The EU's Digital Market Act prohibits Apple and other tech giants from favoring their own systems.
The long fight to make Apple's iMessage compatible with all devices has raged with little to show for it. But Google (de facto leader of the charge) and other mobile operators are now leveraging the European Union's Digital Market Act (DMA), according to the Financial Times. The law, which goes into effect in 2024, requires that "gatekeepers" not favor their own systems or limit third parties from interoperating within them. Gatekeepers are any company that meets specific financial and usage qualifications, including Google's parent company Alphabet, Apple, Samsung and others.
On the tech side, Android users also get lower-quality photos and videos when they're sent through iMessage.
Android users don’t receive anything at all through iMessage; the whole conversation becomes SMS/MMS. I suppose getting major, relevant tech details is hard for an outlet like Engadget.
I'm pretty sure they meant when messages are sent using the iMessage app - from the point of view of iPhone user distinction between iMessage protocol and SMS/MMS doesn't matter.
The app is called Messages. The entire point of the article is to discuss iMessages versus SMS so I absolutely do think it’s important to get the distinction right in this case.
There is nothing to distinguish here. iMessage is the protocol and messaging platform. An iMessage sent remains as an iMessage when received. Android users are not sent and do not receive iMessages. They are sent SMS/MMS and they receive SMS/MMS. If all of the iMessage servers exploded right now, nothing at all would change in Apple to Android messaging because iMessage was never involved.
They’re not sent from iMessage. That is the point. If you write an article in a tech publication talking about messaging apps and protocols, you need to get the names right.
Low quality SMS. There are lots of things Apple could do to improve the experience of texting people without iMessage, lots of things built into the SMS standard that they do t implement.
Edit: wow thought this was commonly known. Basically Apple hasn’t adopted industry standard SMS improvements. There’s a whole campaign to try to get them to. Here’s an article explaining https://www.android.com/get-the-message/
Basically Apple hasn’t adopted industry standard SMS improvements. There’s a whole campaign to try to get them to.
This is an advertising campaign to get Apple to adopt Google's proprietary version of RCS, which is not the SMS standard. It is, functionally, Google's own version of iMessage, running Google software on Google servers.
I guess this is a way for google to force apple to open the protocol since they can't just open it in the EU, so it affects the US too. But the EU don't have to listen to google.. if imessage is such a minor player they may just leave it alone.
We use it when WhatsApp has server problems every once in a while or for a round of GamePigeon.
Ironically, in Europe you'd be "missing out" on most group conversations if you'd insist on using iMessage, as most of your buddies probably have an Android phone with WhatsApp installed.
The EU won't leave Apple alone, that's the whole purpose of the Digital Markets Act (prevent "gatekeepers" from excluding other players).
The irony here is that Google is throwing stones when they have huge glass roofs. This law will certainly bite them back elsewhere, hopefully. We need strong laws to curb these modern day robber barons.
For example, in Sweden, probably half as high of a percentage of people have iPhones as the US and yet everyone uses Facebook messenger and whatsapp, at least when I studied there 5 years ago.
Basically in a lot of Europe texting was or still is expensive and not unlimited and WhatsApp was a free alternative and Meta did not own it at the time.
So everyone was like well fuck texting and adopted apps like WhatsApp and then Meta bought WhatsApp. Now in these countries it's the defacto standard whether you like it or not. Businesses, people, and even sometimes government uses it as the default way to text. It sucks.
Because it gave the possibility of free text and calling over the internet , that was a big deal for many developing countries and it is very simple to use. Like I heard some Apple fanboys said that iMessage comes already installed with the phone? And on my mind I am like : How hard is to download an app and just put your phone number you are up and running in less than 2 minutes.
Since Google is just trying to get people to use their closed off communication standard (they added a bunch of stuff to RCS and that’s what they want the eu to force Apple to use). And I don’t trust Google with anything anymore, not sure why you would. The killed by Google website is proof enough of that.
The EU isn't going to swap one closed proprietary service for another. If iMessage is included under the DMA as a core platform service, it will require Apple to permit interoperability. I.e. the creation of open APIs. Google, and anyone else, can choose to build connectors into their own apps.
I love the fact that Lemmy users here don’t know shit about how these tech works and they will jump on Apple hate every chance they get. And your comment must raise Linux and open source etc or else it will be an instance downvote.
