U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly

bigtones · 2024-03-21T14:49:56

Here is the non-paywall link to the full NYT article I shared: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/technology/apple-doj-laws...

Kon-Peki · 2024-03-21T15:11:55

Direct link

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24492020/doj-apple-an...

dublinben · 2024-03-21T17:01:56

Here it is from Justice.gov as well: https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline

colpabar · 2024-03-21T14:52:49

https://archive.is/SYlk5

Fripplebubby · 2024-03-21T16:00:00

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.

ChuckMcM · 2024-03-21T17:29:40

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.

xpe · 2024-03-21T18:14:38

> 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.

bmitc · 2024-03-22T08:15:54

And that is stuff Apple absolutely does. I have been at a company for which Apple was a customer. But you'd think that Apple owned the company the way they through around their power and demands.

alsetmusic · 2024-03-22T02:29:05

I’ve read a few takes on this from smart people. This is the first time I’ve seen anything that sounds like a real winnable case. Thanks for the distillation. It’s good to know this isn’t as boneheaded as I’d thought (though they still need to go after the App Store).

joemazerino · 2024-03-22T02:46:04

Excellent breakdown. Much more concise compared to other versions of the story. And, to boot, all entirely true.

Jagerbizzle · 2024-03-21T21:08:16

Thank you

dmix · 2024-03-21T17:37:17

> In the IBM case it opened up an entire industry of third party "compatible" peripherals and saved consumers a ton of money

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

ChuckMcM · 2024-03-21T17:45:32

From a hardware standpoint third party fitness trackers with full integration into iHealth and third party ear buds with the same (or better) features than airpods.

Part of the IBM settlement required them to document interoperability. That was used by the DoJ to force Microsoft to document their CIFS (distributed storage) and Active Directory (naming/policy) protocols.

The latter might be particularly instructive as my experience with CIFS when I worked at NetApp was the different ways that Microsoft worked to be "precisely" within the lines but to work against the intent. Documentation like "this bit of this word must always be '1'" Which as any engineer knows, if it really was always '1' then that bit didn't have to be in the protocol, so what did it do when it wasn't '1'?

anonymouse008 · 2024-03-21T20:41:08

> From a hardware standpoint third party fitness trackers with full integration into iHealth and third party ear buds with the same (or better) features than airpods.

As someone who makes apps in the health space, I couldn’t care less if other tracker data was integrated into HealthKit. HealthKit honestly sucks - it's some bastard of objc naming schemes and methods jammed into Swift. The async is horrible to debug, too. No one has a good time in HK.

The issue with other trackers is that they are more locked down than Apple. You can't just get HR from Oura for instance - and that's not a health kit issue either.

jimrandomh · 2024-03-22T01:13:57

The reason you can't get heart rate data from Oura is that they don't want people looking at it except in aggregate, because then they would notice the accuracy problems and data gaps.

cryptonector · 2024-03-21T22:10:55

I had a similar experience with MSFT docs when working at Sun. The docs were not very good, and though they seemed somewhat redacted, it felt like in fact their internal docs probably weren't much better.

m463 · 2024-03-21T23:25:27

Don't tall into that trap of thinking.

Many years ago I knew an ex-microsoft engineer. Microsoft had poor interoperability with something, and I speculated that engineers in microsoft didn't know what 3rd parties were doing and accidentally broke things.

He told me, "don't be naive - microsoft would have meetings saying 'how can we own this?'"

throwaway-blaze · 2024-03-22T04:13:32

Not to cast doubt on your friend's story, I worked on both the SQL Server team and later on the Windows kernel team in the early 2000s (the bad years). I came from "outside" meaning I had already had a career at non-Microsoft-related companies (mostly startups using linux on the server). I was continually shocked at how _little_ the MSFT employees seemed to know about the industry, or how their customers used their own products.

As an example, this was the era of the J2EE App Server. Almost none of the people I worked with knew what an App Server was, despite the #1 database in use by App Server customers being MSFT SQL Server.

astrange · 2024-03-22T09:16:32

I still don't know what an app server is. Isn't that one of those things from the enterprise programming era where they'd get "architects" to design an "enterprise system" and it would come with twenty different things with names like "message bus" and "dependency injection" that no program in history has ever actually needed?

BlackFly · 2024-03-22T10:09:52

In case you are honestly interested--although your hyperbole suggests otherwise--an app server then was what the docker daemon (or podman or other container launcher) would be now. The two most common in my career were JBoss and Tomcat. Since Java packaged applications into Jars which could be run anywhere (up to environmental assumptions made by developers), you could simply scale up by sending these jars to the app servers to run. Actually, the Alibaba group was quite annoyed in the JCP that western members had given up on these aspects of the Java platform and were moving to support containerization. Arguably, CGI servers for php/python etc. were also a type of app server, although I rarely heard them referred to as such. App servers standardize what it means to start an application which makes operating many applications much easier.

Message buses were generally in memory or in process streaming brokers. Most of these have moved externally today via Kafka, RabbitMQ or cloud proprietary versions like SQS. Some people may lean on ZeroMQ to build similar behaviors when doing multiprocessing and some people may even do it in process if they like the api. Definitely very much part of large scale application development today although the terms of art have changed.

Dependency injection is just a fancy name for polymorphism via fields in your struct, although if you have too much exposure to spring you will associate it with that plus an inversion of control on the actual injection part: that is, you will associate it with heavy use of annotations. If you have polymorphism with a switch (or chained ifs) on a parameter, you don't have dependency injection but if you have polymorphism by having different inplementations of a field of your struct then you are doing dependency injection. Very much part of good software design today, the annotation driven wiring possibly not so common outside of Java + Spring.

m463 · 2024-03-22T04:23:07

This was before that, early to mid 90's era

thaumasiotes · 2024-03-22T06:38:10

Microsoft's documentation for Microsoft's own technologies (as in, the C# libraries they provide) is terrible. What's the competitive advantage there?

mafuy · 2024-03-22T11:55:32

The C# documentation was, at least in its initial years, very good. It even had working examples that demonstrated functions. Compare that to typical javadoc of its time.

tety · 2024-03-22T11:05:22

That is not true in my experience, Windows API is superbly documented and C# docs are of far higher quality than Java's

Thorrez · 2024-03-22T04:30:41

>Documentation like "this bit of this word must always be '1'" Which as any engineer knows, if it really was always '1' then that bit didn't have to be in the protocol, so what did it do when it wasn't '1'?

Maybe it was a deprecated part of the protocol, and setting it would cause an error or do nothing.

technothrasher · 2024-03-22T11:38:40

Or it could be a placeholder for future expansion and while it would do nothing now, in the future it might break things if you've ignored the documentation.

thaumasiotes · 2024-03-22T05:47:08

Maybe it's there to prevent desyncing errors that occur for long strings of zeroes. Information theory isn't the only possible consideration.

microtherion · 2024-03-21T21:52:07

I'm not a developer in this space myself, but my impression is that HealthKit is one area where 3rd party apps have access to the same data as 1st party apps.

heromal · 2024-03-22T03:25:06

Reminds me of Bob Colwell's talk, although it's not from the same angle: https://youtu.be/jwzpk__O7uI?si=NZmfU6av_2D-uPgk (around 1:04:10)

johnnyanmac · 2024-03-21T18:29:42

Forget iMessage, I just want media messages from iPhone to not be sub-144p pictures/videos. I know sms is limited but I doubt that's a technical limitation.

And yea, Gamepass was an immediate thought of something a company wanted to ship but Apple blocked. Between that and the Epic Games store it looks like there's gonna be a lot more options to game on IOS by the turn of the decade.

mullingitover · 2024-03-21T19:07:35

It's not sms, it's mms, and it is in fact a technical limitation.

Honestly we should just sunset MMS entirely. It's like using 56k dialup.

gryn · 2024-03-21T19:17:25

yeah, but the one blocking its sun-setting is apple with their artificial barriers. if apple didn't do it's shenanigans, RCS or something similar with a different name would've have replaced MMS by now.

throwaway-blaze · 2024-03-22T04:17:25

Um no, if the powers that be who control the LTE and 5G (and soon 6G) standards would improve or replace MMS, apple would be forced to improve their ability to send images/videos because they must comply with the standards to have their phone allowed on the carrier networks.

