I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage, giving the impression that Apple phones were high technology, and interacting with peasant androids is what made group chats fragment and pictures and videos look like trash.
Few things are more enraging than people being left out of chats with friends and family because they didn't bend over for Apple. Even worse being a teenager and having to endure social shaming for it. It wasn't until the EU signaled it was going to bring down then axe that Apple capitulated to RCS.
- Yes, I know you are part of the domestic US long tail that use signal/telegram with all your friends.
- Yes, I know no one outside the US uses iMessage.
ETA: A note because people are pretty incredulous about "most evil". Tech companies do a lot of evil stuff, no doubt.
But there is something special about putting social connection behind an expensive hardware purchase and walled garden lock in. Every other messaging app I know of is open to anyone on most platforms for little or no cost. Apple on the other hand purposely leveraged social connections in your life to force you into their garden and keep you there. Lets not pretend that Apple couldn't open up iMessage or even charge a nominal fee for outsiders. Instead you get an iphone and just seemlessly slide into iMessage. So seemless that most users don't even know that it is a separate service than sms/mms/rcs. Apple muddies that too.
But they would never do that, because using people's closest social connections to force them into the ecosystem and lock them there is just too juicy. "Oh you don't want an iPhone anymore? Well looks like you have to leave your social circles main discussion hub to do so..."
> For example, when a user purchases an iPhone, the user is steered to use Apple’s default email product, Apple Mail. It is only through a complex labyrinth of settings that a user can change her default email application away from the Apple “Mail” application towards an alternative like Gmail (Google) or Proton Mail.
> At least for mail a user can in theory modify the default setting. On the calendar
front the situation is even worse. A user’s default calendar is Apple Calendar, and the default cannot be modified
That's pretty evil & predatory to me. The fact that it is by design (someone decided it needed to this awful) is why Apple is being evil here. And this is just one example.
There's more
> For example, Apple banned apps from its App Store that
supported Google Voice because Apple sought to advantage its own services over Google’s
That's not what the parent is asking. The OP said it was the most evil ever done.
Big Tech does predatory and evil stuff all the time. That's not what's being claimed. The OP is claiming that this specific thing is the worst, the singular event that is above and beyond all others.
Except that those claims feel like intentional exaggerations and not meaningfully true?
I use both iOS and Android.
> It is only through a complex labyrinth of settings
I have no love for the way iOS settings are done, but calling the setting for this in particular a complex labyrinth is some pretty blatant editorializing.
> A user’s default calendar is Apple Calendar, and the default cannot be modified
I don't think this is a true statement? My default calendar is a Google calendar. Actually switching to instead use my Apple iCloud calendar has been something of a chore.
The "complex labyrinth" is only reinforcing the impression that you and the author of that brief are both cranks. "Email" is the top setting under "Default Apps". My iPhone doesn't even offer Apple's Mail app in that screen, probably because I deleted it, which also was not labyrinthine but actually quite trivial.
Easy if you know where to look. If you end up in the wrong sub menu you might simply search the web for instructions.
Apple provides web pages where they explain how to use the iphone. There is a section called "mail" under "apps" that shows up in the search results. It really wants me to read the help in dutch, the "apps > mail" section has 14 pages that don't talk about changing the default app, in stead they explain how to use the various features of their own mail app (that is also configured by default)
I don't get why the help pages need a different menu structure.
One has to go to "personalize your iphone" which has 18 pages, changing default apps is towards the end.
Searching the Dutch help website for "mail" I get only 3 unhelpful search results. If i change it to US English it immediately redirects to Dutch again. lol?
Using the "English" for Latin America and the Caribbean works. There I get 5 pages worth of results. Changing the default app is on page 3.
Not impossible but it is not a simple prompt on launch of the app "Banana mail is not currently your default email client. Do you want to set Banana mail as your default app for sending email?"
I'm quite dense of course, if they are going to be like that I will NEVER create an email client for this platform.
The web and their TOS is full of good reasons to never create an app for iphone.
