem?
> I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products, easy to make alternatives to Apple products and easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products.
Swap the name Apple with Microsoft and you might see a different perspective. Microsoft was beaten over the head for anti-competitive practices with browsers back in the day and Apple is behaving no different. It's easily arguable that they are behaving much worse in multiple aspects to what Microsoft was up to.
I fear we're going to see this argument in absolutely every thread on this topic for the next few years and it's going to be argued ad nauseam. "You can just buy an Android phone" barely scratches the surface of the arguments being made.
For example (given the EU gives great context to this): Apple owns and maintains the only App Store that's allowed on the iOS platform. So they have a monopoly on the iOS app market. Is that right and fair? I'm sure plenty will read that want to reply "yes of course it's fair, Apple can do what they want with their own platform" but that's your opinion. Controlled app stores are a dramatic shift from the way software used to be distributed and as a society/whatever we've never actually had a discussion about it. It just happened.
> The government seems to want to make it illegal to have a tight experience, but why?
I'd argue the government seems to want to make it illegal for a tight experience to be the only experience available. And it's not hard to see the argument for why: competition is good. Multiple app stores or whatever would open up the market, Apple would have to make the case for why they should get 15/30% of an app developer's revenue. They might be able to make that case very easily, they might not. But a monopoly means they don't even have to try.
IMO talking solely about Apple and/or arguing about whether they have a "monopoly" isn't going to be that effective (sorry DOJ). The reality is that we live in a world that requires us to be connected, that connection is currently controlled almost exclusively by two tech giants to the extent that even a slightly smaller tech giant, Microsoft, utterly failed in launching a competitive third platform. Is this duopoly good for us as a society? Is it what we actually want? It's fair to at least be asking the question.
Can a argument be made that by not supporting other software on their platform, essentially platform is inhibiting competition, which hinders true price discovery and customer loses ? Like if cars don't allow other FSD on their platform, what choice does the customer has.
Yeah, cars should totally allow third party FSD integrations, provided they are certified to be safe. We can't risk pedestrians getting hurt just so we can have more app choices.
But side-loading apps or having an alternative App Store only exposes you to liability, not other people. So it's not the same thing. We should be free on our own risk.
The problem is monopolization of markets that are typically contestable. All computers are Turing machines and all the code is just assembly. There is zero technical rationale for the restrictions Apple imposes. And the assumption in free market capitalism is that of competition. In tech world this means adversarial interoperability. Which, by the fun fact, is how every current Big Tech company grew. Facebook used to interoperate with MySpace in dislike of MySpace in a manner that today we would even categorize as infringing on IP laws. Adversarial interoperability is demonstrably beneficial for the user. When a company implements social and technical barriers to it, the state has all the right to reign in such behaviour in the benefit of markets being contestable.
Their platform is big enough that it affects the market even if you never use their products. Idiotic decisions that they make can ooze into other unrelated products in order to compete with them. Try buying a flagship Android with a microSD slot and a headphone jack. Now recall where the trend of eliminating those two things came from. The average consumer is not very keen to these things. They see the biggest player, Apple, gut a feature and lie to them about it being a good thing, and they will believe it. Now to recapture the average consumer the other players in the market have to adhere to those changes.
> There are android phones that are superior to iPhones
Sorry to report this is not true for my grandparents, father, mother, brother and sister and in fact my entire extended family. iOS is far easier to use by a thousand miles. Just some anecdata.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. The USA is a surveillance state and Apple’s security posture combined with its market share is a considerable hindrance. The arguments against anti-competitive and consumer-hostile mechanisms ad nauseam pale in comparison to this. I very much want to see real numbers, perhaps survey data, supporting the narrative that customers are locked in, unhappy with their experience, or otherwise underserved by Apple. Because IRL, I see nothing but happy customers.
If their tight experience is so superior, why do they restrict competition? Wouldn't they win anyways?
IMO it's clear that without abusing its position, we would actually have competition for all of the bundled services from Apple.
But this is capitalism. The ultimate goal is always monopoly, so they'll keep chasing that by whatever means necessary.
>easy to make alternatives to Apple products
What? This is plain false. Entering this market is extremely expensive and hard to do. The duopoly is there for a reason. Even giants like Microsoft tried to enter it and couldn't.
> If their tight experience is so superior, why do they restrict competition? Wouldn't they win anyways?
iOS today regularly updates with improvements across the full software stack, up to the Apple apps themselves. Sometimes these changes are major. In the world the justice department is asking for, big changes to —for example, Messages app— would have to be coordinated with every app developer in that category. Changes would takes much, much longer, and in many cases would have to be watered down.
If you're genuinely interested in this below are a couple things you could read to help get some background. Its actually a pretty fascinating history.
Judging by your phrasing, your interpretation of antitrust stems from Robert Bork and has been the mainstream thought for a long time. Read The Antitrust Paradox by him to see how we got here and why the courts have acted how they have for the past 40 years.
The current chair of the FTC, Lina Khan, was actually an academic prior to working for the government and has a long paper trail of how she interprets the law. In short (and extremely oversimplified), it modernizes the Brandeis interpretation that bigness is bad for society in general, regardless of consumer pricing. EX: If Apple were a country its GDP would surpass the GDPs of all but four nations. They argue this is bad flat out.
Can't say it was the only cause, but Khan's paper, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox - note the reference to Bork's book - is partially what resparked a renewed interest in antitrust for the modern era if you want to check it out.
The 0.01% who hate apple anyway can't live without the need to turn the iphone into an android because it's what's good for the children (users). It's really amazing the lengths folks talk about how superior android on these threads and apple is the root of all evil.
The other 99.9% could care less and I predict they will be unhappy with the results of forced-enshitification of iOS.
This quote is pretty consistent with my take on what Apple has been up to:
> In the end , Apple deploys privacy and security justifications as an elastic shield that can stretch or contract to serve Apple's financial and business interests .
In the EU / app store ballyhoo, privacy / security has been used too often.
But in general, Apple has relentlessly set standards for data privacy that no other business seemed willing or able to provide. Far from perfect, (CN datacenters) but still seemingly far out ahead.
People don't normally pay for privacy or data security because they're not considered valuable until something bad happens.
So I can at least understand why the company might lean on this loss-leader to try and prop up its position in the face of unwanted regulation.
> Apple has relentlessly set standards for data privacy that no other business seemed willing or able to provide
One of the big differences between Google and Apple is that users treat Google (IMO rightly) as a privacy threat, but treat Apple as a privacy ally. Apple's data privacy positions look a lot different if you treat them also as a privacy threat. For example, it becomes really odd that you can't set a non-Apple secure messaging app as your SMS app, or set a non-Apple browser as your default web browser. Apple insists that you share your browsing and messaging data with them.
What's the risk here? The risk is that, as has happened with nearly every darling tech company in history, Apple decides to end the honeymoon period at some point because that's what the market demands. Then you're in a position where you've handed over to Apple gobs of private data that they have unencrypted backups of.
> But in general, Apple has relentlessly set standards for data privacy that no other business seemed willing or able to provide.
I find this hard to believe nowerdays given what I read 3 months ago regarding law enforcement and push notification data. Google had set the standard higher in this situation.
The standards Apple set are for others, not for itself; Apple is all too happy to extract as much data as possible from its customers to build its own ad empire while limiting others'. I'd prefer a level playing field where I can control how much data Apple and others can extract from me ("none").
Also, the whole "security" bs is exactly the same thing as governments saying we're doing this to protect you citizens from pedophiles / terrorists / druglords.
The securtiy aspects are a big deal and I say this as someone who is not bothered at all by ad tracking and cookies and the like. But I and a lot of people have banking and crypto stuff on the phone and not having people able to hack in and steal your money is significant.
The sarcasm isn't really necessary. I think most of us would prefer to live in a world where the capitalist mentality didn't trump all other considerations. It's actually possible for a company like Apple to be laser-focused on privacy and giving their users the best possible options, and still make a more-than-healthy profit margin.
Hell, with Apple's cash hoard, they could afford to give iPhones away for at least a couple years without much trouble. I'm not saying companies should be obligated to do crazy things like this once they have "enough" money, but I think it illustrates that there's no inherent reason why many companies need to take any particular action that increases revenue, regardless of the consequences.
Apple's long-standing culture of secrecy and exclusivity is the problem, really.
The point of the quote was not that it's in their interest to differentiate. The point was that, according to the complaint and for reasons they lay out, their marketing is dishonest and they frequently put their users at increased risk when it's to their financial to do so.
In other words, they're saying Apple's privacy and security stance is a bit like the trope of politicians saying "think of the children!" whenever they are selling a law that restricts liberty.
It's been many decades since the USA government attempted to go after a vertical trust. During my lifetime, almost all anti-monopoly action has been against horizontal trusts: companies that gain too much market share for some particular product or service. But there was a time, a long time ago, almost a century ago, when it was common for the government to do this kind of thing, for the benefit of the consumer.
There's also a pretty large econ literature questioning that it actually benefited the consumer, much of which concludes that in cases where the trust's anticompetitive power didn't itself rest on government-granted monopolies, it probably hurt.
That's because the government's definition of anti-competitive is ticky-tacky and is rooted in bullshit.
US anti-competitive policy and enforcement has always been dancing around the double standards of who can do market manipulation, the double standards of white collar crime enforcement, the double standards of "consumer benefit" in a capitalist system, etc.
"Consumer benefit" for example is a cowardly way to say price controls. Consumer benefit is inversely correlated with price. That implies the US government should be doing price controls and setting acceptable profit margins for everyone, but in practice due to the enforcement issues and the way the law is constructed it means that the government regulates prices only in extremely detailed technical cases.
Meaning you can manipulate consumer benefit AKA prices AKA extract profits all you want as long as you don't get into these narrowly defined, often unenforced technical cases.