This is a dumb complaint honestly. The carriers and Qualcomm closely control the standards bodies and could address this problem. Instead they focused on the bag-of-garbage that is RCS, which Apple has finally said they will support. But because RCS is a bag-of-garbage, Apple plans to support a different flavor (the basic standard) from Google's. $0.50 says Google will magically start supporting the basic standard too once Apple ships it.

inferiorhuman · 2024-03-21T20:41:06

  if apple didn't do it's shenanigans, RCS or something similar with a
  different name would've have replaced MMS by now.

The only reason there's any RCS interoperability right now is because most carriers have bought into the Google RCS stack. Before that you absolutely had to be aware of which carrier the recipient was using. If memory serves T-Mobile is running both a Google and non-Google RCS stack. RCS is and was a mess.

Hell, if you've a rooted Android you can't access Google RCS and any RCS messages sent your way will disappear into the ether.

simfree · 2024-03-21T21:24:14

There are no third party RCS apps outside of hardware manufacturer skins on Google Messages as Google has shut them all out.

If you want to interact with the RCS world as a non-wireless carrier, expect to pay upwards of 10 cents a message and have a minimum revenue commit of thousands of dollars a month. Carriers also don't get paid for inbound texts on RCS, creating a huge new cost center instead of symmetrical texting volume resulting in minimal costs like the current SMS/MMS ecosystem.

throwaway-blaze · 2024-03-22T04:19:03

This is untrue, the US carriers had a "cross-carrier" consortium that had built most of its own RCS stack, complete with animating dots when the other party was typing, and good image and video support. But Samsung refused to use it (not sure if Google was bribing them in the background) so it got killed in favor of supporting Google's flavor of RCS.

j16sdiz · 2024-03-22T05:31:02

Any source for that? Afaict, every Telco now use Google's RCS stack.

pests · 2024-03-22T06:35:48

I also can't remember what it was called, but every Telxo uses Google's because of its failure.

rezonant · 2024-03-22T08:25:01

> In October 2019, the four major U.S. carriers announced an agreement to form the Cross-Carrier Messaging Initiative to jointly implement RCS using a newly developed app. This service was to be compatible with the Universal Profile.[34] However, this carrier-made app never came to fruition. And later, both T-Mobile and AT&T signed deals with Google to adopt Google's Messages app.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

mullingitover · 2024-03-21T19:20:45

[flagged]

ygjb · 2024-03-21T19:46:10

That is a shockingly user hostile take, especially considering you call out the reason why so many people still use it: it is the only solution for most users that consistently works.

The main reason people still use it is despite the issues with MMS (and SMS in general) the reality is that every vendor wants to own the messaging stack to build or strengthen moat, and the regulators who are in a position to enforce standard protocols have incentives in many or all countries to weaken the security of messaging protocols to meet surveillance objectives (whether those objectives are well scrutinized methods with judicial oversight, or blanket surveillance requirements).

Blaming the user as lazy or incompetent completely overlooks the significant financial incentives that platform owners and network providers have to maintain the status quo, or force the new status quo to strengthen their moats.

Karrot_Kream · 2024-03-21T21:50:55

Both your post and OP's are confident and emotionally forceful without any reasoning why. On one hand, in most of the world, especially countries less developed than the US, messaging apps are very popular and SMS is either not even provided in the plan or barely used. On the other I do think that at the very least phone manufacturers consider MMS/SMS to be a core functionality because it's built into most phones. As such it does feel user hostile to not care about MMS/SMS. I can see the merits of both but don't know why I'd believe one over the other.

I'm curious where y'all's confidence comes from in user hostility or not and what indicators you have to tip your hand one way or the other. That might result in more elucidating conversation too.

ygjb · 2024-03-22T00:15:04

Sure, I consider calling users lazy and incompetent very hostile because I have spent nearly 22 years building, testing and securing systems starting with ecommerce apps in the early 2000s, through government, finance, browsers and supporting services (Mozilla), internet scale infrastructure at OpenDNS, Cisco, And Fastly, and now at Amazon.

All along the way people routinely attack users for making poor decisions when they are simply using defaults, or the easiest to use and most compatible technologies.

* Pffft... Of course they got hacked, they used IE * Of course they got hacked, they opened an email attachment * Of course they got hacked, they clicked that homoglyph

In this particular case, SMS and MMS are baked into the phone, and delivered by the wireless provider, and for better or worse on the UX front, work with just a phone number and across all mobile OS. For anything other than that, if users have peers using other device or services, the alternative is to use multiple services to communicate with different groups based on which services they use. That means repeating messages across multiple providers, and/or missing folks because all the platform services have actively silo'd their platforms to prevent interoperability.

Yeah, SMS and MMS suck, but they suck less for the simple use case of messaging folks with cell phones, because the barrier to messaging those folks is having their phone number.

It's lazy and incompetent to attack users when users actually have very little control over the actual security or usability of the services and systems they use, especially as everything is hosted in cloud platforms.

makapuf · 2024-03-21T20:45:08

Most people couldnt care less with sub par video message security for most (not all) uses. The fact that every vendor want anything but a good standard stack for keeping their users captive is imo a more powerful incentive.

rezonant · 2024-03-21T19:34:18

Please don't conflate messaging apps with texting, it's disingenuous. Texting is the feature users expect of any smartphone to be able to send a message to any other user who has a smartphone, regardless of what apps they have installed.

astrange · 2024-03-21T21:19:55

My vague understanding is nobody uses SMS outside America and the entire population is on WhatsApp.

microtherion · 2024-03-21T21:54:51

If only! My wife seems to juggle her friends between SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal.

rezonant · 2024-03-21T22:21:13

Sounds complicated. No wonder people in the US don't want to do that when texting is 100% free (with their phone plan) and universal.

geraldwhen · 2024-03-21T23:50:06

Yeah I’m not installing an app to send a message. I get video and gifs and all sorts of whatever I need with iMessage.

Only android people fuss with third party apps because their phones can’t reasonably send messages by default.

lucasban · 2024-03-22T02:02:21

Android devices can reasonably send messages between each other, by default. The whole issue here is that Apple has been intentionally holding back the cross-platform messaging experience in order to make competitors seem less appealing.

lynx23 · 2024-03-22T08:46:24

I can easily send SMS to any Android phone from my iPhone. I really dont understand your reasoning.

IOW, SMS is cross-platform. Whats the issue?

lucasban · 2024-03-22T08:58:48

As an iOS user myself, SMS is still a low quality messaging experience, cross platform or not. Apple could have taken RCS seriously years ago, raising the standard of cross platform messaging for everyone. This would result in an objectively better experience for users of all platforms, including iOS.

lynx23 · 2024-03-22T10:36:58

Contrary to you, I only have a subjective opinion on the matter. In the 12 years that I sometimes use SMS on iOS, I never missed anything. What is it that I am apparently not intelligent enough to miss?

lucasban · 2024-03-22T11:46:12

In no way am I intending to insult your intelligence, and I apologize for any lack of clarity that could lead to such a misunderstanding.

Unlike modern messaging platforms, SMS has no:

- guaranteed delivery

- read receipts

- proper support for group chats (MMS adds this, but the implementation is poor compared to modern platforms)

- support for multimedia (again, MMS added this, but support is poor)

- support for replies

- support for reactions

- support for any kind of encryption

- support for typing indicators

- ability to work independently of an active cellular connection

If SMS works for your needs, and you have no issues with it, that’s great. Ultimately, SMS does work, but many users rightfully expect more of a messaging platform at this point. There are real benefits to users from upgrading to a more modern system.

lynx23 · 2024-03-22T08:44:41

The difference between SMS and iMessage doesn't really count in this context, since usage is largely transparent. Its the same app, and the same contact list.

anticensor · 2024-03-22T11:10:55

They have completely different privacy and reliability expectations: SMS is ephemeral, unreliable, unencrypted and short; whereas iMessage is semi-persistent, reliable, end-to-end encrypted and long.

mullingitover · 2024-03-21T19:47:53

[flagged]

throwway120385 · 2024-03-21T20:03:11

The legacy phone system has a lot of features that aren't present in its replacement, such as freedom to connect with anyone who has a phone number, the ability to move your phone number from carrier to carrier, and the knowledge that as an individual the phone company can't block me from contacting its subscribers entirely for free as long as I pay a fee to my own phone company.