This feels a bit like asking MS Teams to play nice with Google Meet, or demanding that Apple’s office suite (Pages, Numbers, etc.) deliver the exact same product when files are saved in an OpenOffice format. This doesn’t seem to be an issue with any other products…
Apple have designed their product to work well with their devices. The Messages app still functions with non-Apple devices. SMS messages can be sent and received to anyone. The fact that pictures and whatever come through like crap is more an issue with the SMS platform than it is with Apple’s app.
Ultimately, Google dislikes the fact that there is a “green bubble” stigma (for lack of a better word) on Apple devices that encourages those who care about such things to prefer Apple devices. Because Google doesn’t have their own widely used iMessage equivalent, they can’t turn around and make messages outside their platform appear as red bubbles or something, so they are attacking from this angle instead.
Google are attempting to start this fight in Europe in hopes that they can push Apple to change in the US as well. The whole green bubble thing is US-only, but Google haven’t been even remotely successful in trying to force Apple to change, and Apple’s “remedy” to the issue is “Get an iPhone”.
It's RCS not RMS and Google didnt even want control of it in the first place, it's well documented Google has been trying to get US carriers to stop dragging their feet on RCS for a long time. They never did until Google literally went "Fine, I'll do it myself then"
AND RCS is an open protocol, nobody really has "control" over it, Google runs some RCS servers but if it disappeared tomorrow (Or you changed the defaults) RCS itself would run just fine on whatever including if Apple supports RCS
ETA: Also SMS is absolute trash, it's from the early 90's (it's older than me FFS) it doesn't really support what we want out of it media wise today, and what it does support it was forced to. It'll send "video" but it'll be completely unrecognizable. It needs to be put to pasture already.
Bingo. This whole case is designed to make Apple look like the bad guy whilst Google hides their real agenda of forcing Apple to use a protocol Google controls and thus stamp out Google’s competition.
You're like a lot of people on Lemmy: so eager to paint everything even tangentially connected to Google as some kind of grand conspiracy that you can't even get the most basic facts right.
It's quite literally well documented that Apple doesn't want to support RCS because it pressures people to get iPhones. SMS is an ancient garbage protocol, what Google is trying to do is get Apple to support SMSs 21st century replacement and RCS support will fix literally every issue iPhone users have texting Android users. Broken group chats, trash quality videos, ultra compressed images, no reactions or stickers, threaded chats etc etc
Google wants Apple to use Google’s proprietary extension of RCS, which runs on Google’s own servers as is precisely as open as iMessage. Effectively nobody uses the industry-standard version of it.
Oh, now you want Europe's strong arm? Google? Now? Fuck off, you yankee!
EDIT: Also, we European literally don't care. Everyone is using Whatsapp or Telegram. There's no "Blue vs green bubble" war here in Europe, only America can get angry on such idiocy.
Let's be clear - only a subset of Americans care about the bubbles. And it's annoying to the rest of us too.
The iMessage approach is the obvious solution, Google had a competitor over 10 years ago and killed it. Signal took the same approach and killed SMS just this year.
It's frustrating, because US has the particular problem of SMS being ubiquitous because it became zero-additional-cost for most people by about 2005. The same mindset that keeps people on SMS also creates the blue-bubble nonsense: ease of use and not having to think about it. Signal was making inroads on this, makes me wonder why they stopped supporting SMS.
I have friends who say "I don't want to have to think about where to message someone". Oh, ffs, do you struggle with calling their home/work/cell, or choosing to email or send a letter?
So yea, it's not America vs the rest of the world, it's us vs the complacent/unaware.
Call someone? In America? They'd rather text. I'm in one of these group messages, apparently my bubble is a different color. Though I like my phone from Taiwan, so they can deal with it
I get that this is a silly issue that only a subset of Americans actually care about, but if you think that Google is doing this for any other reason other than that they don’t like how popular iMessage is and want it to end, you’re fooling yourself. Google hopes to eventually make more money when one barrier between an Android and iPhone is removed.
I don’t care as long as the result isn’t less secure or less private than iMessage is now. Google has zero percent of my trust at this point, on the privacy front.
Wrapping an internet messaging service with a text messaging system was probably one of the worst things that Apple did.
