The Great iMessage Debacle (Premium)

For the most part, moving between smartphone platforms is a straightforward enough process that I can do so several times each year as needed. But there are some problems that I run into all the time. And the worst of them, by far, is Apple's fault.

I am referring, of course, to iMessage, a proprietary Apple messaging service and alternative to SMS/MMS text messaging. In the Apple world, iMessage is viewed as a key advantage of the company's walled garden approach, thanks to its integration across the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac. ("I can send and receive messages on my iPad!") But to the outside world, iMessage is viewed as a key example of the lock-in that occurs in that walled garden because Apple refuses to let it interoperate with SMS/MMS and the Rich Communication Service (RCS), the modern standard for messaging that's used by Google, Samsung, and the Android world.

Yes, Apple just revealed that it would finally support RCS on the iPhone, 7 long years after Google adopted it on Android. But not really, right? Apple will treat RCS the same way it treats SMS/MMS in its Messages app, as a green-bubbled second-class citizen. So this "support" is nice, but it will do nothing to eliminate the blue/green bubble divide, a psychological "us vs. them" tactic that Apple uses on its customer base to keep them in line: Blue message bubbles indicate iMessage and are "good" because they are Apple-based, and green message bubbles are from peasants who haven't yet seen the way. You're encouraged to bully them into switching to the iPhone, basically.

To me, this green/blue bubble thing is nonsense: As noted, I use the iPhone a lot and I have never once noticed or cared what color the messaging bubbles are when I'm texting. But this is also a real problem and one I've experienced first-hand: Both of our kids have nagged my wife to switch to an iPhone so she can be part of the superior blue bubble world. To her credit, she remains unimpressed with their arguments.

But this is also not the iMessage problem of which I speak, it's just the backdrop for the increasingly strident calls for Apple to be forced to open up this service. As it turns out, iMessage is just one of probably hundreds of micro-strategies that Apple employs to protect and extend its dominance, and when you view it that way, which is the correct way, then you can understand what's happening in context and compare this behavior to that of, say, Microsoft, a convicted monopolist, or any of the gatekeeper products and services designated by the EU under the DMA: Big Tech forces or coerces their customers who are using a dominant product or service, in this case the iPhone, to use its other products and services. And in doing so, it keeps them on the dominant platform and can artificially---and, as it turns out, illegally---tilt the balance for its other products or services, many of which would never succeed on their own without that leverage. This is Antitrust 101.

Tod...