In a laps of sanity I created a pwa one time. I've explained to exactly one user how to add the option to add a web app to the home screen to the menu so that they can add a web app to the home screen. It was a really hard sell and it took a long time.
I of course had to laugh at myself for acting against my better judgement.
Imagine someone made a web app email client and tried to compete with the build in client. Then in the middle of the struggle apple jokes about discontinuing PWA.
> Easy if you know where to look. If you end up in the wrong sub menu you might simply search the web for instructions.
Actually, at the very top of the home page of the settings app is a search bar. If you type in anything reasonable (default, email, mail) then one of the first 2-3 results will be “default apps” or “default email”.
Maybe 8/10 people in your family circle would benefit from reading the published user guide for their device. That doesn't take technological proficiency, just reading.
> Not impossible but it is not a simple prompt on launch of the app "Banana mail is not currently your default email client. Do you want to set Banana mail as your default app for sending email?"
This is what happens when you install Gmail, for example. You're both under and over-thinking this.
I'm just baffled how if we look at Microsoft or Google everyone agrees that the tyranny of the default is a problem. Then it comes to Apple and we get statements like "no, I love that I have no choice." It's frustrating.
I mean, does Settings > Apps > Gmail (or whichever other app) > Default Mail App really qualify as “a complex labyrinth”? Sure, it’d be a good thing to add a “Default Apps” section under Settings > General or something, but calling the current route complex almost sounds like an insult to users.
EDIT: Actually, there already is a “Default Apps” section right at the top of the page of Settings > Apps. Yeah, if that’s a “labyrinth” then the assumed level of user intelligence is quite low.
I didn't even know you could change the default mail app on iOS and I’ve used it for the better part of a decade now, as a Proton user too. I’ve endured the frustration because I thought it was fixed. Either being allowed to change it is relatively new, region locked, or yeah it’s a labyrinth.
It’s not region locked, and as the sibling post notes it’s been there for a while. I’m not sure how much more simple it can be made (open Settings, tap Apps, and there it is at the top of the page).
I suppose it could be possible for apps to prompt the user to change the default, but I’m honestly pretty sick of that behavior on desktop (e.g. I have several browsers installed for various reasons and they nearly all bug me about being default) and would rather not see it copied to mobile OSes too (I don’t believe Android allows apps to show such a prompt either).
You may as well ask why you should look anywhere but at your own feet while walking around your city.
You have been told that every new OS update brings new features and abilities, and Apple publishes an iPhone User Guide for learning about iOS features like how to change the default mail app (https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/change-the-default-ap...). It's on you to look.
I've probably used Apple Mail and/or Apple Calendar at some point in my ownership of Apple products but they're both using Google products at the moment on my phone and I have no recollection of setting those up as being complex through a variety of hardware transitions.
It’s also probably worth noting that most of the stock iOS apps are the most service-provider-agnostic in the industry. Mail and Notes work on bog standard IMAP, and Calendar and Contacts are built on CalDAV and CardDAV, respectively. Google services work fine in all of them (though could be better if it weren’t for Google’s crappy IMAP implementation). The only case where they don’t work is with non-standard providers like Proton.
Go try to sign into your open-standards-abiding calendar and notes accounts in the Calendar and Contacts bundled with nearly every Android phone on the planet and see how well that goes.
No, I don't think it's an understatement at all....
In the difficulty of non-iMessage compatibility, I have had people close to me say "Why don't you just get an iPhone?" with an incredulous tone.
Perhaps tech companies have had more evil things happen on their platforms, that for whatever reason they were slow to react to.
But
"Why don't you just get an iPhone" was a precisely and meticulously engineered line, pure social manipulation, that was intentionally orchestrated to be delivered to me through the mouths of the people I trust most in my life turned unknowing pawns.
That is why I consider it the most evil. Apple is by design purposely exploiting a core human function, close social circle communication, to trap people in their garden.
> No, I don't think it's an understatement at all....