It's way better than being on Whatsapp or iMessage or Slack or Teams or whatever you're proposing to replace it because I have a lot of control over who can contact me and nobody is using my presence on the phone network as a means to drag all of my friends over to the same phone network.

mullingitover · 2024-03-21T20:33:16

The legacy phone system currently enables breathtaking amounts of abuse and fraud. I know all the benefits you're listing, and I would enthusiastically surrender them just to watch the legacy phone system be decommissioned.

If we invented the legacy phone system today, it would be illegal to operate because it's so insecure. We certainly wouldn't dream of forcing everyone to use it.

simfree · 2024-03-21T21:32:55

Any replacement would have the same fraudulent traffic migrate to it.

You can already see this type of fraudulent traffic occur on Telegram with the constant crypto bots and on Signal with the romance scams.

A PSTN sunset would force this fraudulent traffic to migrate to the over the top communications platforms, eliminate many people's ability to access emergency services reliably, destroy reliable voice quality on cellular networks as there's no consistent way to prioritize third party voice and video traffic.

mullingitover · 2024-03-21T21:48:10

> Any replacement would have the same fraudulent traffic migrate to it.

We've had SSL on the web for 30 years now. We don't visit our bank's web site and wonder if we're really talking to our bank, but we casually accept that of course someone calling from our bank's phone number could be a fraudster. There might be some fraud that is able to migrate, but it wouldn't be the smorgasbord for fraudsters that the legacy phone system has created.

> eliminate many people's ability to access emergency services reliably

This is like saying that we can't put out the dumpster fire because it provides some people with warmth. The 911 system (at least in the US) is already a travesty. Caller locations are a crapshoot for wireless calls. Call centers aren't centralized, standardized, or coordinated, and they're overloaded. The technology is outdated. Moving it off the phone network and onto a centralized digital platform would be a massive improvement.

AnthonyMouse · 2024-03-21T20:39:57

All you would need to replace this is a messaging app that uses email addresses as identifiers and then falls back to sending messages via email if the recipient doesn't have the app.

throwway120385 · 2024-03-21T20:55:02

What organization runs the messaging app? Do we have some kind of consortium of companies? And how do we add or remove companies from that list? There are actually a lot of social problems around this that are already solved by the network of arrangements between the companies that run our phone system and the users of the phone system and so on. You'd likely end up recreating that and at the end of the day you'd have rebuilt the phone system. The technical problems are a very small part of this.

AnthonyMouse · 2024-03-21T21:03:53

No organization runs the messaging app, it's a protocol that anyone can implement. Publish an RFC. The first time you contact someone who uses a different provider, their messaging app or service sends you an email asking you to confirm that you sent the message, after which your app is associated with your email address on their provider. A combined messaging+email app could handle this automatically. At that point you can make calls, video chats, group chats, E2E encrypted direct messaging etc., using an email address as an identifier.

In general, solve problems in the same way that email does but add protocol support for realtime direct communications and end-to-end encryption.

throwway120385 · 2024-03-22T00:24:23

Somebody has to pay for the infrastructure. You can either have a very loose federation of a lot of individuals running their own infrastructure like in the early Internet on one end of the spectrum or a couple of big companies that essentially run everything like we have now with Google and Meta. But someone has to run it. If you rely on a single company to stand up everyone's instance of the application, then you're right back where we are right now. And how do you manage all of the configuration data for all of the users? There are a lot of practicalities here that I worry you don't appreciate when you say "It's a protocol that anyone can implement." Well, so is PSTN. It just so happens that you need a certain amount of infrastructure to implement it, which is true of everything, even email. I'm not convinced that a new protocol gets us anywhere because it doesn't solve the underlying very human tendency to want to pay someone to deal with all the unsightly stuff so you can get on with your life, which is incidentally also the problem we have with email vis a vis Google.

AnthonyMouse · 2024-03-22T09:04:37

> You can either have a very loose federation of a lot of individuals running their own infrastructure like in the early Internet on one end of the spectrum or a couple of big companies that essentially run everything like we have now with Google and Meta.

Or you could have thousands of medium-sized companies that each operate nodes that interoperate with each other even though none of them is the size of Google or Meta, and users could choose one based on whether they want to see ads or pay a few bucks a year, or run their own if they're into that sort of thing.

> It just so happens that you need a certain amount of infrastructure to implement it, which is true of everything, even email.

The infrastructure you need for email is any functioning general purpose computer, including ones you can find in the trash, and a domain name, which you can also get for free if you really want to and in practice costs around $15/year to do it properly. Anyone with the inclination can do this and many solitary individuals actually do.

The infrastructure you would need for this thing would be even less, because the premise is that you already have an email address/provider, so all you'd really need is the ability to map a port so you can make a direct connection to the other endpoint -- or IPv6.

Whereas the infrastructure you need to participate in the PSTN... I think you're required to be a CLEC to even have a block of numbers assigned. If all you had to do was install Asterisk on the trash PC it would be something else entirely, but the telcos do a lot of regulatory gatekeeping, which is another reason the legacy phone network should be decommissioned and replaced by a modern IETF protocol.

idle_zealot · 2024-03-21T23:25:20

My understanding is that used to be how most text messaging was done pre-smartphone in Japan.

Currently the only similar thing I'm aware of is https://delta.chat/en/, though I believe it does all of its networking over email, rather than only using it as a fallback.

I wonder what the pitfalls of using email this way are; it seems like a great way to get a free backend and growth-hack a chat app, so there must be some reason it's not more common.

AnthonyMouse · 2024-03-21T23:47:39

It's the idealist's solution because it benefits the user. Companies typically want to use phone numbers because they're more expensive for users to maintain separate identities with, which helps when you want to track them. Moreover, companies want lock-in to their own network effect, not a federated network that anybody else can permissionlessly join.

It's the sort of thing you get when somebody builds it as a hobby project, or a skunkworks project escapes from a large corporation and is already open source by the time the MBAs get their hands on it. Or, in the old days, DARPA funding.

rezonant · 2024-03-21T22:23:35

99 standards on the wall, 99 standards... take one down, pass it around, 101 standards on the wall.

https://xkcd.com/927/

AnthonyMouse · 2024-03-21T22:45:53

Except that the popular messaging apps don't have published standards and you can't interoperate with them even if you wanted to. How do you implement the iMessage protocol on Android or Windows?

Point me to the existing IETF RFC for e.g. mapping email addresses as identifiers for use in a standard communications protocol for voice and video calls.

pierat · 2024-03-22T02:17:09

You used to be able to, with tools like Trillian and Gaim.

Not any more, at least for any semi-popular chat. The throwaway and no-names? Yeah you can, well until IF they get big. And well, they won't.

theshackleford · 2024-03-21T21:47:15

> I have a lot of control over who can contact me

This might be the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s literally legal in my country to spam me on my phone number and there is ZERO I can do to change that. Ergo I have fuck all control over who can contact me.

Detrytus · 2024-03-21T20:37:17

> freedom to connect with anyone who has a phone number

This is actually a bug, not a feature, as it enables all kind of robocalls and sms spam. That's why I love the iPhone feature that allows me to block all the calls from numbers not in my contact list. It does not allow this for SMS though...

rezonant · 2024-03-21T20:52:43

It does allow it for SMS apparently, but the UI is easy to misunderstand. In the "Unknown & Spam" settings where you picked "Filter Unknown Senders" there is an option below it marked "SMS Filtering" and you need to set that to... "SMS Filter".

https://www.guidingtech.com/how-to-block-text-messages-from-...

Even if it couldn't do this, that would just bolster the case that Apple is making SMS worse than it has to be on their platform to promote iMessage and its network effects.