In fact all of these charges or facsimiles of them existed in different forms 10 years ago, they were there on launch 15 years ago. Apple is being sued now simply because other large powerful interests like Epic games, don't like the revenue split rules on the App store.
Most of these laws are written not as regulations, but ways not to regulate.
Readit News
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24492020/doj-apple-an...
1. "Super Apps"
Apple has restrictions on what they allow on the App Store as far as "Super Apps", which are apps that might offer a wide variety of different services (specifically, an app which has several "mini programs" within it, like apps within an app). In China, WeChat does many different things, for example, from messaging to payments. This complaint alleges that Apple makes it difficult or impossible to offer this kind of app on their platform. Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.
2. Cloud streaming apps
Similar to "super apps", the document alleges that Apple restricts apps which might stream different apps directly to the phone (like video games). It seems there are several roadblocks that Apple has added that make these kinds of apps difficult to release and promote - and of course, Apple offers their own gaming subscription service called Apple Arcade which might be threatened by such a service.
3. Messaging interoperability
Probably most people are familiar with this already, how messages between (for example) iOS and Android devices do not share the same feature-set.
4. Smartwatches
Other smart watches than the Apple Watch exist, but the document alleges that Apple restricts the functionality that these devices have access to so that they are less useful than the Apple Watch. Also, the Apple Watch itself does not offer compatibility with Android.
5. Digital wallets
It is claimed that Apple restricts the APIs available so that only Apple Pay can implement "tap to pay" on iOS. In addition to lock-in, note that Apple also collects fees from banks for using Apple Pay, so they get direct financial benefit in addition to the more nebulous benefit of enhancing the Apple platform.
In the IBM case it opened up an entire industry of third party "compatible" peripherals and saved consumers a ton of money.
[1] I had a summer intern position in Field Engineering Services in 1978 and it was what all the FEs were talking about how it was going to "destroy" IBM's field service organization.
Not simply that a company is dominant; it is more about how and why they are dominant.
Update 2:40 pm ET: After some research, the practices below may capture much (though not necessarily all) of what the Department of Justice views unfavorably:
* horizontal agreements between competitors such as price fixing and market allocation
* vertical agreements between firms at different levels of the supply chain such as resale price maintenance and exclusive dealing
* unilateral exclusionary conduct such as predatory pricing, refusal to deal with competitors, and limiting interoperability
* conditional sales practices such as tying and bundling
* monopoly leveraging where a firm uses its dominance in one market to gain an unfair advantage in another
Any of these behaviors undermines the conditions necessary for a competitive market. I'd be happy to have the list above expanded, contracted, or modified. Let me know.
I’m curious what market opportunities the Apple suit could open up.
- Xbox cloud game streaming
- WeChat like super apps w e-commerce (X wanted to do this play but more likely Facebook Messenger and the like)
- iMessage on android
- a receipt tracking app or something directly tied into Apple Pay tapping
Maybe they should be. Our societies are ostensibly consumer-centric. It's about time our laws and organisations strongly sided with consumers against any opposition, especially against business.
When are people going to stop buying Apple?
Dead Comment
I am curious what things the iPhone does that others aren't allowed to do.
Most of the differences between Garmin and Apple Watch seem like they were conscious decisions where they each decided to take a different direction.
It's one of those weird things where it seems like the case has a bunch of holes. You can use an iPhone with some but not all non-Apple Smart watches. You can use a non-Apple phone with non-Apple smartwatches. There are other non-Apple smart watches that those manufacturers have decided can't be used with an iPhone, no different than Apple. Lots of choices in the market, I certainly don't feel restricted.
I am not sure how requiring something like WeChat to break into multiple apps would be a big issue. Apple even breaks it's own apps up into different apps.
This is all before even getting into things like ecosystem integration.
You'll pry my Garmin from my cold, dead hands but there's no mistaking it for an actual "smart"-watch. I value it entirely for health & fitness, and the very few "smart" things it can do are just nice-to-have icing on the cake.
I tried Garmin watches, and they're certainly better as "exercise tracking devices" than anything Apple offers, but they weren't tightly enough integrated with my iPhone to make it "worth it" to me to wear them all the time.
An Apple Watch Ultra - on the other hand - is a poorer exercise tracking device, but gives me enough "integrated with my iPhone" benefit to become the first watch I've worn consistently in 30+ years.
I assumed this was the result of design and development choices by Garmin, but it'll be interesting to see if their are meaningful ways that Apple restricts smartwatch developers from including similar levels of integration.
The two main differences are notifications filtering (choosing which apps can send notifications to the watch) and actioning notifications from the watch.
Sending messages from watch for example. Apple only allows that for Apple watches
Apple block Garmin watches from replying to text messages as they do on Android for example.
Only Apple Watches are allowed to do that.
I also note that iOS regularly tries to nag me into blocking Garmin Connect from sending notifications to my watch.
Ostensibly that’s to preserve battery life but they don’t do that for their own watches either.
I've noticed this with wireless bluetooth headphone pairing. Sometimes it works, othertimes there are odd limitations and devices unpair randomly.
Also Samsung's Adaptive Fast Charging sends lower wattage through the cable if it detects a non-Samsung device. So Apple is not the only offender here.
The Garmin sadly misses out on notification filtering, focus modes, replies, solid Bluetooth (it drops out from time to time and the app needs reopening).
Airpods and other bluetooth Apple devices seamlessly sync with iPhones because of a wireless protocol they use that is only available on Apple devices. I forget what it's called, but this definitely limits connectivity of devices that aren't made by Apple.
If people want to buy an iphone and shit it up, let them do it.
macOS has proven for decades that a reasonably proprietary OS can be distributed and kept reasonably secure when apps are installed on it outside of an App Store. There's even third-party App Stores on macOS like Steam, Homebrew, and a few more that Indie developers use to distribute apps.
The next generation isn't necessarily choosing, though.
Their parents are giving into their demands for *an iPhone due to social pressures entirely originated by Apple's monopolistic behavior (iMessage green bubbles).
Then, when they're locked into the Apple ecosystem from the start, it's almost impossible to break out -- even if you grow up into a mature adult that doesn't give a shit about bubble colors.
Interoperability (being able to exit an ecosystem without massive downsides, specifically) between the only two parties in a de facto duopoly is absolutely necessary and morally right, and it's a shame market failures force the judiciary to intervene. But we are where we are and there's no use putting lipstick on a pig -- the system as it stands is broken, and if left alone will feed on itself and become even more broken.
This is basically saying you only use TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, Tinder, Gmail, Google Maps, and play zero to some handful of mega huge F2P games.
Why have an App Store at all then? You don't use it. It's an installation wizard for you, not a store.
Don't you see? This stuff doesn't interact with restrictions at all. The problem with the App Store is that it sucks, not that it's restricted.
> making their app store worse
I've heard this take from so many people. It is already as bad as it gets. The App Store is an utter disaster. They have failed in every aspect to make a thriving ecosystem. It is just the absolute largest, hugest, best capitalized, least innovative apps and games.
This doesn't have to be the case at all. Look at Steam. Even Linux package managers have more diversity with more apps that thrive.
And all that is way easier than rooting/jailbreaking. I doubt that will be enough of a deterrent considering the anti-trust angle being that you can't compete with apple's native software
That would be significantly more fair to the end users than the current status quo, if they won't intentionally make obstacles for those users.
Obviously, that's not happening.
If they had one set of APIs for smartwatches that can be used by them for the apple watch and everyone else for their smartwatches they wouldn’t get sued. But instead they give themselves deep integration into the OS and limit everyone elses access. When you are one of the only available platforms thats not okay.
I agree people should be able to choose different things. But I also agree with the suit, that once someone gets in the position to control the market of 1000s and 1000s of companies, it's not longer just about user choice in phones. It's about the digital goods (apps/subscribtions/IaP) market itself.
I know some of us like to think of Apple as some kind of corporate diety, but even Apple has to answer to the US government.
If your walled garden (App Store) is really better, people will stay in it voluntarily.
Like damn, what if I intend to build this ecosystem from the outset, does that mean as soon as it reaches critical mass the government is going to come in and dismantle it? It's bullshit. This is essentially saying you're not allowed to build ecosystems.
Consumer products don't demand the same flexibility in this regard that enterprise products do. This is just other companies crying that they want a slice of the pie.
Nope, that's covered by basic consumer protections. Apple still has to offer support if the user has issues that weren't likely to have been caused by the modifications.
Your car maker doesn't get to refuse to honor your powertrain warranty just because you put in a custom stereo.
If only they had it left it there.
Some examples:
I think many computer savvy people don't realize how freeing and liberating it is for normal people to have an "appliance" computer.Those choices also affect me, though. Any shared albums, messages or other data I transmit with these users has a higher risk of being leaked.
There's some security in knowing almost all phones are not jailbroken and thanks to regular os upgrades, have a pretty solid security floor.
One way to handle this would be to decorate the comms ID, email / phone name whatever to show they aren't running a standard iOS. But I would want to know as easily as I do that messages I exchange with someone are going to an android device.
Just let people wipe the phone completely - no drivers, no kernel, nothing, and bring their own. That's the proper solution to people wanting to own their hardware and do whatever they want with it. Want to install a different app store/browser/etc? Go for it, start by installing the new kernel and drivers.
Almost none of the "free" apps are actually free. However, the App store makes it impossible to find this out without first supplying credit card information and installing the app, and possibly setting up an account with an app.
It used to be great. Frankly, it's now abusive.
Not sure I buy this point. Competitors can also offer their own suite of apps. Apple has an advantage that they can come pre-installed. But they aren't really building super-apps, just a variety of default apps - nothing stops third parties from offering multiple apps on the platform, that is actually a common thing to do.
Not only that, apparently updates automatically push their apps on you as well, without even asking. Suddenly I had a "Journal" app added to my homescreen from nowhere, and I thought my device had been hacked before I realized what was going on.
