Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All they offer is an interest-free installment plan. Which even in Sweden (one of the most expensive countries in Europe) is often as low as a lunch for two: https://www.tre.se/handla/mobiltelefoner/apple/iphone-15 > What's an equivalent iPhone to e.g. a Galaxy A54 (~1 year old, EUR ~300-350)? There might not be, which doesn't make iPhone a "status symbol among the middle class and richest people in the EU". It's l…
Lunch being expensive too in Sweden does not make the iPhone more affordable across Europe. In some European countries an iPhone SE costs a third of the average monthly net salary.
Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation
121–130 of 202 posts
Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation
#122No real surprise about iMessage and Bing. They are not dominant communication methods/search engines at all, at least within my social circles (in Sweden). Some useful info about who the gatekeepers are/which parts of their platforms have been designated at gatekeeping: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en . Includes a nice diagram!
The diagram was helpful. Have you seen anything similar that summarizes what it means for services to be designated this way? As an aside, it strikes me as vaguely protectionist to see that it’s only 6 companies and none of them are European… (maybe that’s a hot take?)
> Examples of the “do’s”: gatekeepers will for example have to:
> - allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services in certain specific situations;
> - allow their business users to access the data that they generate in their use of the gatekeeper’s platform;
> - provide companies advertising on their platform with the tools and information necessary for advertisers and publishers to carry out their own independent verification of their advertisements hosted by the gatekeeper;
> - allow their business users to promote their offer and conclude contracts with their customers outside the gatekeeper’s platform.
>
> Example of the “don'ts”: gatekeepers will for example no longer:
>
> - treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform;
> - prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms;
> - prevent users from un-installing any pre-installed software or app if they wish so;
> - track end users outside of the gatekeepers' core platform service for the purpose of targeted advertising, without effective consent having been granted.
---
> As an aside, it strikes me as vaguely protectionist to see that it’s only 6 companies and none of them are European… (maybe that’s a hot take?)
Simply put, there are no European companies on this level. If you want a phone, you are going to have to choose Android or iOS. To chat with people on your new phone, you will use what your friends & family are on - most often WhatsApp. When you want to search something on the internet, for most people it's going to be the default search engine, so Google Search. And when you want to go on a Social Network, it's going to be... etc, etc. The EU is of course part of the western world and so has not had the same requirements to develop their own companies, or lock American companies out, like China/Russia.
Perhaps the closest that could come to mind could be some messaging apps, e.g. Threema, or perhaps Mastodon as a social network (sure, it's federated, but anyway...). But these don't qualify as they are nowhere near big enough.
Finally, I'm quite optimistic about the DMA; not just for consumers in the EU but also in the US and worldwide. I feel there has been significant consolidation of market power and stagnation/coming stagnation, and competition is often considered the way to break out of this. Perhaps we will see a new generation of companies and ideas and more options for both consumers and small/medium businesses in the future.
Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Apple doesn't have ~300 Euro phones with OLED screens in its offer. Sure they do, the iPhone 12 is still widely available and it’s at least twice as fast as an A54. The prestige argument just hold up when you look at the data unless you scope it to say flagships. Google and Samsung charge just as much, and they have the same decreasingly small prestige that conveys. We’re 15 years into the touchscreen era so you’re…
iPhone 12 costs almost twice as much as Samsung A54.
Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's a historical artifact -- by the time that iMessage launched, the US was well into the phase of free, unlimited texting, so there was no barrier to "just texting". Since there was also no barrier (in terms of costs, subscriptions, or installation friction) to using iMessage, it was a drop-in upgrade of the user experience for SMS. In contrast, I still have to pay a fee to send SMS messages to my European…
> by the time that iMessage launched, the US was well into the phase of free, unlimited texting The iPhone itself launched with unlimited data, but limited text messages. > keep in mind that AT&T's default rate plans for the iPhone don't include unlimited SMS messages: they include 200 messages per month unless you add an extra-SMS plan. Chatting this way can easily rack up your SMS charges if you're not careful. htt…
It wasn’t universal on all wireless plans, for sure, but by 2011, in the U.S., it was definitely more common that at least for smartphone plans, which were starting to shift into charging for amounts of data usage rather than blanket “unlimited” buckets and were also starting to charge extra fees for tethering (this is also the time that LTE became real and usable in the U.S.), you’d get unlimited or seemingly nearly unlimited messaging plans as part of the fee.
Carriers had been offering large or unlimited text plans for years at this point — my SideKick in high school had unlimited texting as part of the $20 a month fee that T-Mobile charged on top of the minutes plan to operate the software. BlackBerry took advantage of this too with its BIS plans on carriers and the “free texting” lure of BlackBerry via BBM and SMS was a big selling point of those devices for sure.
But the key here is “for smartphone plans.” You still had a lot of non-smartphone users in 2011 and so part of the pitch to get them to spend $500 on a phone that would require a $50 a month plan was unlimited texts. iMessage was a nice carrot here
What I think iMessage did was not only spur carriers to cut the SMS fees even further (again, for smartphone plans), but it was a great additional reason to get people to adopt smartphones. Because the sort of unspoken rule was that if you had a smartphone in the U.S., you had unlimited texting. Most people in the U.S. don’t text people outside the U.S. so unless you have family or friends in other countries or you do a lot of international business, I think SMS was just sort of an accepted default for a lot of people.
