With just days to go before the European Union's Digital Markets Act designates gatekeepers, Apple is allegedly arguing iMessage isn't popular enough to be classified as a gatekeeper service.
tbf, Apple‘s iMessage dominance is mostly a US based phenomenon. In European countries, many people use WhatsApp and telegram. Anecdotal evidence: I don’t know anybody using iMessage.
Same in France. Apple or not, it’s still mostly WhatsApp and a bit of Telegram around me. Only old iPhone users who haven’t installed anything are using iMessage because it’s the default application.
People in each country used whatever everyone else is using. In the US that became text/iMessage. This was partially driven by the way cell companies charged in the US with free texts but limits on data (iMessage uses data, but it came later).
In other countries the better at the time options won out. We talk to our friends in Europe and Africa with WhatsApp.
That’s not quite what I see in France. Many people use Whatsapp to text friends/family when they’re abroad. But everyday, I mostly see classic SMS texts (or iMessage)
I don’t know anyone in the UK that actually uses it as iMessage and not just as the SMS app.
I think this goes back to the time of 3G pay monthly SIMs (before the iPhone) that would come with unlimited data, but limited texts. That pushed people to use apps like WhatsApp that basically just allowed unlimited texts.
If what you and others are saying is true, that only a small number use iMessage, then that supports Apple’s claim and there’s no need to open it since not many people use it.
How will it be a good thing for all Apple users since Apple users use iMessage and don’t give a crap about SMS or RCS?
Maybe it it was someone else besides google pushing RCS it might have a better adoption rate. But by this time next year google will have moved to another message app.
They turn off iMessage in Europe. Or have argue it’s ability to fall back to SMS meets this. Or the industry invents a protocol that they all use and iMessage gets a new colored bubble.
I don’t know anyone in the UK that actually uses it as iMessage and not just as the SMS app.
I think this goes back to the time of 3G pay monthly SIMs (before the iPhone) that would come with unlimited data, but limited texts. That pushed people to use apps like WhatsApp that basically just allowed unlimited texts.