It's interesting how this seems like an incredibly American problem. In Europe everyone either uses WhatsApp or Signal and iMessage is hardly ever used.
I am plugged into the Apple ecosystem daily and shamelessly and yeah I think it’s arguably accurate. What makes it so sinister is how benign it seems yet how devastating the consequences have been.
I think gp's statement is a pretty accurate, Apple's behavior was intentional, they know it ends up creating artificial social pressure and bullying. Most appalling and disgusting.
> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage
Is that really the worst thing you've seen big-tech do? That's very fortunate.
What about Blackberry Messenger which was the mobile instant-messaging golden standard for years and BB exclusive for as long as it mattered in the market? Was that too long ago to remember?
Actually, iMessage happily harms apple customers all the time.
I know many MANY people who have lost chats with their loved ones (especially deceased ones) because there is no way to export and save their conversations.
I think this should be as easy as saving photos, which apple makes (somewhat) easier to export.
Back to email, it is pretty horrible to set up my local email server on an apple device. You have to go through these dialogs, apple servers have to be contacted (for "redirection"), and I usually barely get it working.
The inability to manipulate most objects on iOS in any meaningful way is a big part of what killed it for me. Everything on my network is just an scp away now. No dumb hacks to deal with some retarded Cupertino PM's idea of how computing should work.
No escape hatches turns walled gardens first into a jail and then into a brig on a sinking ship.
> and from what I've seen, often act as if that is some sort of mark of superiority.
Feels like you weren't able to have a proper discussion with those people. In many EU countries, using SMS made/makes no sense because SMS was/is super expensive as compared to WhatsApp. And using iMessage makes no sense because most people don't have an iPhone. From their point of view, it actually makes no sense.
Now if you tell them "well, where I come from everybody has an iPhone" or "SMS have always been free", probably they won't say "still, I'm better than you for no apparent reason".
I don't think that it is actually seen as a mark of superiority anywhere in the EU to use WhatsApp. Unlike apparently in some places it is seen as a mark of superiority to have an iPhone vs an Android phone.
If you go in a EU country where SMS were not prohibitively expensive in the beginning of WhatsApp (e.g. France), you'll see that WhatsApp has been less successful (at least in the beginning). WhatsApp was a killer app because it was free SMS, really.
Since when can WhatsApp interact with SMS users? They're so evil and predatory that they have entirely walled themselves off from that method of communication entirely.
WhatsApp gained popularity in Europe when non-early adopters started switching to smartphones (2010-2012 ish). The difference was that, in contrast to iMessage, you could install it on pretty much any smartphone. In the pre-Meta days they even supported many then dying ecosystems like Symbian, Nokia S40, etc.
They had a yearly subscription fee, but most people never got the request to pay it.
Nobody cared that it was incompatible with SMS, because everybody hated SMS because of the insane prices. In 2009 I got an iPhone 3G with an unlimited data plan, but I was still paying something like 0.20 or 0.25 Euro per SMS.
I like how they (just like imessage) allow you to message someone who cant possibly read the message because they have no whatsapp. Then again, I think they cant even deliver the message over sms on iphone? SMS is only available in the apple app if you first force it to send SMS?
I don't think most of US in the EU really mind, or even know what messaging app people in America use. The privacy conscious folk around here do tend to prefer Signal over Whatsapp though.
A lot of people, in Austria at least, have moved to signal in my experience. My communities in the US and Austria have trended toward adoption of Signal with very few holdovers between messages and WhatsApp, some partly due to my pressure but overall it’s just getting away from the BS of the alts
> Even worse being a teenager and having to endure social shaming for it. It wasn't until the EU signaled it was going to bring down then axe that Apple capitulated to RCS.
Regardless of the merits of Apple's actions as regards technical interoperability I feel compelled to point out that this in particular is a cultural problem, not technical malfeasance. RCS users still appear as green bubbles and even if the lack of functionality has been remedied the stigma has not. People at my lunch table 20 years ago were drawing artificial distinctions between "MP3s" (portable DAPs) and iPods because the latter were expensive luxury products and the former were not. The same thing is at work here because owning an iPhone is a proxy for one's socioeconomic stratum. I own an iPhone and as soon as an Android user appears in an iMessage group chat some joker immediately makes a green bubble quip - no degraded picture message required.