Apple also have the advantage of not having to follow their own rules. Their apps can send notifications without asking for permission about it. "Journal" again is an example here where the app sent me a notification and after going to the app, then they asked me for permission to send notifications.
I think there are technical limitations when you have different apps vs. one app. Simples being you need to log in to multiple different apps, but things like data moving between them etc are also complications.
While we never want to compete with core Apple apps, we're constantly having to say 'sorry that's the restrictions running on Apple' with background support.
(our usecase is we have a B2B app that has visual progress reports - so we'll have the same people on a team - the Android ones get their progress reports uploaded instantly, the iOS ones 'sorry keep your phone open'.)
I've designed several apps (Fitstar, Fitbit, theSkimm) that were dependent on the Apple ecosystem. While it's a huge tax to comply with their rules, they also do a TON to help developers succeed, especially early on. They maintain components, provide developer tools, build entire languages, design new paradigms, and ensure quality. I've had a respect for the tax on a service they provide to both developers and end users. At this point though - they're acting as a monopoly, and it feels anti-competitive.
It's not just the developer tax that's a problem. Hiding behind a veil of privacy also doesn't forgive the introduction of "dark pattern" end user experiences - such as the inability to have a group chat with non Apple users. And no non-Apple share links on Apple Photo albums. These create digital "haves" vs "have-nots" - and not everyone in the world can afford to buy physical Apple devices. There must be protocols that allow information to be more interoperable so people have optionality and control over their digital identities.
Maybe they should be required to license the tech, if they are not already. But I don't want to degrade my experience just because that's the only way to have a level playing field. Maybe the BT standards group could get off their ass and make the underlying protocol better.
- Apple Watch can directly use your credit cards without needing to separately add them to Fitbit/Google Pay.
- Apple Watch can "find my" your phone, whereas Fitbit's version of this is limited to just making it beep, and even that only works if the phone is running the Fitbit app in the background (which it often isn't).
- Apple Watch can stream data to the phone all the time, whereas Fitbit relies on the app being opened, meaning your morning sleep data isn't available immediately since opening the app (to look at it) just enables it to begin transferring.
- Apple Watch can unlock itself when your phone unlocks.
- Apple Watch gets much richer notification integration.
And yeah, you can argue that all of this is optional "extra" stuff that is just Apple's prerogative to take advantage of as the platform holder, and maybe that's so to some degree... but these little things do add up. Particularly when Apple doesn't even have a device that competes with Fitbit, it feels unfair that they shouldn't be made to open up all the APIs necessary for this kind of interoperability.
I strongly believe Apple is under no obligation to make iMessage cross-platform. It's their service they invented, and they get to run it how they chose. SMS is the interoperable standard between different platforms, and RCS is the new standard which they've comitted to supporting.
I would much rather action taken on Apple for the anti-steering provisions restricting competition for payments. I think this has had a much bigger market impact than limitations on game streaming or smart watches.
In the consumer's eye, all phones can text, so it is a universal way to reach someone who has a phone number. It removes the complexity of having to coordinate ahead of time with a contact about what messaging service they both have. It's why texting is so popular in the US (along with historical actions by US carriers to make texting extremely cheap and ultimately free)
Once they had this control, they then used it to make texting better only when the conversation participants each had iPhones, which produced a network effect where friends would be incentivized to pressure their contacts to also use iPhones. Apple leveraged convenience, features and security to make this happen.
I don't anticipate Apple's upcoming RCS support to materially change this. If we're lucky, we'll get higher quality pictures out of it, but it's possible to support RCS while not supporting a lot of the features that make RCS better than SMS, such as read receipts, replies, typing indicators, and yes, encryption. Encryption is not a standard part of RCS yet, but it could be made so by Apple forcing Google to standardize their encryption and then implementing it. But it's not in Apple's interest given the above to bother. More likely they will do as their initial complaint/announcement about RCS hinted at: Not even engage on encryption because it's "not part of the spec", leaving iPhone/Android messaging unencrypted.
Google is not blameless here, it's insane that they haven't worked themselves to standardize encryption.
It's not solely about iMessage not being open, it's about reserving key features for only iMessage to give it a significant advantage. (Also mentioned are other key bits like running in the background, etc)
So if it were up to you all telecom operators would be on separate networks, because you can always use smoke signals to get your message across?
(I'm with you for niche applications where the number of users is small. But we're talking mainstream communication here.)
That argument only works until there is market dominance, which is the point of anti-trust regulations.
So was the Bell telephone network.
What does that have to do with anything? They have a dominant market position and they abuse it. Different position, different rules.
With regards to the "super apps", Apple can just as well argue that it aspires to retain access for multiple players ("avoiding monopoles", ironically), so naturally it does not want only a single app becoming the majority of all downloads, which leads the app store idea ad absurdum.
Makes you wonder about something else: Could Apple one day be broken apart like "Ma Bell"? It seems the Apple brand is inconsistent with notions of modularity and openness (which brings with itself a certain messiness), everything is supposed to look at feel alike up to the slightly silly (as a problem to solve, as long as there are still children starving on this planet at the same time) device unpacking experience.
It's good that the U.S. government are doing their job as expected, in this case that's relevant for all other countries, where a lot of the device owners/users are based.
My ultimate wish would be some someone to launch a third mobile platform - beside Apple IOS and Alphabet-Google Android - based on a new open W3C standard (not HTML). Such a standard would get a chance to grow with the support of the legal apparatus: judges should force the oligopolists to implement said standard, and then people might just say "hey, I can just implement ONE app, and catch all THREE platforms."
This is the reason I am now on an iPhone after being on Android since ~2009. But this could also apply to Samsung too. There were two watches I was considering - Samsung's and Apple's (for health monitoring reasons, I have a family history of heart problems, and am already nearly 10 years older than my dad was when he died). I would either have to buy a Samsung phone or an iPhone to get the functionality I wanted, and TBH I really don't like Samsung's take on Android (I've been either Cyanogenmod or Motorola for over a decade), so an iPhone it was. But I would have preferred to get an Apple Watch and have that work fully with my Android phone, but that's not even a starter, let alone the limited-functionality you would get with a Samsung watch with another Android phone.
I'm happy with the watch, and I now like a lot about the iPhone. But it was 4x the price of my previous phone.
On the other hand, I would like to see interoperability in stuff like airdrop. But that would not be something that other FAANG would make money of, so that is probably not so interesting for these regulators.
Do you think no one else should be able to build a mobile payment service? Should banks be block from making, say, ChasePay?
It's fine to prefer Apple Pay and to choose Apple Pay even if there are other options. The question is, should everyone be locked into Apple Pay vs choosing Apple Pay because it is better than ChasePay?
You can read the full document but of course very few of us would do that.
Instead, I think this Youtube video of the US Attorney General is giving a good summary of the case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ6JycDyYj4
Better competition for cloud streaming apps? Seems good for me as a user. Better messaging interoperability? I don't have anyone in my family or friends group who wasn't already on an iPhone, and I thought this was coming already with RCS anyway, but sure let's go. Better smartwatch support? If it makes Apple want to build even better Apple Watches, I'm all for it. And all of my cards already work with Apple Wallet so this has no bearing on me either.
The only one that's really ambiguous is "Super Apps". I'd be greatly inconvenienced if Apple things stopped working so well together, but I wouldn't be inconvenienced at all if others get a chance to build their own "super apps".
I'm skeptical that adding RCS will actually fix the problems because of how Apple is likely to implement it. Their malicious compliance in the EU strongly hints that they are going to hobble their RCS implementation just enough to maintain the status quo just like they are with the DMA requirements. Hopefully legal efforts like this push Apple more towards actual interoperability.
This would let Google get rid of dedicated apps like Gmail or Google Maps, and then just force everyone to go through a central Google app itself.
> Also, the Apple Watch itself does not offer compatibility with Android
Will they force Samsung and Google to have their watches interoperate with iOS too, or are they exempt because they are bit players in the field?
> Apple’s smartwatch—Apple Watch—is only compatible with the iPhone. So, if Apple can steer a user towards buying an Apple Watch, it becomes more costly for that user to purchase a different kind of smartphone because doing so requires the user to abandon their costly Apple Watch and purchase a new, Android-compatible smartwatch.
15 basis points (0.15%) from the issuing bank on something that _undoubtably_ increases tx volume and associated interchange revenue. Sure, the issuing banks would like tx volume for absolutely free. Sure, DOJ should argue the point on NFC access. But 15bp from the party that's making more money on a service that's free and beneficial for {consumer, merchant, card network} just seems like good business.
That's the point of the lawsuit. Chase can't currently make Chase Pay to compete with Apple Pay and offer a mobile payment service with less than 15 basis points.
And fine, let apple collect their fee, but also open up payments on iPhone to other providers. Why can't my native bank app use the nfc hardware itself, hmmmmmmmmm? Oh Apple lock in so they can collect their $$$ for literally no reason; the payment network already exists, Apple is just a middleman.
The smartwatch point is interesting and not an argument I've seen made before, but it's a very good example of Apple's vendor lock-in.
> The company “undermines” the ability of iPhone users to message with owners of other types of smartphones, like those running the Android operating system, the government said. That divide — epitomized by the green bubbles that show an Android owner’s messages — sent a signal that other smartphones were lower quality than the iPhone, according to the lawsuit.
I read that as 'interop' is a secondary issue, if an issue at all; the actual case is the green/blue segregation. If Apple embedded a fingerprint in every interoperable message and shown blue messages for iMessage-sent content, green background for others, it'd still be a problem even if messages are otherwise identical - unless all the features truly work on both, in which case the color split is purely status signaling.
The other points seem much more specific and actionable.
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The richest company in the world is purposefully generating social and psychology stress for young people so they can edge up their market share just a little bit more. In a just world, people would be imprisoned over this.
