re: Marques Brownlee explains the Apple Antitrust lawsuit

quote:

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At the end of the day, I personally, don't see imessage as a monopoly. It's part of the ecosystem within apple's phones. There are clear alternatives out there to an iphone. The consumer has spoken within the US market so it shouldn't be on apple to play nice with opponents.

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If Apple had made iMessage a standalone messaging app, and Apple users chose to use it to message other Apple users, then I would agree that the consumer has spoken.

But that's not how it happened.

Apple piggybacked iMessage on SMS, a universal messaging system which is what consumers really want, and brought those users onto their platform "seamlessly" (which is a nice way to say "underhandedly"). Then when people tried to switch to Android, they weren't receiving their messages because Apple had hijacked their phone numbers (iPhones were still trying to send iMessages to their numbers instead of SMS).

That's fricked up. I don't know if Apple has since fixed that issue, but it's not the only example of Apple doing shady shite to lock in users and make it hard to switch.