That's a pretty defeatist take. What if I want Android because SyncThing works better on it than on iOS? Then I can't have iMessage?

If you told people in 1995 that operating system vendors and service providers would arbitrarily block certain apps to lock you into their ecosystem people wouldn't have believed you.

“DOS ain’t done til Lotus won’t run”

Whether that was ever fully policy at Microsoft, people sure believed it was.

1995 was also around the time MS was pursing its embrace-extend-extinguish strategy to the internet with internet explorer.

> If you told people in 1995

Really? Wasn’t that somewhat common back then?

I want to use adb to communicate with my iPhones. Google is evil using adb as a moat and locking away my access to adb! See how silly that sounds?

It only sounds silly if you have a highly technical background.

What are you trying to say? That iMessage is somehow "required" to interoperate with others because it does not require a highly technical background to use, but adb is exempt? I'm not following your train of thought.

> What if I want Android because SyncThing works better on it than on iOS? Then I can't have iMessage?

Correct. iMessage is an Apple service. If you want to make use of Apple services you should probably use Apple products. \_O_/

One of these is inherent, dictated by technological abilities. The other virtual, made up and kept in place by abusing a monopoly.

What monopoly would that be? Apple quite literally advertises alternatives to its Messages app on the app store landing page.

How many of those alternatives come pre-installed and can't be removed?

How is that even relevant? The stock Messages app doesn't conflict with any of the other messaging apps.

Lawsuits on Microsoft & IE pretty well established that defaults matter for antitrust actions.

One of the remedies was to prompt the user to pick a browser at install time. Apple is literally advertising all of the alternatives in perhaps the most obvious way that they can. There's no trust to bust here.

IE had the majority of the market share on the most popular desktop platform (Windows). Neither Messages nor the iPhone are in that position. Phones are pretty evenly split between Apple and Google in the US (and it's more lopsided in favor of Google elsewhere). Again, by virtue of having competition and having that competition easily accessible there's no monopoly.

There's just a bunch of butthurt Google fanbois who are lamenting the color of… well the color of someone else's text messages on that other person's device. All received messages have a grey background.

For the sake of the argumt, let's say there is no monopoly, but a competitive landscape filled with alternatives and switching costs are zero.

Does that change my point about the difference in those examples?

You can get alternative SMS apps on iOS?

iMessage is just the iOS texting app. When someone says "I'm having trouble getting Stranger Things to play on Netflix" you don't tell them "You should switch to Hulu". Netflix (iMessage / texting apps) has Stranger Things (texting) and Hulu ("alternatives" like Whatsapp et al) do not.

As an Android user, in theory I shouldn't care about iMessage. However, because of the way that iMessage creates schisms, miscommunications, lost communications, broken texting experiences and more between my Android friends and my iPhone friends, I have to. I would like the texting features of these phones to interoperate so we can all text together in peace.

I wrote up a scenario (user story?) that I think helps to explain the problems I think should be solved that seem to fly over so many people's heads, especially when they advocate for over-the-top messaging apps like Whatsapp to solve the problem (particularly in the US context): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38578101