I do however find them extremely hypocrite of suggesting how they "care" about young people and yet not acting on it while causing this problem.
Making it difficult for 3rd party .. sure but trying to force apple to have their hardware work on other platforms is a business decision .
3. Messages do interop. But it’d be hilarious if the US created some kind of precedent where everything has to work on everything.
4. Samsung, and Google both fall into this trap, where more functionality is available between like devices.
5. So when my Amex isn’t accepted, that’s Visa or Mastercard restricting APIs - and causing lock in right?
These strange legal cases are odd to me. If we think these large tech conglomerates should be regulated, then write laws for them, don’t use the court system to muck things up for no reason.
But that's not a claim. It might be a fact that supports a claim. One which Apple might contest. It seems that no matter how many times web publications in spades remind readers that monopolies are not per se illegal, i.e., something more is required, e.g., anti-competitive conduct, forum commenters remain convinced of some other reality.
- Monopolization: actual, attempted, conspiracies, etc.
- Restraints of trade. Horizontal (rigging bids, fixing prices, allocating markets to avoid competition) and Vertical (resale price limits, exclusive deals)
- Tying: leveraging one monopoly to gain another
- Merger, where the resulting market would not be competitive
- other Unfair Competition (FTC)
While lawsuits are not uncommon, actual relief is rare, in part because the few judgments are overturned on appeal. Antitrust has been steadily eroded for decades.
Recent relief includes US v AT&T 2018 (imposed conditions on the Time Warner acquisition), but there are many more overturned.
So: 1. Super apps and 2 cloud streaming apps (restraint of trade): it's hard to compare all of apple to all of these multi-function apps. One question is whether all the apple functionality in fact complies with whatever constraints are imposed. I suppose the theory is restraint of trade. In NCAA v. Alston (2021) the NCAA lost their ability to restrict student compensation, but that was a blanket restriction.
3. Message interoperability: Apple also color-codes SMS messages, and will argue it helps to indicate the kind of data that can be transferred. That's a losing argument.
4. Smart watches (Restraint and tying): Unclear what limits are placed on other watches. Easy to fix with an updated API, but some risk the court will try to order Apple to license WatchOS. As with patent, watches may end up adding more legal exposure than the product is really worth in the portfolio.
5. Digital wallets (tying): Hard to see the courts requiring openness here when they have not done so for other financial networks, and the government doesn't really want this.
Most are based on tying, but tying has not been effective for some time. Virtually every successful tying case lacked a distinct business or technical rationale. (The right to repair and maintain (from Xerox on) is the furthest they go in rebutting technical rationale's, and they still permit technical standards.)
I just find it a bit questionable that Apple is being forced open this much. If you want a super app, why don't you just use the browser? Also, is cloud streaming apps such a big deal?
And re smartwatches, isn't it somehow expected that apps made by the same company will always have an edge? You can see this in the Windows+Microsoft Auth combo where Microsoft apps can do stuff that non-Microsoft apps can't just because it is a Microsoft app.
Maybe iPhones are much more popular in the US, but I feel Apple doesn't have such a strong hold of the mobile market in Europe.
My worry is that Apple is be forced open and will have to allow everyone to access the same APIs with all the security implications of it. Surely, if people don't like the way iPhones work they can move to Android or Tizen. I personally wish people moved away from iPhones AND Androids so we could have the thriving and healthy competition we had at the beginning of the smartphone revolution with Android, iOs, Symbian and similar. Support a market full of mobile OSes competitors and not a duopoly with open APIs.
This is true, my wife and I have Huawei smart watches.
After my wife's android phone broke she got an iPhone and the watch is basically useless.
It can't receive notifications, can't control music playback, it can't use "find my phone" which makes the phone shout "I'm here" really loud.
The only thing it can do is sync the step counter.
1 - Might have an argument there.
2 - OK, but only if the user is willing to accept the security risk to their apps, Apple and non-Apple. Apple has an interest in keeping the apps they create, or sell for others, secure but should bear no responsibility if a third-party fails to keep to the same standard.
3 - OK. I personally kind of like it because I am a bad person, but OK.
4 - Aren't most of them behind Apple's watches, anyway? I don't have an issue with Apple Watch not being compatible with Android - while Apple shouldn't prevent a third-party (see 2 above) from creating a bridge, they should, in no way, be forced to do it themselves.
5 - (see 2 above) And I don't have an issue with Apple torquing the nuts of banks - the banks do the same to us. And yes, it's my money they're taking from banks, but the banks don't like that, so ... I'm gonna call that one a tie.
Isn't this .. not "super apps" then? If it's multiple apps? Said 3rd party super apps could instead be multiple apps people install a la carte. But companies want to do uber apps for funnel purposes etc.
In the US, people tend to use iMessages, which is not interoperable with other ecosystems. But iPhone place no limitation on third party messaging apps. Indeed, the rest of the world simply ignores the existence of iMessages and uses other applications for messaging (these vary per country/region, but I don't think that iMessages has any significant market share in any other country).
There's not technical reason preventing people in the US from using another messaging platform, and there are no limitations imposed on third party messaging apps. It's really just a cultural issue of people _choosing_ iMessages. Probably just network effect.
iMessage is an Apple service, created as a way to provide additional value to people on Apple platforms so that they aren't limited by SMS. The DOJ argument appears to be "oh, you made a better mousetrap, and now you have to let people outside your platform use it." Why? What's the rational argument there?
They then extend that argument to the watch, which is just bananas. It's designed to work with one set of platforms. The tightly coupled nature of Watch/Phone/Mac provides benefits, but Apple is never going to open the technical kimono up to Samsung (e.g.) watches to use the same hooks, and they shouldn't be required to do so.
Suing Apple(or any other company over stuff like this) when the fines will be a tiny slap on the wrist at worst will not incentivize proper behaviour, so there is literally zero reason for doing this except for the govt to feel good about itself, see!! we got a few hundred million from that evil corp for doing bad things. LOL. Apple could plead guilty tomorrow, pay the fine and continue doing business and not even notice.
Page 76 of the lawsuit PDF goes into some specifics under the section "Request for relief".
2. I was able to use PS Remote Play on my iPhone even many years ago (pre-COVID). A quick google search shows that Steam Link and Shadow PC (my ATF) are also available on iOS. I'm on Apple's side here too
3. I think the situation has recently changed here as someone else has commented, so this feels solvable without a lawsuit. Also it's hard to single out Apple here when everyone out there has their own messaging platforms. It's not like WhatsApp is encouraging third-party clients. An argument can be made that iMessage blurs the line between what's Apple-provided vs. carrier-provided, so I can see the user confusion and the issues that come with it. I'm on the FTC's side here
4. Who cares about smartwatches. It's niche at best. Besides, there are countless other watches you can use and they work with many devices. I'm on Apple's side here
5. It's not like you can't tap your card instead of your phone. I don't think the phone needs to be just a husk with apps created by third parties, especially for things like wallets. I'm happy to trade away that freedom for increased security, Benjamin Franklin's quote notwithstanding. The payments ecosystem is made up of players charging fees from the next player down the chain, so also hard to single out Apple here, but I can see why there's need for increased transparency (I wasn't explicitly aware they charged any fees, even if I would probably guess they were if prompted). I'm on neither side here.
So based on my biases and incomplete understanding of the facts, Apple wins 3-1
It's worth remembering that this administration is suing seemingly everyone in Tech, in what I can only assume is being done in the hopes they can make a name for themselves. Lena Khan literally said "you miss all the shots you don't take".
I would prefer a more focused approach with higher signal to noise ratio.
2) This is about cloud gaming, when you're streaming the game from hardware in the cloud, like Xbox Game Pass. Streaming the game from your own hardware isn't as competitive to Apple since it requires you buy a $500 console or gaming PC.
3) The biggest issue was Apple not implementing RCS and defaulting every iOS user to iMessage, which has created a two-tier messaging system, friends getting locked out of chat groups, etc simply because Apple doesn't want to use the standard.
4) "Who cares" is not a valid argument in using your dominance in one market to dominate another, which is textbook anticompetitive behavior. They also do this with AirTags, Airpods, any accessory where the Apple product gets to use integrations with the OS and third-parties are forbidden from doing so.
5) Tapping your phone is more secure because the card number is randomized and single-use, protecting it from replay attacks.
That would be true, if Apple couldn't literally write any TOS they want that allows other App stores or billing methods and then add "but you can't include tracking that invades our users privacy or resell their data".
That's just as enforceable on their end, and not anti-competitive, assuming Apple themselves don't launch their own ad platform and tracking...
_cloud_ streaming where the game is running a ms/sony owned server is only available in a browser.
i don’t know about the sony side of things, but apple rejected ms’s native cloud streaming app.
219.43 million people use smartwatches
Every single group chat that I use on a day-to-day basis has a non iPhone participant. The biggest argument against the way apple treats SMS vs iMessage I see is people feel ostracized for having green bubbles. I just don't understand why this rises to anti-trust.
Never heard this argument, could you name an example of this? I figured the reason for the ban was that it would sidestep most of the Apple software that comes with an iPhone, which Apple obviously wouldn't want since they would prefer to lock users in.
Of all the points in your low-effort manifesto I find this the most absurd. Even if you don't see any merit in the case, you must admit that it's likely that the DoJ does.
The first is their attempt to redefine what the market is in order to declare Apple a "monopoly": they've posited a completely separate market for "performance smartphones", and tried to use total revenue rather than number of units sold in order to push Apple up to having a very high percentage of this invented market.
The second is their characterization of how Apple got to where they are. Like them or not, you have to be seriously down a conspiracy rabbit hole to believe that the iPhone became as popular as it is primarily through anticompetitive tactics, rather than because it's a very good product that lots and lots of people like. Regardless of whether you, personally, find that value proposition to be compelling.