EDIT: I booted up my iPhone 14 on the latest iOS and I guess this has changed? There isn't a "SMS Filtering" option near the Filter Unknown Senders option which has moved to the top level Messages settings page versus when the guide was written.

I'm not sure if that means it always filters SMS or it never does, but again if it doesn't filter SMS at all that's an Apple choice, it doesn't mean you can't do it on SMS.

throwway120385 · 2024-03-21T20:55:42

When I was on Android it did allow me to do this for SMS.

pdntspa · 2024-03-21T20:55:06

> holds us back from adopting modern technology.

Where we're all captive subjects of some cloud asshole spoon-feeding us bits of infrastructure we used to be able to run ourselves

dzhiurgis · 2024-03-21T20:27:10

US should sue themselves for requiring a phone number for a person to exist to begin with.

catlikesshrimp · 2024-03-21T19:52:13

TLDR: It has nothing to do with MMS

But that didn't address GP's comment. Apple states that green bubbles are pariahs because messages can't be sent to androids so it breaks the system, or something like that [BS]

Iphone users think that green bubbles are pariahs because they aren't part of their exclusive group, and because green bubbles turn chat groups into rubbish, because yada yada not iphone. (spoiler alert, apple does it on purpose)

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/android-users-stig...

For laughs: Tim Cook telling someone he has to buy her mom an iphone (1hr 0mins 17secs)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=3615&v=sdvzYtgmIjs&feature=you...

LorenDB · 2024-03-22T00:37:12

I still want to see Matrix get adopted for messaging by default. Purism actually did it with their Librem 5 (probably one of the few good things about that company, but that's a rant for another day).

inferiorhuman · 2024-03-21T20:37:14

  it is in fact a technical limitation.

No, it's not. Carriers limit the attachment sizes quite severely, but that's not an inherent limitation of MMS.

simfree · 2024-03-21T21:35:24

The file size limits on iOS for MMS are far below what most carriers permit, making photos and videos sent from iPhone look much worse when sent via MMS.

inferiorhuman · 2024-03-21T22:10:39

Doubt that. AT&T still limits attachments to 1 megabyte for picture, video, and audio files. That's not an iOS limitation. I just sent an animated GIF to a Google Voice number and it was compressed to about 800 kilobytes.

I suspect the people whining the most are communicating with folks that have "Low Quality Image Mode" enabled on their iPhone.

https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1041906/

ipaddr · 2024-03-22T00:28:46

Below are the limits per carrier. You are correct AT&T is 1m. The iphone has a limit of 200k which can be raised to 300k. Parent was correct.

https://www.infobip.com/docs/mms/message-types

inferiorhuman · 2024-03-22T00:32:04

Did you not read what I wrote? There's no 200 kilobyte limit. I literally sent a GIF from my iPhone that was compressed down to 800 kilobytes. Even the JPEG images were compressed to 300+ kilobytes.

If you're unable to send files that large from an iPhone there's a carrier issue in play.

bmitc · 2024-03-22T08:19:33

Are you sending that to another iPhone? Trt exchanging text messages between an Android phone and an iPhone. It's completely broken. Apple wants to force Android users into iPhones so that their tect messages stop sucking, as if it's and Android issue.

pests · 2024-03-22T06:41:57

Their link references MMS not iMessage.

How does Apple get around that MMS limitation?

secondcoming · 2024-03-21T20:25:00

I can count on one hand the number of MMS messages I've ever received.

starttoaster · 2024-03-21T23:47:55

MMS was much more common before data messaging apps like Discord or Facebook Messenger became some of the normalized places for cell phone chatter, which anecdotally I think that switch started happening (or at least I began recognizing that switch) around the early 2010's.

So I'm guessing you're a very young person based on how little MMS you claim to have received. Which is fine, it's fair to point out that technologies us old folk use may differ slightly from what the whippersnappers are doing. And there are no wrong answers there, except that it's also fair to point out that when you purchase a cell phone, before you install any apps, you have some ingrained cell phone messaging features. One of which is a messenger app built on top of SMS and MMS.

I've probably sent and received thousands of MMS messages over the years, because it was the primary method for a cell phone user to send a picture to your friends and family. Back in the day, at least, and still today for some. It was also the way that us old folk were able to send group texts at a time.

Toutouxc · 2024-03-22T06:48:12

Must be a regional thing. Where I live in Europe, MMS were just too expensive to use regularly, roughly 5-10x more expensive than SMS, and they came roughly around the time when phones were slowly getting simple email clients and usable data (GPRS and sane pricing).

I’m around 30, I grew up with a dad who was a fan of modern phones and technologies (first camera phones, Windows smartphones, PDAs) so I always had fancy phones, and I’ve received

johnisgood · 2024-03-22T02:09:34

MMS has always been extremely rare here, and I am around ~30 years old, so I guess it depends, of course. Personally I have never received, nor have I known anyone who has either received or sent a single one that was not by accident.

secondcoming · 2024-03-22T00:17:27

I'm in my forties! It may depend on the region of the world you grew up in, but in the UK at least MMS was quite expensive for what it offered.

techcode · 2024-03-22T08:55:28

Until 2010 I worked for Route Messaging (now they are called Telesign) on internal systems as well as integrations with mobile operators and other "messaging brokers" around the world.

MMS was indeed order of magnitude more expensive than SMS and several orders of magnitude less used.

Reasoning for such high prices was more about mobile internet/data back then being really expensive "1G" - and MMS was (still is I guess) using mobile data to send/receive "multimedia messages".

At this point I expect that cost of MMS is more about maintaining legacy systems/servers for that.

Although in something like 2008/2009 integrating through legacy SMS protocols (those previously used by beepers/pagers) was cheaper than through modern protocols. Some operators had hardware boxes supporting those that were already paid off long time ago.

kemayo · 2024-03-21T19:48:09

That is, indeed, a technical limitation of MMS.

The newer RCS standard would be better, but Apple has already announced they're going to support it this year (after dragging their heels for a few years).

inferiorhuman · 2024-03-21T20:47:42

  That is, indeed, a technical limitation of MMS.

No, it's not. It's an implementation detail. MMS is basically just SMTP on the back end. There's no technical reason you couldn't allow much larger attachments aside from cost and shitty implementations.

The last time folks got worked into a frenzy over RCS I ended up looking at the MMS specs. If memory serves 3GPP recommended an upper bound of at least 5 megabytes. American carriers typically limit attachments to like 3 megabytes or less and they mandate ancient video codecs.

techcode · 2024-03-22T09:15:42

This. And it actually doesn't even need to be done through SMTP.

MMS being basically SMS with a link/url to where the phone fetches multimedia part from - it could also be sent via older EMI-UCP (that was originally used for pagers).

At some point pre 2010 (when I worked in Routo Messaging - now called Telesign) we also got an SS7 connection - so we could finally start doing stuff like a real mobile operator/provider.

kemayo · 2024-03-21T21:34:33

I guess rephrasing it to a practical limitation of MMS would be fair, though? Insofar as it’s not something we’re blaming Apple for.

ipaddr · 2024-03-22T00:30:30

Apple has a 200k limit. We can blame Apple for having the worst mms limits

jaegerpicker · 2024-03-22T01:58:44

Prove this, because I'm pretty certain this is not the case. I helped build a messaging app for iOS (Technically a TeleHeath app that needed to accept MMS/SMS also) and I saw absolutely none of this. That was a few years ago so it's possible it's changed but I'd have to see actual documentation for that. Otherwise I firmly believe this is BS and completely made up.

inferiorhuman · 2024-03-22T00:31:43

No, they don't.

486sx33 · 2024-03-21T19:41:51

If you pay for iCloud ($4 a month) you can send an iCloud link easily to any video that anyone else can access at full resolution

I realize this isn’t what you are asking for. But it works well and doesn’t depend on Google’s closed version of RCS

ricktdotorg · 2024-03-22T00:13:23

long-time iPhone user here, i did not know this!

thank you for posting!

