2) This is about cloud gaming, when you're streaming the game from hardware in the cloud, like Xbox Game Pass. Streaming the game from your own hardware isn't as competitive to Apple since it requires you buy a $500 console or gaming PC.
3) The biggest issue was Apple not implementing RCS and defaulting every iOS user to iMessage, which has created a two-tier messaging system, friends getting locked out of chat groups, etc simply because Apple doesn't want to use the standard.
4) "Who cares" is not a valid argument in using your dominance in one market to dominate another, which is textbook anticompetitive behavior. They also do this with AirTags, Airpods, any accessory where the Apple product gets to use integrations with the OS and third-parties are forbidden from doing so.
5) Tapping your phone is more secure because the card number is randomized and single-use, protecting it from replay attacks.
a) Users may reload HNPay balance by credit card, debit, or bank transfer, through in-app browser.
b) Users may use "send money" button to create some special chat message or link, which will be intercepted at server side, to send HNPay balance to a HNPay address/user ID.
c) (Deprecated)The user may scan QR code on a fading sticker at storefront that does the same as above.
d) The user may also use "show QR code" button, have the other user/store machine scan the code, which allows the other user/store computer to do b) with a negative amount for withdrawal.
e) The HNPay balance can be refunded to bank accounts if needed.
I'm sure people here can come up with half a dozen applicable financial regulations, restrictions imposed by banks and payment processors, cybersecurity attack vectors and massive lawsuit potentials for each of above, plus perhaps couples of solvable App Store guideline difficulties across a)-e). I think those would be problems towards realizing Facebook Messenger pay or TwitterPay, not App Store special treatment that only applies to China. Not many of them, if any, use NFC and secure element hardware in iOS devices like the point 5. misleads.
Re: #2 FWIW Shadow PC doesn't require a PC. You get a virtual one for like $20-50 / month depending on the level of virtual PC you'd like.
And Microsoft Cloud Gaming is still in beta. Why would Apple even need to consider supporting it?
That would be true, if Apple couldn't literally write any TOS they want that allows other App stores or billing methods and then add "but you can't include tracking that invades our users privacy or resell their data".
That's just as enforceable on their end, and not anti-competitive, assuming Apple themselves don't launch their own ad platform and tracking...
Who else is going to care about privacy though?
For the payment situation for example, Apple Pay (and Google Pay) use EMV Tokenization so that your actual credit card number is obfuscated:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pay#Technology
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Pay_(payment_method)#Te...
Credit card numbers are used by retailers to data mine their customers:
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
As does Samsung Pay. As could any number of tap to pay providers, if Apple would let them on iOS.
Here’s another example: Facebook knows exactly the 100 people they show my ads but not giving me their full name, relationship status, list of friends, their gender, sexual orientation, etc.
But does Apple have access to things? Or do they (sometimes?) design things so that even they don't have the information?
A lot of the time they do things 'on device'.
My general worry is that the entire discussion is shifting “from what’s good for the customer to this other company cannot do something shady because you protect the customer”.
Does Apple enjoy this gatekeeping practice? Of course they do, but so does Google with Android and they abuse the crap out of it.
Every single group chat that I use on a day-to-day basis has a non iPhone participant. The biggest argument against the way apple treats SMS vs iMessage I see is people feel ostracized for having green bubbles. I just don't understand why this rises to anti-trust.
From the iphone side, there has to be something, because my family keeps 2 group chats. One with android users and one without. Someone when using an iphone is annoying when group texting android users.
Apple supports the video standards that were available via MMS/SMS when iMessage rolled out, the higher res videos only available in the first place because Apple added it via iMessage. The newer 'standard' was a Google dominated way of trying to make inroads on Apple's superior implementation and in most of the world, Messages isn't even the top Messaging app.
Now that Apple has announced support for RCS incoming, even including messaging in the suit doesn't make sense in the slightest.
iMessage replaced iChat, which was an XMPP client. XMPP supported high-res videos in 2011. (I'm pretty sure it supported them in 2004.)
The RCS standard was is just about as old as the iPhone and older than iMessage. Google began supporting and pushing the standard forward in a way that benefits everyone. Apple could have done the same, or made iMessage an open protocal or any of a number of things. Instead Apple has consistently chosen to go the anti-competitive route.
> Apple's superior implementation
It was 'superior' in some ways inferior in other ways, such as communicating with people without an iphone. iMessage isn't particularly better than any other messaging app, but the benefits of user lock-in, and being the default, replaceable sms app. These anti-competitive behaviors do clearly harm users.
> Now that Apple has announced support for RCS incoming
Perhaps once the support actually lands you'll have more of a point. However, I expect half-assed support and the bare minimum given Apple's previous reluctance.
But Apple's customer is also affected, in two ways:
1. I then have to text the person back, asking them to re-send the video using another chat app, or emailing a link, or something like that. That's annoying for the iPhone user.
2. In the other direction, if I didn't know better, and I tried to send a video to the iPhone user, it would end up looking like crap for them. That's not a good experience for the Apple customer.
> The newer 'standard' was a Google dominated way of trying to make inroads...
Not sure why "standard" is in scare quotes; it's an actual standard, whereas iMessage is just some proprietary thing Apple made. And it's not newer: RCS is from 2008, which is older than iMessage, and almost as old as the iPhone itself. Likely work on the standard started before the iPhone's release.
> ... on Apple's superior implementation
This is of course a matter of opinion, but to me, any protocol that is locked down, with the owners refusing to enable interoperability, is by definition inferior, regardless of its other merits.
> Apple has announced support for RCS incoming
And we'll see how that goes. If Apple works with Google to enable full interoperability, including E2EE, I'll be pleased. Anything less, though, and it'll feel like Apple is just doing the bare minimum to try to avoid regulatory action. It also remains to be seen as to how much Google cooperates in the other direction. The RCS E2EE stuff is a proprietary Google extension; hopefully that gets made into a public standard as well.
