EU tells Apple to open everything up to its rivals

Of all the major and minor players in this space, Apple has by far taken the most user-centric, privacy-first, security-centric stance. And they have done so over and over and over again.

Have they been perfect? Of course not. But every instance where they've lapsed, they've made geniune efforts to improve the situation. Are there ways they can still improve? Of course. But the direction has been clear and unambiguous. And as a result, they've earned my trust. This, in an environment where quite literally everyone else has repeatedly proven themselves untrustworthy.

In general; let's take that whole monopoly thing serious again, together with regulatory capture.

I'm no free market liberal, quite the contrary. But competition is *good* and we should have more competition between these huge companies that basically make a living from extracting rent.

Now the consumer can chose between more competitors.

> The fact that Apple purposefully not only gives Android users a shitty experience when communicating with iOS users

You mean utilizing the standardized SMS and MMS protocols? How is that purposeful? Just because they refuse to rollout iMessage on Android?

> but also ensures that the presence of an Android user can break the experience for everyone else in a group chat (e.g. degraded videos now for everyone) in iMessage

Again, they switch to SMS/MMS to be compatible with Android devices. Video quality (and photo quality for the master) can only be as good as the limitations of MMS.

Contrary to what Google implies, Apple isn’t doing something on purpose to make videos shitty, the MMS protocol simply can’t handle original quality photos.

> is a blatant attempt to abuse their monopoly power (in the US at least where iMessage dominates)

No, a blatant attempt at abusing a monopoly power would be them saying they drop support for SMS and MMS so you can’t text to Android users anymore because people keep repeating nonsense talking points fed by Google so they’d rather just not deal with the headache.

> Apple doesn't even need to make an Android version of iMessage, they just need to support RCS instead of SMS/MMS: https://www.android.com/get-the-message/

There is no “RCS”, not as a working standard anyways.

The BS Google is peddling is their proprietary flavor of RCS that runs on their Jibe servers, Google’s own attempt at iMessage if you will.

Google wants Apple to adopt “G iMessage” or at the very least hook Apple’s iMessage into Google’s proprietary “RCS” implementation, presumably in part to get a whiff of all the data that would be routed through their servers.

We know this based on slew of things:

1. Half of the features listed on that propaganda website aren’t part of the RCS “standard”, they are however part of Google’s proprietary RCS implementation. So it stands to reason that Google is talking about their proprietary RCS solution

2. Google is using “RCS” as a brand name, when they talk about “RCS” they talk about their proprietary flavor of RCS, similar to how Apple uses the brand “iMessage”[0]

3. Pretty much all of the “RCS” out in the world is Google’s proprietary RCS implementation that runs on Jobe servers. The original RCS standard was conceived by the GSMA (its full members being carriers) intended to be implemented at the carrier level. Carriers however had no appetite of implementing it so now what passes as “RCS” is almost exclusively run by Google. This is either done via the Google branded Messaging app or with a white label construction bearing the logo of carriers and manufacturers via either a direct relationship with Jibe or one of the middlemen[1] that sell Jibe’s services. This means that globally, whether offered by an OEM or carrier, close to all “RCS” offered is just Google’s proprietary implementation of RCS.

The only thing stopping Google from having a true monopoly on texting services is the fact that Apple refuses to run the iMessage network through Google’s Jibe service.

If what is being touted as RCS would’ve been a true standard like SMS or MMS then I could see Apple adopting it as a fallback option like they already do with SMS and MMS, but since the handful of specs that are cobbled together as a “standard” are hardly any better than those two ancient standards and since what Google is pushing for is essentially Apple adopting Google’s own iMessage, I don’t see it ever happening.

0: https://www.phonearena.com/news/google-drops-chat-for-rcs_id...

1: https://jibe.google.com/partners/messaging-partners/

Of course it won't, because Apple restricts it to run only on devices built by Apple.

They had a Safari for Windows many years ago, then killed it.