FYI for those others who don't know: click on a video in your photos app. click share --> "Copy iCloud Link"

jquery · 2024-03-22T05:05:56

Careful, it will leak your real name. It's no good for anonymous sharing.

rezonant · 2024-03-22T08:33:03

Pretty sure Apple will make the recipient sign up for an Apple account to view the content. At least it does this for notes sharing.

EDIT: Tried it on my iPhone and it does not require an Apple account, kudos Apple. It does show my full real name as others have mentioned.

bestnameever · 2024-03-22T05:59:52

Apple opened up the app store for game streams back in January.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24050430/apple-app-store-...

pmarreck · 2024-03-21T20:09:01

Media messages from Androids to iPhones are in fact technologically-limited by MMS. That's not an Apple-imposed limitation, it's written in stone in the MMS standard.

akho · 2024-03-22T08:43:25

Works fine over WhatsApp/Telegram/…. Not a technological limitation.

lightedman · 2024-03-22T00:44:45

Please show me where that's written because iPhones have no problems sending full-resolution images to my droid device but I can't do the same to them.

astrange · 2024-03-21T20:41:50

Super apps are a dud. China has them because the regulators want them, not because they're a good business.

PaulHoule · 2024-03-21T21:28:33

My understanding is the reason they are dead in the US is even though the banks might let you build payments into it they will not let you negotiate any discount in fees so you will have to add your own fees on top of their own fees. It begs the question of why a bank or consortium of banks hasn’t developed a super app.

When I gave this talk in late 2016

https://www.slideshare.net/paulahoule/chatbots-in-2017-ithac...

there was huge interest in messaging-centric apps as this runs around the boondoggle of having even the tiniest patch to your app get reviewed.

RhodesianHunter · 2024-03-21T21:15:00

Exactly. Most people would rather use the best app for the niche thing they want to do rather than the shittier version from some mega-app they happen to have for some other reason.

unclebucknasty · 2024-03-22T02:30:26

Yes, but don't underestimate the power of convenience. That factor seems to inordinately raise the shittiness toleration threshold these days.

novok · 2024-03-21T20:48:27

Why do they show up in other asian markets, like Grab and such?

astrange · 2024-03-21T20:51:45

A lot of people are used to WeChat, so it can feel natural to make another one. LINE is also basically WeChat.

I don't think that's enough to make them competitive though. For instance, a scandal in one feature of the app (or Facebook being considered lame by kids) will hurt the rest of it.

bluk · 2024-03-21T18:57:12

Cloud game streaming has been recently allowed worldwide under a few conditions ( https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=f1v8pyay ).

Forcing Apple to allow third party payments without Apple's cut would improve market opportunities for many businesses. Facebook could have its marketplace conduct peer to peer transactions. Amazon could allow the purchase of digital goods (books, movies, etc.) and put it on more equal footing with Apple itself. While big businesses are best positioned to take advantage today, the effects directly trickle down to small startup businesses.

While I personally don't care for it, cryptocurrency use would have more potential. Apple blocked apps for NFT features in the past because they couldn't get their 30%.

Having third party marketplaces might make it so that there is some actual curation at the App Store.

dwaite · 2024-03-22T06:25:08

> Forcing Apple to allow third party payments without Apple's cut would improve market opportunities for many businesses.

It would, but that is how Apple collects their commission. Where regulations where Apple has been forced to provide this separation (such as the US), they have split 3% to cover payment fees out of the commission, and put additional considerations for when leaving the app to make a payment would result in a commission and that Apple may audit that you are properly reporting commissions.

The DMA mandated that Apple decouple their commission structure from a single App Store in favor of multiple marketplaces, and they put in a 50 Eurocent core technology fee per user per year (after a margin of free installs).

> Amazon could allow the purchase of digital goods (books, movies, etc.) and put it on more equal footing with Apple itself.

Amazon does have digital purchasing of Video. Amazon added the ability to subscribe to a limited video version of Prime using in-app purchasing, and that kind of account will bill purchases using in-app purchasing.

They likely have razor thin margins for anyone who chooses to do this, but expect customers to either have existing Prime accounts or to want to upgrade from Video to the full Prime account for the other services. I suspect they did the math and think their margins on Kindle wouldn't support this.

pests · 2024-03-22T06:47:30

> Amazon does have digital purchasing of Video. Amazon added the ability to subscribe to a limited video version of Prime using in-app purchasing, and that kind of account will bill purchases using in-app purchasing.

Sorry, I do not parse this. What did they add?

CapstanRoller · 2024-03-22T07:25:06

Amazon Prime was originally an add-on to regular Amazon accounts that provided expedited delivery as a flat rate subscription. Later, Amazon got into the streaming business and bundled access to films and shows into the Prime subscription. For a while it was kind of a useless perk since the available content was old or low quality.

Later, as Amazon acquired more popular content and then created an in-house production studio, they added the ability to rent or "purchase" (rent) streaming video content on a per-episode/season/film basis without requiring the full Prime subscription service.

This was designed to address Amazon customers who were primarily (pun intended) interested in the video content, not the physical goods.

barkerja · 2024-03-21T19:30:41

I wonder if this will have a trickle down effect on other app stores, specifically gaming consoles. Would XBox Live or Playstation Store, for example, be on the hot seat if they rejected an application or "game" that was basically a storefront for streaming other games?

bluk · 2024-03-21T20:21:33

I don't think so, at least not as a consequence from this case if Apple loses. Antitrust cases are usually very limited in scope. Microsoft's loss required many actions (documenting Active Directory and other protocols/formats, browser choice screens, etc.), but no one else in tech were required to do so.

John Sircacusa (from ATP.fm) pointed out years ago that the heart of Apple's biggest issues is business relationship management. This was when Apple only had a handful of issues with a few companies and made some poorly received statements about developers. Their ability to build mutually agreeable relations has only gotten worse in recent years.

Sony and Microsoft have kept their relations with third parties tough but ultimately agreeable. They promote practically all of their third parties (unlike the App Store which has so many apps that its like winning the lottery to be promoted). Consoles have stores which are probably more curated but which third party publishers/developers actually like.

IMO, DoJ, EU, etc. are acting primarily because they have received so many complaints from Spotify, Microsoft, Epic Games, Google, Meta, Tile, etc. Governments don't take action for the "public" interest on its own.

bobthepanda · 2024-03-21T19:09:47

Facebook tried this with games and cash transfer within Messenger but it never really took off.

Personally, I don’t think Western (or at least American) consumers are all that interested in a super app. Asia has a ton of players in this space like WeChat, QQ, Line and Kaokao but those have never taken off in the West outside of diaspora communities.

gessha · 2024-03-22T04:39:38

Facebook’s attempt didn’t work out because they lost the youth market to Snapchat, TikTok, Discord and Instagram(It’s funny, I know). They tried to bring in Instagram users into Facebook but that didn’t(hasn’t) work out yet.

bobthepanda · 2024-03-22T04:43:53

I mean even the old people barely play Facebook games or use Messenger money transfer. Western consumers just tend to trust product specialists rather than an all in one app.

k12sosse · 2024-03-21T22:08:55

Kind of sideline here but..

Tim Hortons had gift and loyalty cards ("every 7th coffee free"). Then they introduced an app with "rewards" as an alternative to loyalty and gift cards. Then the app turned into a bank. Then they stopped the physical loyalty cards. Now you can't "earn" free coffee without giving them your personal information and signing up for the bank of Tim Hortons. It's ok though. I stopped being a customer because of it.

numpad0 · 2024-03-21T19:27:41

Why don't twitter. com just do the super apps w/ e-commerce thing? It's financial regulations, not App Store regulations, isn't that the case?

What are challenges for implementing such "payment" system on iOS that can transfer, say Monopoly money vs real USD? Aren't those almost entirely legal or compliance matters for very good reasons? The Alaskan 737 MAX 9 landed largely intact thanks to still-working parts of regulations and we all value that.