When I had switched to Android, I was hoping I'd still be able to use iMessage from my iPad occasionally, But eventually I had to give up because whenever I sent an iMessage from my email, my family would just try responding from there as well, Even when I sent a SMS message afterwards.
I managed to convince my father to download WhatsApp (since he doesn't want to use signal or telegram, and personally, I don't really like signals lack of external features like no smartwatch app or assistant integration. And I don't know why not Telegram), but the only other messaging platform my mom uses is Facebook Messenger so that kind of sucks that it's my only option for communicating outside of SMS. Can't really convince my sister to switch to something else (and she blocked me on discord for whatever reason, probably because she's 16 and going through this huge phase right now and I tend to use my sona for almost all online accounts as opposed to my real name)
My family kept complaining that by using something else beyond SMS, requiring them to check yet another messaging app, I'd be complicating their lives too far. But I'm still continuing because there is absolutely no reason for me and my family to be using SMS anymore, and I personally would like to have things like typing indicators and higher quality media back
On a side note, why is Facebook Messenger so much worse than WhatsApp despite being owned by the same company?
They didn't make WhatsApp, they bought it. And were smart enough to leave it mostly alone. They don't even really need to outright spy on convos, just sucking in all the contacts, building shadow profiles and figuring out relations from who's talking to whom is worth gold.
SMS is the bare minimum. The only reason iPhone supports it is because it was supported before iMessage was a thing. It was also so it could still communicate with "dumb" phones.
SMS is an ancient garbage protocol, what Google is trying to do is get Apple to support SMSs 21st century replacement, RCS
But Apple doesn't want that because RCS support will fix literally every issue iPhone users have texting Android users. Broken group chats, trash quality videos, ultra compressed images, no reactions or stickers, threaded chats etc etc
RCS is too little, too late. Its encryption is problematic, and people currently using it can tell you how inconsistent it is. It's what you get when industry players want to control things.
Why build RCS when everyone could use an existing, extensible protocol like XMPP? Yes, XMPP isn't perfect, but had the RCS consortium started there, then agreed to support specific features, we'd have a much better solution today.
Nobody in EU uses SMS, it stopped being a thing as soon as everyone had phones with internet and you could use better chat apps. So we don't give a crap about iMessage being open or not.
My understanding is that while the US and some others quickly moved to unlimited texting plans, many European countries continued to charge per text so apps like WhatsApp become the defacto replacement
No, even if people didn't use SMS, Apple market share is actually growing and it could lead to iMessage becoming dominant like it is in the US. Even if it won't benefit us much, I'm sure Americans would appreciate the EU caring about it because the US government could never do it.
Google and company can go fuck themselves on this one, and I'm usually the first one to bash on Apple for selling overpriced status symbols.
I'm frankly amazed at how much importance Google gives iMessage, when it's not the number 1 messaging app anywhere in the world. Hell, even if you assume Apple halved its report of monthly active users in Europe, that's 90 million people in Europe. Significant, but less than 25% of the total population of the EU
Outside USA and Canada, you'll be hard pressed to find people who give a damn about iMessage, because most are using a different, cross compatible app anyway, like Whatsapp or Telegram, even across most European countries.
Because those aren't internet messages, RCS is supposed to supersede SMS and MMS, which is how Google whatever (hangouts? talk? messages?) sends messages to iPhone numbers. Meanwhile, apple-apple communication via iMessage is done via internet
Because the standard is mostly controlled by Google and Samsung, Apple's biggest rivals in the mobile space
Because Google has been completely anal about being easily spotted in iPhone conversations for quite a while. It is pretty obvious that this has nothing to do with using better standards. AFAIK, even phones that can use RCS have it turned off by default.
Because anyone with an internet connection already has access to several widely used apps that do much more than RCS does
All I want is to be able to message people using discord through Signal. Or from Messages to Whatsapp. And just be able to send and receive decent quality videos between iMessage and non-imessage users.
It's so annoying having to juggle so many different messaging apps just to talk to people.
Because each platform is for a different use-case. Discord sucks. It's one of the worst UI/UX I've ever seen, and I've been using computers since the late 70's...punched cards are only slightly worse.
As much as I have been on the EU’s side on every case that they’ve had against Apple. This should be a giant red flag that Google is pushing this so hard.