People that define themselves by conspicuous consumption don't care about interoperability. They care about brand recognition.
But that's what so insidious about it - by also actively degrading the chat experience it makes excluding non-Apple users not merely social signalling but also a rational decision even if you don't care about conspicuous consumption whatsoever.
So pick your poison, either you exclude them because of in-group signalling/conspicious consumption or exclude them because you want non-potato resolution, with Android users getting the blame for Apple's UX. Either way Tim Cook says the solution is to buy an iPhone.
Yes, but this is precisely the point isn't it? It's blatantly enabling and embracing "othering" for no technical reason as an explicit strategy to exploit social pressures to maximize profit.
The most evil thing a tech company has done is make a proprietary messaging app?
Apple didn't make SMS bad, it just was. Apple has since implemented RCS and it hasn't changed how I communicate with people from my iPhone at all.
Google should probably take most of the blame for repeatedly fumbling messaging on non-Apple platforms for the past 2 decades. Every time they had something that was getting any amount of traction it got quickly replaced with some stupid new, worse messaging app so a PO could get a promotion.
I think the point was that if Google weren't so inept, iMessage wouldn't be such a monopoly
And you know, maybe they have a point. I especially think about Microsoft and MSN Messenger/Skype. How do you fumble away not one but two dominant messaging apps?
OP's point is about Apple intentionally fragmenting communication in social groups as an ecosystem play (trickling down to bullying starting in grade school etc) so Google's messaging marketshare would only be relevant if there was some reason to believe it would have cowed Apple into interoperating.
Because there are exactly two players in the game, and we’re in a thread under a whiny hyperbolic diatribe from someone that had the former.
Why didn’t Google deliver an alternative to iMessage? Did they choose not to? Is it actually hard? Are they just too incompetent at making software that isn’t for running infrastructure?
This reads like public affairs copy from Meta/Alphabet/et al looking to distract from the real, measurable harm produced against teens by social media and AI products that are either directly (Instagram) or indirectly (character ai) owned.
Apple does not owe Android users a superior non-Apple experience. Android a pretty damn huge platform, right? Way bigger than Apple, I hear? Blame Google. Google failed to compete.
The evil is (so-called) social media in all of its forms. Human connections of all kinds have been comprehensively distorted and enshitified by unchecked corporate opportunism and manipulation.
I don't really agree with this framing. The fundamental issue is user ignorance, full stop. The fact is that our collective tech education is in a terrible state. Apple exploiting this to sell iPhones is just natural behavior for a profit-driven enterprise.
Instead of shaming Apple (which won't be very effective IMO), we should aim to improve education. Teach users how SMS/MMS/iMessage work. Tell them that they can install universal messaging apps and so on.
Perhaps the fundamental issue is your ignorance? Don't you know that users require tools that just work and that they should not be required to understand all of this technical nuance?
"I don't understand why people complain about that AT&T telephone company monopoly, when they could just write each other letters. When did people forget how to do that?"
Telephone calls allow for near-instantaneous communication using voice while letters can (and could) take days to arrive and rely on writing. There is no comparison with using a computer vs. a cell phone to send messages over the Internet. It's even generally using all the same network protocols.
> "Communicate outside the home" is a pretty vast difference
It's genuinely baffling to me that people actually see things this way. When there is a social reason to be outside the house, I take that as a reason not to be staring at a glowing rectangle.
The world got by just fine when answering machines and paper maps were the norm.
What is silly about going to do an errand without distractions? It's more efficient in my experience. I wont look up stuff in the store or answer texts that in reality can totally wait. I've yet to have something happen where not having my phone lead to me missing some big emergency or event.