So why not they just do that? Or CAN'T they?

dragonwriter · 2024-03-21T19:30:44

> Why don't twitter. com just do the super apps w/ e-commerce

X, the company formerly known as twitter, fairly explicitly plans to, they are just taking time to pivot, in part because they don’t seem to have any real clear roadmap from where they are to where they want to be.

microtherion · 2024-03-21T21:59:13

What you call "fairly explicitly plans to" I call "supposedly is working on, according to statements by its owner, who has a history of vaporware announcements".

trothamel · 2024-03-22T01:42:45

But also having a history of announcements that take longer than expected, and come true. (Reusable rockets come to mind.)

dragonwriter · 2024-03-21T23:09:35

Fair enough.

dwighttk · 2024-03-21T20:59:28

>fairly explicitly plans to,

>don’t seem to have any real clear roadmap

not your fault, but that's pretty funny

dragonwriter · 2024-03-21T22:59:17

I see the apparent contradiction, but the goal has been made pretty explicit, but from the outside the plan seems to be missing.

entropicdrifter · 2024-03-21T21:05:37

And also because they're in a technical quagmire of their own creation

nomel · 2024-03-21T21:20:36

> And also because they're in a technical quagmire of their own creation

Could you expand on that?

m463 · 2024-03-21T23:22:31

I would be happy if iMessage threads could be exported and saved.

if I was going to dream big, I would like to point the iCloud hooks to a personal server instead of apple in a meaningful way.

JimDabell · 2024-03-22T07:47:57

If you have a Mac, your messages are stored locally with SQLite, so you can export them that way.

CapstanRoller · 2024-03-22T07:50:21

It is possible to export iMessage threads by purchasing an Apple computer and enabling "iCloud for Messages", at which point the messages will be synced to the computer and stored locally in an SQLite database then exported using open source tools... unless you sent too many messages or attachments, at which point you also have to purchase an additional iCloud subscription based on how much storage you need.

Hopefully you can accomplish all this within the return window of the computer (or purchase a used one). The iCloud subscription fees are non-refundable. You can also just give up, keep the computer, and embrace the Apple ecosystem.

Thank you Tim Apple, very cool!

Sent from my iPhone

Reason077 · 2024-03-22T01:02:34

- Music Apps (Spotify) that properly integrate with Siri, like on Amazon and Google devices.

Lio · 2024-03-22T09:53:42

I'd just like to be able to get music off my iPhone to my mac without having to buy a third party app or buy a subscription to Apple Music.

scotty79 · 2024-03-21T21:14:43

> 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.

crabmusket · 2024-03-21T21:20:05

As a small business owner, I'm actually keen on the benefits to other businesses that antitrust enforcement and pro-competition enforcement can have.

As a really specific example in the case of Apple, I really hope the DMA causes wider availability of browser choice on iOS so that we as a business that ships a web app can offer our customers features like notifications and other PWA benefits. Our customers are somewhat willing to switch browsers to get the best experience when using our app. But switching to Android? Not a reasonable ask from us.

Most consumers also have jobs right? Making their lives better and easier at work, increasing competition to give their employers more opportunity to thrive, is just as important as making their groceries cheaper.

tpmoney · 2024-03-22T01:17:52

The flip side of this as a consumer is that I'm happy that mandating safari on iOS means I can be relatively sure any given site is going to work in Safari. I'm glad I don't live in the days where I needed 3 separate browsers on my computer (Safari, Firefox and IE) to ensure that I can use websites when I need to. In "ye olde days", even if you were using Safari for most of your browsing because it gave the best battery life on MacOS, you'd run into some sites that wouldn't work with it. You'd try Firefox maybe next, hoping that it was just some site that didn't have any developers who knew what a mac was. But even then, you'd run into sites where, no the problem was the developers just assumed everyone used IE and used a bunch of IE specific stuff.

I can't remember the last time I saw a "this site only works in XYZ" message. Some of that is a lot of modern sites are all built on big frameworks, but some of that is also because only supporting Safari, or only supporting Chrome or only supporting IE is going to lose you huge swaths of customers.

What if I don't want to switch browsers for the "best experience" when using your app? What if I want you to make your app the best experience on my browser of choice?

As always these things are tradeoffs and balances.

crabmusket · 2024-03-22T02:21:11

> What if I don't want to switch browsers for the "best experience" when using your app? What if I want you to make your app the best experience on my browser of choice?

What if I cannot do that due to there being no incentive for Apple to support web standards in Safari?

We don't want our users to have to switch browsers, but that leaves us with no ability to use lots of the features that make modern web apps competitive at all with native apps.

tpmoney · 2024-03-22T02:31:15

Like I said, it's all tradeoffs. It's worth noting though that software companies definition of "best experience" and the consumer definition of "best experience" aren't always in sync, and plenty of Apple's restrictions align more with the consumers version of things. The most obvious example is mandating apps ask for tracking permissions, or location permission or access to photos and calendars. I'm sure Facebook and Google and plenty of other vendors would argue the "best experience" is a seamless one where the user doesn't need to be bothered with such minutia. And yet, I for one am quite glad they can't deliver their "best experience" to me.

jquery · 2024-03-22T05:15:21

True. On my iPhone, I just did an extremely complicated checkout flow involving registration on multiple websites as well as a credit check, and it worked like a charm.

Several years ago I wouldn't have even bothered trying to do that on my phone. There is some benefit to Safari being so ubiquitous.

rstephenson2 · 2024-03-22T01:32:40

If it goes through, your customers can switch, once, to Chrome.

After that, Google leverages its other service monopolies, Chrome goes to 95%+ market share, standards fall by the wayside, and nobody has any choice.

I guess the answer to that is antitrust against Google, but I’d rather do that first than go through the Chrome domination phase.

crabmusket · 2024-03-22T02:25:04

The DMA also applies to Chrome, so there'll be some pressure from that direction.

techpression · 2024-03-22T03:53:26

Nothing in the DMA does anything about Chrome taking over completely. Actually the DMA is more or less a dream come true for Google, Amazon and Meta, it drastically strengthens their market hold at the cost of making the Apple ecosystem more diluted.

It will be a sad day in the near future when the web becomes “Chrome”, even on mobile, much as it was “IE” not that long ago, alas, we seem to never learn.

JimDabell · 2024-03-22T07:56:34

The biggest threat to the open web is Chrome’s dominance. Firefox is dwindling away and even Mozilla doesn’t seem to care about it, leaving Safari the only thing stopping Chrome from completely taking over. Google are already executing the Embrace & Extend playbook with non-standard functionality.

Everybody who says “Safari is the new IE” seems to be too young to know what IE and front-end web development were really like during the 00s. I’d take WebKit on iOS over a Blink monoculture any day, and so should any web developer.

techpression · 2024-03-22T08:14:35

No argument from me, I disregard anyone who says “Safari is the new IE” as someone who doesn’t know better but claim to do, or someone who is just trolling. I had to work with both IE on Mac and IE6 on Windows, Safari is not even remotely close to the isolated non-conforming nightmare it was back then. It’s also a bit terrifying how many seem to think Chrome gets it right all the time, even when they blatantly ignore standards or leave implementations with bugs for what feels like forever. But they get away with it since they’re so big, just like Microsoft did with IE.

I don’t know what the solution would be, not like you can mandate the existence of a web browser engine into existence and making one gets harder for every new thing added.

astrange · 2024-03-22T09:19:56

Economies are producer-centric when you have international competition.

An example being Intel, which is currently getting billions in government subsidies via the CHIPS Act, because their business fell behind because it was impeded by the government suing them for antitrust issues.

ChuckMcM · 2024-03-21T22:43:28

Yes, historically the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) and the Clayton Act (1914) define the roll of "regulated capitalism" rather than simply "free market capitalism". There has been a continuous battle between people who wanted to get infinitely wealthy by exploiting their dominance and the Government ever since.

I've had some great conversations with folks about why this form of "American Capitalism" is the most efficient economic engine with regard to an industrial economy. As a system, this, and a graduated taxation that provides a damping function on "infinite wealth" and feeds it into government services has the potential to create an economy where everyone has a chance to get rich, and everyone's basic needs are met. That combination maximizes participation in the economy and thus GDP.

The macroeconomics class I took spent several weeks on this relationship and the "Great Courses" economics class also talks about it.