So the timing for iMessage in the U.S. was perfect because it used the same default app everyone used, could work on your Mac or iPad or iPod touch too AND it worked internationally with other iPhones. Plus blue bubbles and the many significant technical and security improvements over the old way. But mostly blue bubbles.
But as the other poster said, the lure of BBM and later WhatsApp in the rest of the world was largely that you could use it internationally for free. And the iPhone didn’t get its strong international adoption until after things like WhatsApp had already landed.
The iPhone’s initial carrier restrictions didn’t start to lift until 2011-ish and 2012 so you had Android growing extremely quickly in Europe and Latin America and Asia, where a thing like WhatsApp (which debuted first on iPhone in 2009, it then came to BlackBerry and then in 2010 Android and Symbian) could grow like a weed and have hundreds of millions of users before most people in the U.S. had even heard of it. (I was on CNN and Fox Business in 2014 explaining what WhatsApp was and why Facebook had just spent $20b on it).
So I think timing on iMessage was perfect for U.S. domination (where iPhone marketshare is over 50% but depending on your demographic/age, is probably even higher) but it might have just missed being the defacto tool in the rest of the world.
Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
>iPhone costs as much as an equivalent Android Only flagships, But decent Androids can be had for much less than an iPhone. Like the Samsung A54 for example. Apple doesn't have ~300 Euro phones with OLED screens in its offer.
> decent Androids can be had for much less than an iPhone The Android ecosystem didn't have a $399 Android device in 2016 that is still getting first party security updates today. The 2016 iPhone SE has worked out to ~$50 per supported year.
They do care about stuff the can actually see, like having big bright high resolution OLLED display, not that dim low-res display on the SE pulled straight out of a 2008 parts bin.
Especially that phones are now the main computing and content consumption platforms for most people. and if you put a 6.2 inch 1000 nits 1080p OLED vs 4.7 inch 720p 400 nits IPS, the difference will be as big as the grand canion and sway purchasing decisions way more than years of SW updates.
Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's a historical artifact -- by the time that iMessage launched, the US was well into the phase of free, unlimited texting, so there was no barrier to "just texting". Since there was also no barrier (in terms of costs, subscriptions, or installation friction) to using iMessage, it was a drop-in upgrade of the user experience for SMS. In contrast, I still have to pay a fee to send SMS messages to my European…
More importantly, most Americas do not text anyone outside of the country, and haven't really ever. So people had no real reason to move off of texting, because it just worked, and Apple's iMessage just looks like texting seamlessly.
Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
>iPhone costs as much as an equivalent Android Only flagships, But decent Androids can be had for much less than an iPhone. Like the Samsung A54 for example. Apple doesn't have ~300 Euro phones with OLED screens in its offer.
> Apple doesn't have ~300 Euro phones with OLED screens in its offer. Sure they do, the iPhone 12 is still widely available and it’s at least twice as fast as an A54. The prestige argument just hold up when you look at the data unless you scope it to say flagships. Google and Samsung charge just as much, and they have the same decreasingly small prestige that conveys. We’re 15 years into the touchscreen era so you’re…
The iPhone 12 doesn't cost 300 Euros, it's 500 Euros and only comes with a dinky 64GB RAM base vs 128GB on the cheaper Samsung.
Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious, in what sense did it come "for free" in the USA?
In the U.S.A., people use iMessage by default, because they use text messaging. People don't use texts in Europe (we use WhatsApp and similar, but WhatsApp by a long margin). The reason people still use texts in the U.S.A. is up for debate, and it's something I've thought about for a long time.
It's like being able to skip over copper and go straight to fiber optics.
Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation
#129The usage of iMessage in Europe is vastly inferior to the usage of it in America. I think that was a reasonable argument from Apple and the European Commission agreed. But the thing is, apple obviously wants for people to use iPhones in Europe and to use their services just like in America. But they are now very much aware that this sort of market dominance won't come for free like it does in the USA.
it's too bad, i was hoping the USA could free ride off European regulation. i would like to see an iMessage app for Android. for me, it's the opposite of the teenager status issues. rather, a lot of older people seem not capable of understanding the difference between iMessage amd SMS - not colorblind, but they seem to not perceive green vs blue bubbles even after it is pointed out. and this has caused me big practic…
Re: Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's a historical artifact -- by the time that iMessage launched, the US was well into the phase of free, unlimited texting, so there was no barrier to "just texting". Since there was also no barrier (in terms of costs, subscriptions, or installation friction) to using iMessage, it was a drop-in upgrade of the user experience for SMS. In contrast, I still have to pay a fee to send SMS messages to my European…
How much does the cheapest mobile plan that offers "free and unlimited" texting cost in the US? Quick look at t-mobile shows $15/month for unlimited texts. So much for "free" :)
Wouldn't 15 be pretty cheap for a phone plan anyway? That's less than Netflix costs now?