Going out into the world is in fact the opposite of abandoning all contact, it's directly interfacing. According to your comment, you equated your world with access to your phone.
The world got along fine (better, probably) without the internet, yet here we all are.
> What is silly about going to do an errand without distractions? It's more efficient in my experience. I wont look up stuff in the store or answer texts that in reality can totally wait. I've yet to have something happen where not having my phone lead to me missing some big emergency or event.
> Going out into the world is in fact the opposite of abandoning all contact, it's directly interfacing. According to your comment, you equated your world with access to your phone.
I have a hard time believing this isn't a disingenuous take just for the sake of arguing. "Hey honey, while you're at the grocery store, could you pick up some milk?" "Hey, I'm finishing up at the doctor, any chance you want to meet for lunch?"
Are we really saying we can't understand the difference between a computer and a cellphone? Are we really unable to imagine any reason why communicating outside the home can be a useful ability? That the ability to do something doesn't mean it is the only way to do something, nor does it mean it has to be done that way at all times in all situations?
google with their android anti-fragmentation-agreement is pretty predatory. basically release any/all android devices with google services and pay us cut or release none and use pure aosp. it is some next level shit.
huh. Isnt that what business deals are supposed to be? Two businesses entering into a business relationship, where both parties get something. OEMs get Google services & operating system, or OEMs are free to use open source project.
Are you saying Google should freely give away their products?
> Isnt that what business deals are supposed to be?
To clarify what exactly that agreement does: it prohibits companies from developing competitors. It is nakedly anti-competitive, and no, business deals are not supposed to be that - there's a large body of law, sadly rarely enforced, saying so. Not every business practice is legal just because the directly involved parties agreed.
nice strawman, first google honeypotted the smartphone-os sector with their AOSP (android opensource project). now when they killed every other option except apple & effectively became a monopoly for all smartphone vendors, they are using their monopoly power to prohibit companies from using aosp piecemeal. they are explicitly telling vendors if you make any device with google services then you cannot make an ungoogled device at-all. this is exact opposite of the open source spirit and highlights that they were never interested in opensource, they were doing pretty much what MS did in 90s, release a bundled shitty version of a popular app with OS so you can kill them and maintain dominant monopoly. they just weaponized oss with AOSP to kill off any contenders.
take a moment to think why amazon has no google services on their table and/or an amazon branded basic android smartphone, it would be super easy for them to do it (leave aside firephone .. for reasons).
How is this not monopoly abuse? if Lina Khan had any balls this is what she would have gone after.
> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage
I think you might be living in a bubble, if this is the "most evil" thing you have heard of a big tech company doing. Go read up on IBM's history, especially in the 30s and 40s. Or a more contemporary example, read up on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Or Amazon's mistreatment of workers in both corporate and warehouse settings. Or Meta scraping data off your devices without permission to train AI.
And, though I know some folks here disagree, plenty of people around the world believe what's happening in Gaza is a genocide, and Big Tech has materially contributed to making it happen. Or, if you want another example of human cost, talk about how resources for electronics are mined, or how electronics are manufactured.
Saying, "the most evil thing big tech has ever done is make some chat bubbles blue" puts a whole lot of human lives below the color of some chat bubbles.
You can think Apple did a really bad thing by doing that, that's fine. No complaints. But to call it the most evil thing ever done erases an incalculable amount of human suffering.
> I think you might be living in a bubble, if this is the "most evil" thing you have heard of a big tech company doing. Go read up on IBM's history, especially in the 30s and 40s. Or a more contemporary example, read up on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Or Amazon's mistreatment of workers in both corporate and warehouse settings. Or Meta scraping data off your devices without permission to train AI.
I wouldn't count the IBM thing because I don't see it as part of the vernacular "big tech" of today; however I do think it's the most evil so far in this thread.
The others? They are mostly aggressive competition, especially the MS stuff, and altogether I don't see them as more evil than Apple's exclusionary UX. What's at the bottom of it for me is that it harms users directly, e.g. what others said about kids getting shamed for having a non-Apple phone. The one thing not mentioned yet that would qualify for me would be Meta's product altogether with its impact on teenagers; and various gambling simulators like Roblox.