The challenge is that rich men (typically its men) don't like being told they can't do something, or told they have to do something which will reduce their total wealth, and they respond by corrupting legislators into changing the rules.

It isn't "good" or "bad" per se, some people always eat all the cookies if they think they can get away with it. As a systems analyst though the system is an excellent study in 'tuning.' In theory, as a government maximizing GDP is a goal because the more GDP the more gets done the happier people are, etc etc. Technology strongly affected the rate of change of wealth, people who were middle class at a startup suddenly being in the top 10% in terms of wealth over the course of a few years, rather than a life time of work and savings. Others leveraging their wealth in technology startups having it rocket them into the 1%.[1] Something that the US system of laws does not do well is respond to changes "quickly" (my lawyer friends tell me that is a design feature not a bug). But as we saw with Microsoft's antitrust case they do respond eventually.

[1] Back in the dot com days there was an article in Wired about the "Billionaire Boys Club" which talked about members of the several VC firms whose net worth had ballooned to over a billion dollars.

rmbyrro · 2024-03-22T09:51:37

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...

When are people going to stop buying Apple?

dclowd9901 · 2024-03-22T06:02:27

Ironic that the worst business decisions (hardware or software lockdowns that pave the way for antitrust suits) come from the business heads.

ben7799 · 2024-03-21T16:39:49

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.

Wowfunhappy · 2024-03-21T16:58:25

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.

shagie · 2024-03-21T17:28:36

The Pebble was released in 2013. The two way communication SDK with Pebble was released in May of 2013. In February of 2015, the 2.0 Pebble SDK was released with further integrations.

The first iWatch was announced in September 2014 and released in April of 2015.

The Pebble was discontinued in 2016.

What integrations are you expecting Apple to have released prior to its own release? What functionality did iOS lack that android provided that hampered Pebble's development on iOS?

daghamm · 2024-03-21T18:00:14

"The first iWatch was announced in September 2014 and released in April of 2015."

Just a side note: apple has in past started limiting other companies products as soon as they decide to create a competitor and sometimes years before it hits the market.

IIRC Spotify has been bitten by this at least once, which resulted in a lawsuit.

shagie · 2024-03-21T18:07:56

What limitations did Apple place in 2013 (or 2014 or 2015) that reduced the functionality of Pebble in light of a forthcoming iWatch?

If it was a "it worked and then Apple took away this API that we were going to use" that would be one thing. If it was "the iPhone didn't have the functionality for other devices to read messages over BlueTooth until 2015 with iOS 8" - that's a different claim.

johnnyanmac · 2024-03-21T18:36:24

I don't know about Pebble, but Tile got restricted really hard once Apple decided to make the Apple Tag. There's many rants/statements from the Tile CEO on this subject.

So this behavior isn't a relic of old APIs

shagie · 2024-03-21T18:53:53

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/04/tile-ceo-on-competition...

> > If you look at the history between Tile and Apple, we had a very symbiotic relationship. They sold Tile in their stores, we were highlighted at WWDC 2019, and then they launched Find My in 2019, and right when they launched their Find My app, which is effectively a competitor of Tile, they made a number of changes to their OS that made it very difficult for our customers to enable Tile. And then once they got it enabled, they started showing notifications that basically made it seem like Tile was broken.

> Prober is talking about changes that Apple made to location services permissions. For privacy purposes, Apple stopped making it easy for apps to get permanent access to a user's location. Apps in iOS 13 were not initially allowed to present an "Always Allow" option when requesting location access, and the feature had to be enabled in the Settings app. Apple also started sending regular reminders to customers letting them know their location was being used.

> Tile was not happy with these privacy changes and that privacy tweak set Tile against Apple, with Tile in 2019 calling on Congress to "level the playing field."

> > The main points of differentiation of AirTags vis a vis Tile are enabled by platform capabilities that we don't have access to.

> Apple has, in fact, launched the Find My network that gives third-party accessories some of the same access that AirTags have, and Find My network accessories will be able to access the U1 chip in the iPhone 11 and 12 models much like the AirTags, but Tile won't be able to use the Find My network unless it abandons its own app and infrastructure, which it is likely unwilling to do.

> Prober said that Tile has been "seeking to access" the U1 chip since its introduction in the iPhone , and has been denied.

----

Should Apple have a "grant once for app, always allow location service?" (note: this would allow an innocuous app to turn into a tracker with a later update). Or should Apple have a "this app has accessed your location {N} times in the last 24 hours?" ... or some other functionality?

Is "grant once, always allow" a security risk for users?

For U1 chip access: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/nearbyinteraction/... and https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10165/

mckn1ght · 2024-03-22T04:51:40

> Should Apple have a "grant once for app, always allow location service?" (note: this would allow an innocuous app to turn into a tracker with a later update)

Users should be allowed to grant grant “always” permission, for that app version. The next time it gets updated, they get hit with the prompt again.

In fact I’d like that to happen for all permissions, so I regularly review them, and I know when an app update has occurred.

thirdsun · 2024-03-22T10:04:22

> Users should be allowed to grant grant “always” permission, for that app version. The next time it gets updated, they get hit with the prompt again.

I think users would hate that since they don't understand why the app keeps asking again and again. Some apps are updated on a weekly basis.

astrange · 2024-03-22T09:59:06

Apps can change their functionality without an official update as long as they can access the internet, and if they're enabling secret trackers they have no reason not to do this.

Hikikomori · 2024-03-21T19:29:57

Does Apples own stuff have the same limitations?

shagie · 2024-03-21T20:49:01

Yes. And you need to go and configure them in settings if you want them to have the access. https://www.idownloadblog.com/2020/08/24/manage-widget-locat...

The example given there is the Weather app and widget which I've gotten notifications for myself.

You will also note:

> Navigation apps like Google Maps, Waze, Apple Maps, and so forth work best when they can pinpoint your exact location with precision. But a weather app, on the other hand, works just fine even if it’s only allowed to determine the city where you live or just an approximate region.

Maps, Messages, HomeKit, Clock, Siri, Weather, Wallet - they're all in there. System services too (and you can disable the system service's access to location data - e.g. Apple Pay Merchant Identification, Compass Calibration, Setting Time Zone).

For things that like to access the location in the background (Weather especially does this) you may get "Weather" has been using your location in the background. An example of this can be seen at https://www.lifewire.com/turn-on-mobile-location-services-41...

Its not just "I am using the location data always" but also "this has been accessing your location in the background" which is the type of thing that Tile does.

Apple tends to not have apps that access location information in the background and so this sort of message is not one that people tend to see. Weather is the one that does for weather alerts.

Apple Maps doesn't access location in the background so one wouldn't ever see the a message from it.

Wowfunhappy · 2024-03-21T21:42:42

I have received these messages for e.g. the weather app, but never Find My. Find My seems to be immune.

shagie · 2024-03-21T22:36:02

"Find my".app (for lack of a better designator) doesn't use the location information in the background. Weather.app does use location services in the background. Weather (like all user space apps) can also be restricted to only getting the approximate location rather than exact location.

Find my system is part of the operating system itself - not an application running in user space. It can be disabled in the "Share My Location" settings in Location services in settings and in System Services "Find My iPhone" because that part of is not a user space app running but rather part of the kernel.

Wowfunhappy · 2024-03-21T23:25:55

Yes, but isn't that an example of Apple giving special privileges to their own product? How would Tile go about doing this?

shagie · 2024-03-22T01:44:15

What functionality that Apple has are you suggesting be extended to Tile?

Access to the U1 chip? They can do that.

Show up in Find My? Let's get some standards for secure and authenticated transmission of item location to other parties.

Have Apple's phones automatically detect 3rd party BTLE products and report their whereabouts to a 3rd party? This is a privacy nightmare. Side note - why Apple's phones? How about a patch to Android too?

Something else?

joking · 2024-03-21T19:21:23

there are many examples on this, IOS makes warning messages for other developer apps, but none for their own apps. I received warnings that google maps has used my background location, or than google photos or synology photos have access to my photos, but not a message on the same access from apple maps or apple photos.

duskwuff · 2024-03-21T21:16:53

> IOS makes warning messages for other developer apps, but none for their own apps.