They also point at some of Apple's offerings and make absolutely absurd claims about how they're anticompetitive—for instance, that they're going to somehow take over the auto market with CarPlay 2.0 and the fact that AppleTV+ exercises control over the content it serves.
There are some things Apple does that are genuinely concerning and deserve more antitrust scrutiny (for instance, their anti-steering provisions for the App Store are pretty egregious), but so far as I can tell, they're not even mentioned in this suit. I'm frankly disappointed in the DoJ for how they've put this together, and would have loved to see something that was narrower and much more robust.
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The Justice Department, 16 US states, and the District of Columbia, among others. Anti-trust violations are crimes.
I love the current US government. Cracking down on pretty much all of Apples bullshit in one fell-swoop. Now just stop them from offering 8gb of ram on the base model macbooks, and apple might be the perfect tech company.
The WeChat super-app is available on iOS, complete with installable "mini apps", and most of the same functionality that is available on Android. So it's not clear exactly what the complaint is here. Unless Apple makes exceptions for WeChat and China that are not available to developers elsewhere?
Like my Xiaomi phone was able to store any card I wanted and do a Tap to Pay, but I have to use Apple Pay and I can’t do that because my region is locked to somewhere Apple Pay isn’t a thing. Here in Melbourne even public transport is affected by this. The local myki transport cards can be digitally carried on an Android phone but not an iPhone.
Jihad against anything actually working well (ie firefox and ublock origin) due to to be polite dubious reasons. Apple gatekeeping is just a move to ads for themselves, it was already multibillion business for them last year. Thats monopolistic behavior in plain sight.
As things are, this lawsuit seems like the government striking an aggressive posture torwards tech companies for no good reason. It's almost like -- as the tech companies get bigger and more powerful -- the government wants to remind them who's really in charge.
Customers don't really have great choices right now when it comes to smartphones:
1. One OS is locked down, has a walled-garden ecosystem, but has many privacy-protecting features.
2. The other OS more open (interop & user-choice-wise, not really in the FOSS sense), but is run by a company that seems hell-bent on eroding user privacy.
These properties are dictated by Apple and Google. But due to the barrier for entry, there are no alternatives that come even close to duplicating Android's and iOS's feature sets. Even simply using a community-developed Android-based OS can cause you to lose access to many useful features Android provides.
I guess I went off on a little tangent here, but my position is that the existence of Android is only a defense if switching between the two doesn't incur high costs, both financial and non-. That's demonstrably not the case.
Does Apple not let others offer a suite of apps?
I see:
* third-party apps not being able to send/receive carrier messages (SMS)
* only Messages getting background running
* blue/green colored bubbles.
The background running thing is a bit of a surprise. If you had asked me, I’d have said iMessages didn’t run in the background given it’s load delay for new messages.
WhatsApp on iOS does a much better job, ironically (it just sends all queued outgoing messages once connectivity is back in the background, like every email client did back in dialup days).
...if that counts, is the suit claiming that they somehow don't let other developers have multiple related apps? Because it seems that something like Meta's suite of apps (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) that all share login data and suchlike should qualify if "the Apple ecosystem of apps" does.
In this case, could a resolution involve resolving the individual claims, or are the plaintiffs looking for a more all encompassing solution?
> 4. Smartwatches [interoperability]
Where do you draw the line on forcing interoperability?
This is kind of like (in-person) movie theaters.
Movie theaters don't allow you to bring your own food, you have to buy their food/drink.
Why should a movie theater be forced to allow patrons bring their own food?
Why should Apple be forced to allow it's patrons to brining competitive things to their business?
Note: I ask these questions out of genuine curiosity. Not to troll/stir-the-pot.
I don't think there's a good real-world "venue/food" analogy. However, hypothetically: Imagine if half of all homes/apartments were controlled by the same company and they also happened to be the largest food producer. They then decided to limit what food could be brought into your home, saying "We have the safest food, so you can only buy our food." Now, they might even be right that their food is the safest, but the market impact would be significant enough to warrant anti-trust action.
- Should the government force marketplaces to allow competing marketplaces to set up shop within their area, collect fees, but not pay any fees to the larger market?
- Should the government make laws to require restaurants to allow competing chefs to bring a hot plate and start cooking food at the tables and serve them to their customers?
- Should Google be forced by the government to include support for formats in Android that are used by Apple such a HEIF and HEIC? What about Microsoft and Linux?
These rules are not about individual choice or freedom. This is about giant corporations using the government to give them a way into the walled garden built by a competing mega corporation. This is completely self-serving and in no shape, way, or form serves the common good.
As an iPhone user I do not want government interference in a market place that has been kept mostly free of malware precisely because it keeps out the riff-raff. I want the hucksters and the scammers blocked. I really don't care if they scream "unfair!" at the top of their lungs from outside of the fence.
Similarly, general SMS messaging is a cesspit of unceasing spam precisely because it is so interoperable. Because Apple keeps out garbage devices with zero security, I've seen precisely zero iMessage spam in the last decade. I got a spam SMS in the last hour. I'll get several more today.
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90% of marketshare with monopolistic practices is relevant?
• Allowing alternate web browser implementations, including alternate Javascript and WebAssembly implementations.
• Which would include third party developer access to the memory allocation/permissions API used for JIT compilers. Make iOS a first class ARM development OS. Please.
Perhaps removing restrictions to general APIs for competitive apps and "Super apps" would implicitly include those changes?
Interesting that this doesn't address Apple's iOS "taxation" of tangential non-web transactions, or the lack of App Store alternatives. If Apple has monopoly power, those seem like suitable concerns.
Such cases always seem to reach a pre-determined conclusion, that has more to do with the political winds of the era, than true legal determinism.
Looking at the accusations from that lens:
1. Super Apps - I don't see how 'Apple doesn't share enough data with Chinese super apps' is going to fly 2024 America. It also has huge security and privacy impliciations. This accusation seems DOA.
2. Streaming games is tricky, but it isn't a big revenue stream. The outcome for this point appears immaterail to Apple stock.
3. iMessage - This is the big one. I see the whole case hinging on this point.
4. Smartwatches. Meh, Apple might add inter-op for apple smartwatches on android. I don't think this will lead to any users switching over or an actually pleasing experience.
5. Digital Wallets. This seems tacked on. Apps are PhonePe and PayTm work just fine on Apple and Android. I have never heard of anyone using a Digital Wallet that is not Apple pay, Google Pay or Samsung Pay. Are digital wallets a big revenue stream for Apple ?
Google: true, BUT you can install and publish other app stores
MSFT: false, they charge 15% for apps and 12% for games (talking about the Microsoft Store)
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Note that Apple doesn't allow alternative web browsers on iOS, so Safari/WebKit is the only Super App allowed on iOS.
https://open-web-advocacy.org/apple-browser-ban/
> When you download Chrome, Firefox or any other browser that isn't Safari on an Apple device, that browser is forced to use Safari's rendering engine WebKit. Chrome normally uses Chromium, and Firefox Gecko. However, Apple will not allow those browsers to use their own engines. Without the ability to use their own engines, those browsers are unable to bring you their latest and greatest features, and can only go so far as whatever WebKit has added.
Second, third-party browsers use their own rendering engines (Gecko, Blink) on MacOS, while iOS only allows WebKit.
Nor [embedded] programming languages (e.g. Python).
If Chrome was let loose indiscriminately on any platform, how long before it became a Macromedia Flash, hobbling battery life and performance on whatever platform didn’t align to Alphabet’s strategy?
Also, how long before Alphabet began prime-timing Android, leaving Apple versions trailing months of not years behind, and restoring the “Works best on IE” experience of the ‘00s?
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> Apple itself offers a "super app" of course, which is the Apple ecosystem of apps.
To be fair to Apple, both Google and Meta have loads of apps for iOS that compare to the Apple suite of apps. Although there is definitely a pre-installed advantage for the Apple apps.
- NFC
apple does have full NFC support for their products but for other apps there are tons of road blocks for using anything close to full NFC functionality
- Bluetooth
same, similar more usable, but some functionality is still not available for 3rd party apps at all meaning certain things can only be provided 1st party by Apple
- Strange behaviour when releasing questionable competive Apps
There had been multiple cases where Apple released 1st party apps and it "happened" that the previous leader(s) of previous existing 3rd party apps "happened" to have issues with releasing updates around that time (or similar strange coincidental behavior). Additionally such new apps often had some new non-documented non public APIs which makes it harder for 3rd parties to compete.
- Questionable app store reviews
Stories of apps running in arbitrary you could say outright despotic harassment when wrt. the app store reviews are more then just few (to be clear legal non malicious apps which should be fully legal on the apple app store).
EDIT: To be clear for the first 2 points apple always have excuses which seem reasonable on the surface until you think it through a bit more (e.g. similar to there excuse for banning PWAs in the EU, I think they might have undid that by now). And for the other points it's always arbitrary enough so that in any specific case you could call it coincidence, but there is a pattern.
It stands in stark contrast to literally everything else about the device, which is almost universally easy and thoughtless.
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I don’t use Apple in spite of this, I use it because of this. Trying to support everything will likely lead to a worse experience for everyone in a multi-device world.
Apple is a hardware company making their own software to run that hardware, much like a game console. It seems like many of the criticisms here could be adapted and applied to Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation. Why can’t my PS VR work with my Xbox… it’s a Sony monopoly /s
There are areas where I think Apple can improve, such as right to repair and reliability in general. But it seems like some of what these governments are trying to kill is the very reason some people went to Apple in the first place. That doesn’t lead to more choice, it leads to less choice… as the government tries to turn iOS into an Android clone. Kind of odd that Apple is being told to act more like the platform that has the lead in global market share.
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Imagine the extreme end result of this: You buy a phone, and it’s OS comes with only one app installed: The Super App which you launch and do everything through it. How is that Super App not in fact the OS at that point?