The bottom line, though, is that Apple doesn't interoperate until they believe that they're going to be legally forced to. At least if they get in ahead of the regulatory action, they can do their implementation more or less on their own terms. It's a smart move, but IMO is also scummy.
The thing that has always baffled me about Apple keeping iMessage iOS-only, and not supporting RCS, is that they've been hurting their own customers with this stance too. Plenty of iPhone users live with a degraded, less-private experience wen communicating with non-iPhone users, or have to remember to use a different chat app when conversing with certain contacts. This makes a lot of Apple's rhetoric (in general, not just regarding messaging) about protecting user privacy feel a bit hollow at times. Clearly their primary motivation for the privacy stance isn't to protect users, it's because they believe it gives them a competitive advantage.
Yes, but my mother, who wants to text a video to her sons to share a moment from her day, is, and Apple prevents her from doing that. There is no way to spin this as anything but Apple being openly user hostile to anyone who wants to communicate with an android user.
("She can just-" No, she cannot "just". My mother is in her 60s, and she shouldn't have to learn a workaround to use a basic feature of her phone that just works on android.)
or so the argument goes
It's pretty awful lol. You can say "it's the carriers" but if you make something that relies on some other people who won't do it right, you haven't made something good, you've made something where you can blame other people for it not being good.
FB Messenger is better and I try to use it over texting whenever I can (in part because I don't need my phone at all to use it)
Since it's a global switch, I've had to turn it off...
Excellent point. This is a large part of why I don't agree with iMessage "exclusion" somehow rising to the level of antitrust.
iMessage doesn't make Android texting worse, it just reveals how bad it already is.
_cloud_ streaming where the game is running a ms/sony owned server is only available in a browser.
i don’t know about the sony side of things, but apple rejected ms’s native cloud streaming app.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/
Luna can only support iOS by using Safari, for example.
As far as I'm concerned Microsoft cloud gaming is like a 1.0 version and works fine on Windows and Android. I had no idea it was a beta product until just now.
Never heard this argument, could you name an example of this? I figured the reason for the ban was that it would sidestep most of the Apple software that comes with an iPhone, which Apple obviously wouldn't want since they would prefer to lock users in.
219.43 million people use smartwatches
If this was such an insignificant niche, Apple Watch wouldn't even exist, would it?
>The global smartwatch adoption rate has reached an impressive 21.7% of the adult population
...
>The adoption rate of smartwatches is expected to continue growing, with industry projections suggesting that it will surpass 25% of the adult population shortly.
I don't believe a fifth or a quarter of the adult population could rationally be called 'niche'.
And you think Apple had no role to play in this by making most of them useless on their devices?
Have you used one? Which one?
The first is their attempt to redefine what the market is in order to declare Apple a "monopoly": they've posited a completely separate market for "performance smartphones", and tried to use total revenue rather than number of units sold in order to push Apple up to having a very high percentage of this invented market.
The second is their characterization of how Apple got to where they are. Like them or not, you have to be seriously down a conspiracy rabbit hole to believe that the iPhone became as popular as it is primarily through anticompetitive tactics, rather than because it's a very good product that lots and lots of people like. Regardless of whether you, personally, find that value proposition to be compelling.
They also point at some of Apple's offerings and make absolutely absurd claims about how they're anticompetitive—for instance, that they're going to somehow take over the auto market with CarPlay 2.0 and the fact that AppleTV+ exercises control over the content it serves.
There are some things Apple does that are genuinely concerning and deserve more antitrust scrutiny (for instance, their anti-steering provisions for the App Store are pretty egregious), but so far as I can tell, they're not even mentioned in this suit. I'm frankly disappointed in the DoJ for how they've put this together, and would have loved to see something that was narrower and much more robust.
This comes across as very strange, they must not have much confidence in their ability to prove that Apple holds monopoly power in the overall smartphone market. I suspect if they lose this case it's going to be because the court rejects such an intentionally narrowed market definition.
The Justice Department, 16 US states, and the District of Columbia, among others. Anti-trust violations are crimes.
Of all the points in your low-effort manifesto I find this the most absurd. Even if you don't see any merit in the case, you must admit that it's likely that the DoJ does.
2. I was able to use PS Remote Play on my iPhone even many years ago (pre-COVID). A quick google search shows that Steam Link and Shadow PC (my ATF) are also available on iOS. I'm on Apple's side here too
3. I think the situation has recently changed here as someone else has commented, so this feels solvable without a lawsuit. Also it's hard to single out Apple here when everyone out there has their own messaging platforms. It's not like WhatsApp is encouraging third-party clients. An argument can be made that iMessage blurs the line between what's Apple-provided vs. carrier-provided, so I can see the user confusion and the issues that come with it. I'm on the FTC's side here
4. Who cares about smartwatches. It's niche at best. Besides, there are countless other watches you can use and they work with many devices. I'm on Apple's side here
5. It's not like you can't tap your card instead of your phone. I don't think the phone needs to be just a husk with apps created by third parties, especially for things like wallets. I'm happy to trade away that freedom for increased security, Benjamin Franklin's quote notwithstanding. The payments ecosystem is made up of players charging fees from the next player down the chain, so also hard to single out Apple here, but I can see why there's need for increased transparency (I wasn't explicitly aware they charged any fees, even if I would probably guess they were if prompted). I'm on neither side here.
So based on my biases and incomplete understanding of the facts, Apple wins 3-1
It's worth remembering that this administration is suing seemingly everyone in Tech, in what I can only assume is being done in the hopes they can make a name for themselves. Lena Khan literally said "you miss all the shots you don't take".
I would prefer a more focused approach with higher signal to noise ratio.