Oh, Roblox by far and away is worse than Apple. But also, Facebook is pretty clearly implicated in a genocide in Myanmar. It's difficult for me to put any genocide in a bucket less important than some kids being put into out-groups.
The difference is that those evil things are second order effects. Nobody in the executive suite at FB was saying "Damn, this genocide is super profitable, let's stole the flames".
Nobody at Roblox is saying "We want to have children do nothing else except play Roblox from dawn to dusk, we lobby against schooling and extra-curiculars to increase Roblox time"
Apple however very intentionally made messaging people not on iPhones painful, and purposely made it out like androids were inferior. They purposely make it so you lose your group chats if you leave iPhone.
Thats why it's the most evil. It's a planned system to use peoples social connections as pawns to rope people into Apples ecosystem. This isn't hypothetical, or "C'mon of course they are saying that!". There are court documents that show it.
My example was not that they try to get kids to spend more time on roblox, of course they do, my example was that they want kids to forgo school to spend more time on roblox. Rather than compete with netflix for engagement, compete with teachers and education.
I can assure you, with all my money bet on it, that no one in a roblox exec meeting ever said "We need to focus on lobbying schools to shorten the school day in key markets." No one at roblox is fantasizing about roblox replacing -all- (I mean this literally, not just entertainment time) facets of a child's life with roblox.
Whereas apple explicitly had their goal "Get kids using iphones, don't port imessage to android, families will be forced to buy iphones and stay on iphones to maintain familial communication."
> Apple walling off iMessage, giving the impression that Apple phones were high technology, and interacting with peasant androids is what made group chats fragment and pictures and videos look like trash.
Which lawsuit PDF related specifically to iMessage interacting with Android was mentioned in this comment? I see a comment about RCS.
Now, maybe you are right, maybe I narrowly interpreted RCS in iMessage to mean chat bubbles, and there's a wider interpretation. Even still, there's no possible way that's the singular most evil thing tech has ever done. The OP is free to be anti-Apple, more power to them, but like, let's be real about levels of evil.
> Also, bringing up IBM, Microsoft or Facebook is "whataboutism".
It's absolutely not whataboutism. The claim the OP made was about Big Tech broadly. Bringing in examples of Big Tech doing evil things is a direct and appropriate rebuttable to the argument that Big Tech doesn't do evil things.
Focusing on the "the most" part is extremely petty.
This whole thread is the complete opposite of "thoughtful and substantive" and the "Converse curiously" from HN guidelines and I regret participating on it.
First of all, when Apple created iMessage, there was no possible way for them to predict that friend groups would use it as a reason to treat members of their groups poorly due to using Android phones.
Second of all, Apple did not deliberately make interacting with non-iMessage users in group chats "look like trash" in order to exclude them. Apple went out of its way to make it possible for iMessage to interoperate with the ubiquitous (in the US) SMS, with reduced features because SMS did not support the better features. If, instead, Apple had just made iMessage not interoperate with SMS at all, you'd be screaming about that instead.
Third of all, if people are leaving others out of chats, that's not Apple's fault. That's something for those families and friend groups to work out amongst themselves. "Hey, guys, I don't have an iPhone, and don't really have the money to get one, so maybe we could use GroupMe/GChat/WhatsApp/Signal/IRC/email/smoke signals/meeting in person/any of the myriad other ways of communicating instead?" A) "Oh, sure, that shouldn't be a problem!" (everything is solved) B) "What? No, we're not going to change anything just because it makes it impossible to actually include you in stuff. That's a you problem!" (turns out, the problem is your friends are assholes)
Apple cannot by any reasonable standard be held to blame for the way bullying, status-seeking teenagers treat each other.
What Apple could have done, for sake of clarity, sanity, and good practice is to handle SMS using one app, and handle iMessage using another, *separate* app.