The answer is clearly yes in a lot of markets, even if purpose-built apps might be better at a specific tasks, a single app that does dozens of things "well enough" is more convenient than having to juggle dozens of login infos and para-relationships with app developers (managing graymail etc).
But WeChat is available on iOS isn't it? If not the iPhone would be pretty impossible to sell there, just like Huawei's android without Google play don't sell here in the west.
Why is any of this a problem when consumers who find all that too constraining can just use Android?
In my opinion, the "monopolistic" aspect of it comes down to the fact that they tied it into an otherwise open messaging system - SMS. You cannot separate SMS messages from iMessages (to my knowledge). So, the only way to know a message was sent via SMS is the green background for incoming messages and the green background plus the "sent via SMS" for outgoing messages. This creates a disdain for SMS, and anyone who uses it over iMessage. It is such a strong feeling, that having green messages makes you "uncool", especially in the younger crowd.
On the other hand, I think the long-term sequalae of the blue-green message is to push people to use stand-alone apps like WhatsApp and FB Messenger. I think it'll be a hard sell at this point to convince a jury that iMessage is an overt monopoly.
The main question I want addressed is: If SMS messages can be directly shown in iMessage, and are not secure, then the argument of not allowing "insecure" 3rd-parties to integrate with iMessage goes out the window. All I want is Android messages to be shown in iMessage. Sure we can make them green, but at least they will be sent over the data network and not SMS.
I find it amusing that in 2024 people in the US still talk about WhatsApp as a future step. Where I'm from already 10+ years ago every single person you know would have a WhatsApp account.
With WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram etc. I think this is pretty much a solved problem in the rest of the world, really only the US is behind here.
Insane to me the amount of WhatsApp evangelism I read on this site. Sure, let's trade international protocols for Zuckerware. What could go wrong?
SMS/RCS are flawed but can be improved. Advocating instead for Meta-produced software is irresponsible and reckless IMO.
That "end-to-end encrypted" advertising has done its job, and most people don't want to be bothered with thinking too much anyway.
WhatsApp is a gold mine of real-world social graph data for Facebook/Meta. If you think for a moment how much you can infer by merging that data with other information you get from people using other FB apps and sites, it's incredible.
One person said that. Almost nobody I know has any interest in WhatsApp. The infatuation with putting all of your messaging into Facebook's hands is a European thing. What I don't understand at all is why Europeans think Facebook is superior to Apple.
> With WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram etc. I think this is pretty much a solved problem in the rest of the world, really only the US is behind here.
I have a hard time believing that having multiple chat apps is any kind of solution to the problem. The nice thing about iMessage in the US is that it covers about 90% of everyone I talk to. Right out of the box, no asking what ecosystem someone else is using, it just works. And if I'm talking to someone who does not have iMessage ... it still just works, albeit with fewer features.
I heartily disagree that Europe or the rest of the world has a better system. Best would be if every phone from every manufacturer supported a modern protocol equivalent to iMessage or Google's proprietary RCS. Until then, iMessage in the US is the closest things to universal modern messaging.
These are not good options to have secure and private communication.
Signal and Threema should be the choices given.
Relying on any one company is bad. But Facebook might be just about the worst.
It's the same with payment system. I hear that bank to bank transfer is still a big pain in the US and that check payment is prevalent there.
I don't think this is accurate. In ANZ at least it's fairly uncommon, and I'd imagine there are a number of other similar countries. I would be surprised if the number isn't 100m+ first world users who don't fall into that bucket, not including the US.
Everything people complain about WRT Meta was being done with impunity; their privacy policy basically said that they could read your messages and tailor ads based on them.
I really don't understand why people are crowing about using platforms like LINE and WhatsApp and sneering at Americans; they are not better.
The thing is, I think it's perfectly fine, reasonable, and correct to have a disdain for SMS. The problem is that people transfer this disdain onto anyone they are "forced" to communicate with over SMS.
> I think the long-term sequalae of the blue-green message is to push people to use stand-alone apps...
Defaults matter. The friction to using iMessage on a brand-new iPhone is zero: it's right there, front and center, and doesn't require anyone to download anything new or confer with family and friends to figure out what the "right" other messaging platform is.
> ... like WhatsApp and FB Messenger
Oof, no thanks. I'd rather not be pushed toward using messaging apps owned by a company known to do shady things with user data. I've managed to get a few friends and group chats off those platforms and onto something else, but unfortunately there are still a few on them that I don't want to just cut ties with.
iPhones implement SMS/MMS, which are both standards set forth by the GSM specification. That's the level of message exchange the underlying protocol offers. RCS is the "next gen" SMS, which is also being implemented. SMS/MMS/RCS does not support E2E encryption.
Apple then offers iMessage as a seperate service, on par with WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger, etc. It is literally just a messaging service running over the internet, using some form of identifier to identify you, which might be your phone number, like signal, or your email.
iMessage also offers proper E2E encryption, which is hit or miss with competitors. The challenge with E2E encryption is peer discovery. iMessage has made encryption easy, to the point that nobody thinks about it, but that's really what the blue bubble indicates, that your message is E2E encrypted.
There is literally no monopoly there other than Apple offering the superior tool. There is open communication with other phones, using SMS/MMS, which is the lowest common denominator when you're talking phones. That is literally the level of capability you can guarantee when talking over GSM.
Are you aware that it's actually so serious that Apple officially uses it in their marketing? They quite literally say "iMessages are blue. So you're not." and most notably: "SMS texters will be green with envy."
https://beast-of-traal.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/2022/01/i...
I have only had an iphone for a few months, and I haven’t tried it yet, but when I enabled imessage I had the option of using an email address instead of my phone number. and From an android users perspective texting an iphone user is terrible, because they are incapable of sending quality photos, i suspect they just default to over compression for mms
…on a side note, the overall iphone experience is not great, everything just feels like it is trying to stop me from doing what i want. Not that android was all that better, but I definitely felt a bit more free with even simple things like how copy/paste works.
While I'd prefer being able to install a standalone Android iMessage app over the current situation, I really don't need or want another chat app.
Have the latter handle SMS/MMS/RCS with options (in its settings area) to enable/disable each of the three, such that any or all of them may be individually allowed (or not).
Then also have an additional pair of options in the SMS app to indicate which other message app can operate as a proxy. Said proxy being able to send or receive SMS/MMS/RCS as appropriate. Possibly have the default set to Messages, but allow it to be set to any other app which has opted in.
Remove all of the SMS/MMS options from Messages, except the 'Send as SMS', which would then try to do the existing fall back when there is no data service.
The default behaviour would be as now. Disabling the 'Send as SMS' option would keep Messages and SMS as two distinct services, and one could then run the that way. Further flipping the config in SMS would allow any other app to be the preferred primary contact point.
I'm not sure how one would handle 'Group Chats' in such a situation.
With such a situation, I'd split the two and operate as distinct systems, iMessages in its own app, SMS/MMS/RCS in the SMS app, all other message facilities confined to their own playpen.
I know some relatives who would prefer to keep the proposed defaults such that everything appears in the Messages app.
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Don't have an iPhone -- what functionality do they limit?
- sending messages over data (obviously)
When iMessage was introduced it was at a time SMS and MMS incurred extra charges, or, at best, came out of a fixed monthly allowance.
Making the user aware of whether they were using SMS/MMS or iMessage was actually a technically important feature, not a way to shame Android users.
Maybe, but my old mom and her old Huawei phone works with zero problems with my brand new OnePlus and whatever mix of phones her friends have. All of them on RCS. The only one that has a problem is a friend with an iPhone that cannot receive images in the size everyone else shares them in. No-one here uses zuckerware - it is all SMS (IE. all RCS except for the few that likes old style Nokias so they get it as a SMS).
The sooner it can be learned that a symbol on a shoe is ... kind of a silly status symbol, the better. Same with blue background or blue check mark.
Making the user aware of whether they were using SMS/MMS or iMessage was actually a technically important feature, not as a status symbol.
This seems especially true for children, who lack the maturity to judge social interaction less superficially. Not saying adults are immune to this sort of thing, of course.
Time and again seems to be US-only curiosity.
What? RCS is a real thing that works between Android users. It is Apple's choice to not support (or contribute to it or improve the standard) it because it locks people in and creates a very cozy, very real in-group sentiment.
You can message iCloud accounts without a phone number using only the email address
So when you see (...) and then it goes away and comes back a bunch of times - peoples fear and anxieties project into that (...) -- and its that fear dopamine that people are addicted to wrt to gree/blue...
where people are annoyed at green when they basically send a UDP txt - whereas blue is a TCP txt, so to speak...
There's a long history of this, with Microsoft being a fairly recent, famous example.
To your example (and excuse my lack of sound legalese), they wouldn't say "Apple must implement RCS", they would say "Apple must allow for an cross-compatible solution" or "Apple must document XYZ features keeping competitors from implementing a proper iMessage alternative".
Want to use a custom client to connect to some service? Want to bridge two rival networks? Such things should be our rights.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
This is, always has been, and will always remain bullshit.
The problem isn't the blue vs green background. It would be the same if the backgrounds were purple and gold, red and gray, or just both blue.
The problem is the different capabilities between SMS and iMessage. And because those capabilities are different, it is useful and productive to communicate that in a clear, but unobtrusive way—like making their message bubbles different colors.
Apple doesn't control the featureset of SMS.
People aren't protesting the actual primary colors of green or blue.
Interoperability doesn't have to be through SMS. Apple could allow other developers to implement the iMessage protocol.
If they control how SMS is received and displayed, they absolutely do control the featureset of SMS. On Android it's trivial to use different SMS apps, the receiver gets to decide how, if at all, they'll be separated.