This is not true. Apple's own apps, like the Weather widget, will display location permission "nag" screens occasionally just like third-party apps do.

> ... but not a message on the same access from apple maps or apple photos.

Apple Maps doesn't use your location in the background. It only uses your location while the app is open, or while you're actively navigating using it.

Apple Photos is your photos. It'd be weird to warn the user that it "has access" to itself.

cush · 2024-03-21T18:44:04

The complaint is outlined directly in the document

https://x.com/ericmigi/status/1770832870870827149

Wowfunhappy · 2024-03-21T18:03:15

Well to begin with, it is my understanding that the specific limitations listed still exist. Can Bluetooth devices remotely start apps now, or keep them in the background? I only used Pebble as an example because I owned a Pebble, I'm not familiar with Garmen's watches.

But seperately, I think it's really bad for innovation if no new product categories can exist unless Apple makes them first! You can imagine a different type of company that would have been delighted to work with Pebble and add functionality to their operating system, because third party compatibility strengthens their core product.

And of course, if this were the Mac, Pebble would not have needed Apple's cooperation...

astrange · 2024-03-22T10:00:38

Bluetooth devices can start apps in the background. I have two that do this, Beddit and .

eitally · 2024-03-21T17:17:43

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.

parl_match · 2024-03-21T18:29:40

FWIW you can answer and place calls via smartwatches on ios.

Also, you can interact with Apple Health from any smart device via a companion app. You just have to grant permission.

#1 is valid though.

GnarfGnarf · 2024-03-22T01:49:55

I couldn’t get the Afib tracker working consistently on my Fitbit Charge 5. Had to switch to an Apple Watch and an iPhone. Much more reliable.

promiseofbeans · 2024-03-22T01:28:13

Also I don't believe you can control music

rattus_rattus · 2024-03-22T02:34:47

You can! I use my garmin a lot to switch songs on my iPhone, change volume, etc.

But like the other commenter said, you can’t reply to notifications or calls when the watch is paired to an iPhone, but you could when paired to an Android, which is a feature I definitely miss from when I had a Pixel.

mscrivo · 2024-03-21T17:39:26

not sure "non-apple watches" is accurate here. I can do all of those things with my Pixel watch

edit: as comment below points out, I was missing the obvious context of paired with an iPhone.

rezonant · 2024-03-21T17:45:16

OP obviously meant non Apple watches paired with iPhones.

atourgates · 2024-03-21T16:43:46

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.

0xffff2 · 2024-03-21T16:47:22

Can you expand on what "integrated with my iPhone" means in concrete terms? I don't really understand what you mean.

InsomniacL · 2024-03-21T16:58:34

I don't use smart watches but I have an example on the trackers.

Tile created trackers and every so often I get an annoying popup

> ~"Tile has been using your location, do you want to stop this?"

Apple then created a competitor product, 'AirTags', but their product does not have these popups.

This is anti-competitive because Apple bypass the restrictions they made on their platform for their product that their competitive have to follow.

jorvi · 2024-03-21T17:07:57

Longest-running example is Apple Maps displaying mapping on the lockscreen and having special bespoke turn-by-turn notifications, using a private API to which no other navigation app has access to.

The other big one is Apple muscling itself into the music streaming market by converting Music.app into Apple Music. In a fair world, Apple would have been required to show a pop-up that offered Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer etc. in a random order. You can’t unmake an omelette, so I feel Apple should be forced to pay billions to these competing services as recompense.

HumblyTossed · 2024-03-21T18:26:21

> Longest-running example is Apple Maps displaying mapping on the lockscreen and having special bespoke turn-by-turn notifications, using a private API to which no other navigation app has access to.

This is a huge one! I love this feature, but really would like to see it shared with Google and Waze.

positus · 2024-03-21T18:15:37

People know how to use the App Store. If they want Spotify they know how to find it. It is by no means unfair, immoral, or unethical for a company to prefer and promote their own products.

On a personal note, I never in my life want to see advertisements for third-party software by default.

oarsinsync · 2024-03-21T22:15:55

> On a personal note, I never in my life want to see advertisements for third-party software by default.

You might want to avoid buying any new Apple products then, or your iPhone settings screen will regularly show you adverts for free trials for Apple News, Apple TV, Apple fitness, Apple Arcade.

Better still, unlike every other free trial in this ecosystem, these terminate the moment you cancel the trial, rather than at the end of the trial period.

jorvi · 2024-03-21T19:00:19

> People know how to use the App Store.

Apparently they didn’t because Apple Music boomed right after that change.

> It is by no means unfair, immoral, or unethical for a company to prefer and promote their own products.

It is when that company is one part of a duopoly, especially for a device pretty critical to daily life :+)

> On a personal note, I never in my life want to see advertisements for third-party software by default.

It’s a one-time pop-up, on opening the music app the first time. Same as the browser choice pop-up on your desktop. Hardly an advertisement.

positus · 2024-03-21T19:49:34

> Apparently they didn’t because Apple Music boomed right after that change.

I wonder how much offering discounted subscriptions to students or iCloud Family users also contributed to its success.

> It’s a one-time pop-up, on opening the music app the first time. Same as the browser choice pop-up on your desktop. Hardly an advertisement.

I don't like browser selection options either. Then again, I tend to use Apple's default apps unless I have an unusual reason to use something else.

bluk · 2024-03-21T19:07:50

> It is by no means unfair, immoral, or unethical for a company to prefer and promote their own products.

Unfairness is at the heart of so many antitrust lawsuits (whether successful or not). Anyone old enough to recall Microsoft in the 1990s would say that many people (not at MSFT) were pointing out how unfair bundling Internet Explorer was. You may disagree but it was one of the reasons MSFT got sued.

tssge · 2024-03-21T18:56:07

>On a personal note, I never in my life want to see advertisements for third-party software by default.

Maybe I misunderstood your point, but could you clarify a bit what you mean? If I open App Store on my iPhone, it is full of third-party software advertisements by default and I don't even know if they can be turned off.

positus · 2024-03-21T19:52:09

After downloading the software that I know I need I rarely ever open the App Store. I really only do for updates every once in a while. I don't mind them in the App Store because that is an appropriate place for them. Seeing them as apart of the normal platform UI (Microsoft Start menu, looking at you) is distasteful. I go out of my way to avoid advertisements both on and off the internet and my QOL has improved greatly as a result.

Dylan16807 · 2024-03-21T22:05:29

> After downloading the software that I know I need I rarely ever open the App Store.

> Seeing them as apart of the normal platform UI (Microsoft Start menu, looking at you) is distasteful.

Then it doesn't sound like a one-time prompt as part of setup would be an issue.

cush · 2024-03-21T18:50:24

It is when they charge those companies 30%. It’s a competitive advantage only a monopoly can sustain

heavyset_go · 2024-03-21T19:02:19

You already see them on the App Store.

mock-possum · 2024-03-21T17:40:00

RIP lala.com, my first and favorite music streaming service - bought out by apple and summarily closed with previous users encouraged to migrate to Apple Music. I think I got a $15 credit or something. As if I needed a reason to further resent Apple.

mattl · 2024-03-21T18:09:01

> by converting Music.app into Apple Music

Apple made iTunes (which already supported Apple Music) into a dedicated Music app, and offloaded some of the other stuff iTunes could do into separate apps and the Finder.

jorvi · 2024-03-21T18:27:23

I’m mostly talking about iOS. Mac market share isn’t too huge, but iPhone market share in the US (where Apple Music exploded in user count immediately after) is.

Ordinarily I hate market interventions like this, but with iOS+Android being a duopoly, we don’t have a free market so special rules start to apply.

ssully · 2024-03-21T17:10:20

Not saying this to defend Apple, but last week I had that same location tracking pop up for Apples Weather app.

rezonant · 2024-03-21T17:51:24

Yes but that doesn't distract from the airtags issue, because airtags are supported by the OS itself, not a specific app. Good on Apple for applying the same rules to it's apps, but not so good on Apple for not giving Tile a way to work in the same manner as airtags.

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