The problem is not that iMessage exists, it's that it operates in opaque and unpredictable ways, mixing SMS and iMessage (and now RCS) communication in a way where even more tech-savvy users do not understand how it works (first-hand experience - had to explain to someone why their images are super compressed when they send them to me, but OK when they send them to their friend with an iPhone).
And now it's the same with RCS (Android-iOS). I send person A an image, the conversation switches to RCS. They use the "automatic reply" when I call them, conversation switches back to SMS. With person B, the switching between RCS and SMS is even more unpredictable.
> What Apple could have done, for sake of clarity, sanity, and good practice is to handle SMS using one app, and handle iMessage using another, separate app.
>“iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” was Federighi’s concern according to the Epic filing.
Among other statements. Apple was very aware of the social effects of iMessage, and leveraged it to force people into getting iphones.
Tech companies have done lots of evil shit. But never, not once, has one ever crossed the line into turning my friends and family against me (however slightly) because I didn't want to lock myself in Apple's cage, however comfortable it is.
Yeah, you can call my friends and family shitty, but the reality is that the are regular non-tech people, explaining the situation to them is impossible, and iMessage Just Works(TM).
I'm sympathetic to the position that Apple could, if they chose, have made a version of iMessage for Android.
But your position that it is somehow uniquely evil just reads as a coping mechanism—a way of not having to blame your friends and family for being shitty for you.
I know plenty of "regular, non-tech people" who understand perfectly well that a) different computer systems do not work properly together, and b) if you choosing to use a particular computer system excludes someone because they do not have access to it, that's rude, discriminatory, and generally shitty behavior.
SMS not having the same features as iMessage is a technical issue, sure.
Apple not providing iMessage on Android was a business decision, no question.
But people being exclusionary and obnoxious to each other over group chats is a social issue, and should be treated as such, and not blamed on either the technical or business side of things.
Your family being willing to isolate you and leave you out of conversations because it would slightly inconvenience them says more about you and them than it does about Apple. I downloaded WhatsApp to include random neighbors in our neighborhood group chat, and your family who has known your forever won’t do the same? Ever thought about why?
Apple was perfectly right when they did this way back as they were not a dominant platform. Different legal rules applied.
However making an argument that some key aspects of the iPhome were not designed for viral growth is disrespectful to Steve Jobs who, like many of that time, was very familiar with engineering platform growth - probably more and better than most.
> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage
What a ridiculous statement. Even with your edit it's still an utterly stupid conclusion to come to.
Off the top of my head I can think of way worse things tech companies have done. Cambridge Analytica scandal, Gmail scanning, the Google Shopping lawsuit, Amazon's product clone hijack, Facebooks mood manipulation experiment, Ring doorbell viewing, Uber spying, to name just a few FAR worse things tech companies have done.
Few things are more enraging than people being left out of chats with friends and family because they didn't bend over for Apple. Even worse being a teenager and having to endure social shaming for it. It wasn't until the EU signaled it was going to bring down then axe that Apple capitulated to RCS.
- Yes, I know you are part of the domestic US long tail that use signal/telegram with all your friends.
- Yes, I know no one outside the US uses iMessage.
ETA: A note because people are pretty incredulous about "most evil". Tech companies do a lot of evil stuff, no doubt.
But there is something special about putting social connection behind an expensive hardware purchase and walled garden lock in. Every other messaging app I know of is open to anyone on most platforms for little or no cost. Apple on the other hand purposely leveraged social connections in your life to force you into their garden and keep you there. Lets not pretend that Apple couldn't open up iMessage or even charge a nominal fee for outsiders. Instead you get an iphone and just seemlessly slide into iMessage. So seemless that most users don't even know that it is a separate service than sms/mms/rcs. Apple muddies that too.
But they would never do that, because using people's closest social connections to force them into the ecosystem and lock them there is just too juicy. "Oh you don't want an iPhone anymore? Well looks like you have to leave your social circles main discussion hub to do so..."
It's just evil on another level.