There’s the Messages app and the iMessage protocol — two different things. How would Apple allow messages from Android that are not SMS? That’s by adding RCS support, which is coming later this year. It still won’t have end to end encryption (like the iMessage protocol does) because Apple isn’t going to support (as of now) the proprietary and closed extensions Google has developed for RCS. Any Android message that comes over the data network will have to have some sort of encryption. Otherwise SMS is just fine, as it is today.
Quite easily: by releasing a standalone iMessage app on Android. The Beeper folks have shown this of course can be done (even if Apple doesn't like it and blocks them).
Doing this would certainly be orders of magnitude easier than implementing RCS. It's quite telling that Apple still wants to maintain iMessage as iOS-only. And if Apple doesn't work with Google to implement the E2EE extension (assuming Google is reasonable about it), that tells us all we need to know (and should have already known): Apple doesn't actually care about their users and user privacy. They just care about their market position and "prestige", and want to maintain these silly "class divisions".
If Apple can access it in any way (which they can) then it is not real E2EE.
I've been paying for iCloud for my wife's iphone for the last several months because of how difficult Apple makes it for us to export our photos. Copying them off the phone with a usb cable is nearly impossible if you don't have a macbook, exporting them off of the website is nearly impossible if you have over 1k photos.. meanwhile google takeout allows me to download all of my photos in my browser in a couple clicks. In my experience, it feels like Apple makes getting out of their walled garden as difficult as legally possible.
[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IOS
[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IOS#Manual_mounting
My devices show up when I plug them in and I can see all my apps that expose storage in Apple's Files, with accompanying icons (2). Device folders like Downloads are off limits, though (3).
1: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IOS#Using_a_graphical_file_...
2: https://nexus.armylane.com/files/Gnome-Nautilus-iPhone.png
3: This entails much pointless duplication of files on the iPhone just to be able to see them from my PC. Apple would prefer, no doubt, that I use AirDrop or iCloud. But my Linux laptop means staying out of Apple's walled garden.
Faster and easier to just sync with iCloud, then download from iCloud.
So, why not just vote with my wallet, and get a device that either is more friendly to 3rd party software interaction or simply allows saving to a movable SD card? Because overall things work very smoothly, and it is easy to find and manage settings. These things balance out well against the frustrations, especially when I know from experience that non-Apple devices will present their own frustrations.
To be fair, the philosophical/theoretical/economic foundations of antitrust legislation confuse me. This has not been helped by media bites a la NYT. Maybe if I had months and years of free time and good material I could form a worthy opinion. But for now, I just have trouble seeing how statements like this from OP are contradictory: "The company says this makes its iPhones more secure than other smartphones. But app developers and rival device makers say Apple uses its power to crush competition."
Super easy, barely an inconvenience.
The easiest way is to export them via photos for mac.
If you don't have a mac, then there's ways to get the photos on a PC: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201302#importpc
You can also setup icloud on windows and download them, then move them wherever. https://support.apple.com/en-ca/108994
You can also connect the phone direct to PC and download them.
So it's not nearly impossible if you don't have a macbook.
However, I don't really export, I turn on iCloud Photos on Windows and set it to store on an external media with sufficient space (over 2TB now) and then tell it to locally store all media in full quality.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/108994
Once it's synced, I have a local folder with all the media. I have accomplished an export. Then I can turn it off, remove the media, and go back to a c:\ folder and not saving locally.
Now, you wanted without iCloud, so then, Windows 10 or newer? Microsoft has a phone companion that can pull things, or there's file explorer for just photos.
But absent iCloud, what I've done is run OneDrive on the iPhone, and let that mirror everything to OneDrive.
(An alternative used to be Amazon Photos, but I can't keep track of their business model, and Google Photos I can't keep track of what makes them decide to replace my originals with badly compressed alternatives.)
I sort of don't understand buying an iPhone, though, if you're not buying into the ecosystem.
The ecosystem is the point.
The ease of use of iCloud, the paired camera roll for your family (not same thing as shared albums), the family sharing of apps and subscriptions, the bring-your-own domain email with "hide my email" throwaway accounts to put into spammy sites, it's all there increasingly seamless, increasingly secure, and none of it is selling you out into third party ad-tech.
If you're not into that, there are other phone systems and operating systems and other hardware all grounded on different and separate principles. There's only one place for a cohesive coherent curated "don't make me think" peace of mind, and consumers should have a right to choose that since it stands alone in opposition to the DIY bricolage everyone else offers.
I don‘t think they care much about legality. When called out, they drag their feet with malicious compliance.
https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...
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Note that apparently Google Takeout doesn't give bit-identical files [1], which may be important for some (like me).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39571747
"Apple operates a walled garden! I can't get my photos out of iCloud!" [half a dozen ways to get the photos off the phone are proffered] "Well. Nevertheless!"
Even if you have a macbook, it is not much better. The photos app kept crashing on me if I tried to copy more than 500 photos. Also, copying to photos is not enough, you need to export everything too. And that messed up the metadata so bad for me.
Iphone is useless as a camera to me. There is simply no way to get original quality photos and videos out of it. What good is camera if you can't access the media you shot?
Of the reasons I can imagine why Apple might want the camera to default to its best settings, "sell moar cloud" isn't in the top 10.
So ironically juxtaposed to the original 1984 Apple Commercial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I
Not sure what exactly you’re talking about, because deleting an email (from the mailbox list) is a long swipe to the left on iOS/iPadOS too, unless you have changed the settings for that to archive the mail instead of deleting. It has been this way for a very long time.
This attitude explains a lot. This logic applies to every app that's available on both iPhone and Android, and to every web app.
I have been called a "violent criminal" on this very site because I criticized Apple's decision to remotely brick swapped components to prevent DIY repairs. I do not understand what it is about Apple that causes this behavior in people when they make it so, so, so obvious that they are just trying to lock people in for cash.
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I do not angry when I use Netflix and the program I wanna watch is on Hulu. I do not complain to Hulu. They offer a app/website and I can buy it that very day. You can, this very day, buy an Android
I wish everything good was free too and I only had one app and one computer OS and didn’t have to choose between car brands too but that’s not Reality
In lieu of this what is the problem? If the government has a problem why not say any code should be able to be run on any device?
Honestly I’m curious - what’s the problem? There are android phones that are superior to iPhones and let you run anything you want. Why don’t people buy those?
The government seems to want to make it illegal to have a tight experience, but why? There are open alternatives. It’s like complaining that Teslas don’t support CarPlay. Valid, but does it require legislation? Buy another car.
FWIW I would love if the government made it so all devices should have an option to run any of your arbitrary code.
Please, go do it. You'll be very rich very quick and I'll eagerly buy your products once you succeed.
Unfortunately you'll find out it's not actually easy at all when you realize that consumers care about weight, size, temperature and battery life which are all things apple excels at. Their hardware is really quite good, unfortunately the software is horribly crippled.
Modern Samsung phones are very good. You’re asserting that Apple should be punished purely because they make good hardware and are successful - and if their hardware wasn’t good and competitive then you wouldn’t care.
Part of why I have Apple devices as a tech enthusiast is the good software and the ecosystem that comes with it.
Would I like to run an IDE and code on an iPad? Absolutely. But I’d rather have the iPad than the android tablet.
In particular, there are no barriers to entry imposed by Apple. For any product Apple sell, there are numerous competing products in the same category. Apple's versions uniformly dominate third party rankings of these products, but all that means is that they're good at what they do.
They really don't. iPhone is a status symbol, especially for the new up-and-coming consumers (teens)
For typical users not buying Apple means having to compromise on privacy with Google, which isn't a great option either. Both are trying their best to create vendor lock-in and make it hard for users to leave.
From developer perspective not having access to iOS users is a major problem. Apple inserts themselves between users and developers, even where neither users nor developers want it. Users and devs have no bargaining power there, because Play Store does the same, and boycotting both stores has a bunch of downsides for users and devs.
*) I expect people on HN to say that some AOSP fork with f-droid is perfectly fine, but that's not mainstream enough to make Apple and Google worried, especially that Google has created its certification program and proprietary PlayStore Services to make degoogling phones difficult.
I care about you as a developer, but I'm not sure this case does. Maybe I'm thinking about it wrong.
As you explained yourself, it's not a real alternative, because it relies on Google itself, who can always decide to break it. A real alternative is GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone. And yes, they are very niche and not easy to make.
Can you see the issue now? It doesn't matter that people could by other cars. It matters that Apple's market is so large that its influence is too big to be left as is.
Is apple a monopoly? Probably not, because you can also switch to android. Does Apple have a large enough share of the market to influence the market? Likely, which is why the EU has DSA and DMA now.
While it is easy to not buy Apple products, I think the thing that often gets missed is that once someone is significantly invested in Apple's ecosystem, getting out of that ecosystem is highly disruptive and difficult.
For example, suppose you are a person who for historical reasons owns a MacBook, and iPad, and an iPhone, and a large chunk of your friends group also has those. The default choice then for you to use a cloud storage solution is Apple's iCloud Drive. The default choice for you to store and share photos is Apple's Photos App. The default choice for you to message your friends is the iMessage App. The default way for you to store passwords is Apple's Keychain Manager.
If you then decide "you know what, I'm fed up with Apple, I'm going to buy an Android", suddenly your cloud storage solution, your photo storage and syncing solution, your messaging solution, and your password management solution are all not supported, so you not only need to find an alternative on your new device, but you also have to do so on all your other devices if you want your phone to be in sync with them. This is a really high friction environment, and makes it so that a lot of people feel trapped in Apple's ecosystem.
So you can be a person who would not choose to buy Apple products today if you were starting from scratch, but you can feel compelled to continue buying them because Apple has made it so that switching in the future is very inconvenient and impacts all your other devices. It's specifically people in this situation who are being taken advantage of by Apple and why Apple's practices are labelled as monopolistic.
Apple spent a long time acquiring customers and coaxing them into their walled garden, and now they're switching tactics to milking those customers now that it's inconvenient for them to leave the walled garden.
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It's not about whether people can choose not to buy an iPhone, really at all. It's about once they do choose iPhone, is Apple unfairly using their control of the platform to influence whether they choose Apple's product vs a competitor for future things they buy.
Do you see what the problem is with the above statement? How far does the government go? Shouldn't all products (electronic or not) be "open" if Apple loses?
This suit reminds me of the phrase, “I’ve been convicted by a jury of my peers… who couldn’t get out of jury duty.”
Apple is under the gun because their main competitors (at least Google and Samsung) aren’t as good / successful, even when they have greater market shares.
Also, Android is.. ahem.. “open source”.
Apples apps are built on top of proprietary protocols which they do not allow anyone else to use, and so there are lots of features and functionality that can only be used by Apple giving them the edge over anybody else.
You assertions are immaterial to the fact that they are breaking the law. Monopolies and monopolistic practices are flatly illegal.
You're also viewing this exclusively through the lens of the "consumer" experience while fully ignoring the effects on the "labor" and "supplier" market.
> The government seems to want to make it illegal to have a tight experience
Is there some evidence that a monopoly is absolutely required to have a "tight experience?"
From the press conference this morning: "It is not illegal to hold a monopoly, Garland said. "
"That may sound counterintuitive in a case intended to fight monopolies. But under US antitrust law, it is only illegal when a monopolist resorts to anticompetitive tactics, or harms competition, in an effort to maintain that monopoly."
https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/doj-apple-antitrust-l...
You are mistaken.
Section 2 of the Sherman Act makes it unlawful for a company to "monopolize, or attempt to monopolize," trade or commerce. As that law has been interpreted, it is not illegal for a company to have a monopoly, to charge "high prices," or to try to achieve a monopoly position by what might be viewed by some as particularly aggressive methods. The law is violated only if the company tries to maintain or acquire a monopoly through unreasonable methods. For the courts, a key factor in determining what is unreasonable is whether the practice has a legitimate business justification.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Spotify, just by virtue of the fact that someone installs their app, must pay Apple 30% of their revenue. Imagine trying to compete in a market where you have to pay your largest direct competitor 30%… And on top of all that, Apple keeps the internal fancy APIs all to themselves. It’s insane this hasn’t come sooner
Is it trivial to move to alternatives once you've already bought said Apple products?
2. It is fairly trivial to move, there are dedicated apps for that for iOS->Android and macOS is still kind of BSD so it’s very compatible.
> Buy another car.
That argument goes both ways.
Once Apple is forced by law to allow other app stores, then you are free to continue to just use the Apple app store.
Just don't install other app stores. It is even more trivial to do that. So please don't complain about other app stores in the future, as your own exact argument refutes it.
> It’s like complaining that Teslas don’t support CarPlay
It would be like that if the Tesla dash App Store somehow generated $1.1T annual revenue while taking 30% off the top of third party app manufacturers, while using that revenue and their own competitive advantage (not paying 30%) to grow and erode secondary markets via their own first party apps
In any case there should be a way to put your phone into some insecure mode and then you can explicitly download any app you want, yes.
But about Tesla - if you could make money, lots of money, selling Tesla dash apps, who cares if they take 30%? The alternative is today, you don’t really make anything at all.
Irrelevant. Monopoly doesn't mean coercing people into the market.
> easy to make alternatives to Apple products and easy to buy feature equivalent devices to Apple products
It's not only not easy, it's not possible. Your mistake is thinking of phones as computers. They are not computers, at least not to the vast majority of users. They are devices that connect to other compatible devices to do telecommunications. It's just like if plain old telephones ran a proprietary protocol and only one vendor could make them.
Swap the name Apple with Microsoft and you might see a different perspective. Microsoft was beaten over the head for anti-competitive practices with browsers back in the day and Apple is behaving no different. It's easily arguable that they are behaving much worse in multiple aspects to what Microsoft was up to.
For example (given the EU gives great context to this): Apple owns and maintains the only App Store that's allowed on the iOS platform. So they have a monopoly on the iOS app market. Is that right and fair? I'm sure plenty will read that want to reply "yes of course it's fair, Apple can do what they want with their own platform" but that's your opinion. Controlled app stores are a dramatic shift from the way software used to be distributed and as a society/whatever we've never actually had a discussion about it. It just happened.
> The government seems to want to make it illegal to have a tight experience, but why?
I'd argue the government seems to want to make it illegal for a tight experience to be the only experience available. And it's not hard to see the argument for why: competition is good. Multiple app stores or whatever would open up the market, Apple would have to make the case for why they should get 15/30% of an app developer's revenue. They might be able to make that case very easily, they might not. But a monopoly means they don't even have to try.
IMO talking solely about Apple and/or arguing about whether they have a "monopoly" isn't going to be that effective (sorry DOJ). The reality is that we live in a world that requires us to be connected, that connection is currently controlled almost exclusively by two tech giants to the extent that even a slightly smaller tech giant, Microsoft, utterly failed in launching a competitive third platform. Is this duopoly good for us as a society? Is it what we actually want? It's fair to at least be asking the question.
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But side-loading apps or having an alternative App Store only exposes you to liability, not other people. So it's not the same thing. We should be free on our own risk.
For some users, this isn't true. More thoughts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39784413
Sorry to report this is not true for my grandparents, father, mother, brother and sister and in fact my entire extended family. iOS is far easier to use by a thousand miles. Just some anecdata.
IMO it's clear that without abusing its position, we would actually have competition for all of the bundled services from Apple.
But this is capitalism. The ultimate goal is always monopoly, so they'll keep chasing that by whatever means necessary.
>easy to make alternatives to Apple products
What? This is plain false. Entering this market is extremely expensive and hard to do. The duopoly is there for a reason. Even giants like Microsoft tried to enter it and couldn't.
iOS today regularly updates with improvements across the full software stack, up to the Apple apps themselves. Sometimes these changes are major. In the world the justice department is asking for, big changes to —for example, Messages app— would have to be coordinated with every app developer in that category. Changes would takes much, much longer, and in many cases would have to be watered down.
Judging by your phrasing, your interpretation of antitrust stems from Robert Bork and has been the mainstream thought for a long time. Read The Antitrust Paradox by him to see how we got here and why the courts have acted how they have for the past 40 years.
The current chair of the FTC, Lina Khan, was actually an academic prior to working for the government and has a long paper trail of how she interprets the law. In short (and extremely oversimplified), it modernizes the Brandeis interpretation that bigness is bad for society in general, regardless of consumer pricing. EX: If Apple were a country its GDP would surpass the GDPs of all but four nations. They argue this is bad flat out.
Can't say it was the only cause, but Khan's paper, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox - note the reference to Bork's book - is partially what resparked a renewed interest in antitrust for the modern era if you want to check it out.
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The other 99.9% could care less and I predict they will be unhappy with the results of forced-enshitification of iOS.
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> In the end , Apple deploys privacy and security justifications as an elastic shield that can stretch or contract to serve Apple's financial and business interests .
But in general, Apple has relentlessly set standards for data privacy that no other business seemed willing or able to provide. Far from perfect, (CN datacenters) but still seemingly far out ahead.
People don't normally pay for privacy or data security because they're not considered valuable until something bad happens.
So I can at least understand why the company might lean on this loss-leader to try and prop up its position in the face of unwanted regulation.
One of the big differences between Google and Apple is that users treat Google (IMO rightly) as a privacy threat, but treat Apple as a privacy ally. Apple's data privacy positions look a lot different if you treat them also as a privacy threat. For example, it becomes really odd that you can't set a non-Apple secure messaging app as your SMS app, or set a non-Apple browser as your default web browser. Apple insists that you share your browsing and messaging data with them.
What's the risk here? The risk is that, as has happened with nearly every darling tech company in history, Apple decides to end the honeymoon period at some point because that's what the market demands. Then you're in a position where you've handed over to Apple gobs of private data that they have unencrypted backups of.
I find this hard to believe nowerdays given what I read 3 months ago regarding law enforcement and push notification data. Google had set the standard higher in this situation.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-now-requires-judges...
Also, the whole "security" bs is exactly the same thing as governments saying we're doing this to protect you citizens from pedophiles / terrorists / druglords.
Hell, with Apple's cash hoard, they could afford to give iPhones away for at least a couple years without much trouble. I'm not saying companies should be obligated to do crazy things like this once they have "enough" money, but I think it illustrates that there's no inherent reason why many companies need to take any particular action that increases revenue, regardless of the consequences.
Apple's long-standing culture of secrecy and exclusivity is the problem, really.
In other words, they're saying Apple's privacy and security stance is a bit like the trope of politicians saying "think of the children!" whenever they are selling a law that restricts liberty.
Yup, all those happened when they were an uber-monopoly and had the resources and breathing space to fund such bets!
US anti-competitive policy and enforcement has always been dancing around the double standards of who can do market manipulation, the double standards of white collar crime enforcement, the double standards of "consumer benefit" in a capitalist system, etc.
"Consumer benefit" for example is a cowardly way to say price controls. Consumer benefit is inversely correlated with price. That implies the US government should be doing price controls and setting acceptable profit margins for everyone, but in practice due to the enforcement issues and the way the law is constructed it means that the government regulates prices only in extremely detailed technical cases.
Meaning you can manipulate consumer benefit AKA prices AKA extract profits all you want as long as you don't get into these narrowly defined, often unenforced technical cases.
In fact all of these charges or facsimiles of them existed in different forms 10 years ago, they were there on launch 15 years ago. Apple is being sued now simply because other large powerful interests like Epic games, don't like the revenue split rules on the App store.
Most of these laws are written not as regulations, but ways not to regulate.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Kodak_Co._v._Image_Tec....
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