[jonhohle]

Considering both iPhones and Macs represent minority positions in their respective markets in the US, how can iMessage be the most popular chat platform? What’s App handles an order of magnitude more messages per day than iMessage. Telegram handles double. Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and SMS all handle more messages.

What happens when you try to write a client for What’s App? https://austinhuang.me/barinsta.html

[_gabe_]

> Considering both iPhones and Macs represent minority positions in their respective markets in the US

A 54% market share, compared to Google’s 46% market share doesn’t seem like a minority to me. It’s not a large majority, but it’s definitely not a minority market share in the US. And just for context, the Justice department filed an Antitrust suit against Google in 2020 for controlling 80% of the market share in search[1].

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...

[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/the-u-s-dept-of-justice-to-file...

[jonhohle]

I stand corrected. I hadn’t realized iPhones had made that much in roads. iMessage still is dwarfed by several other messaging services.

I find it odd to argue that the 4ᵀᴴ most popular (likely less) messaging platform should be forced to open (primarily due to a huge misunderstanding of what monopolistic and anti-competitive practices actually are).

[rezonant]

Do you have a source that says it's 4th in the US? Because from my research that is not the case by almost any metric. And if you consider "texting" as understood by most consumers (grouping SMS, RCS, and iMessage usage together), it seems to be overwhelmingly dominant in the US.

You might wonder why you'd group those three together without including other messaging apps. There's a few factors:

- Every phone comes with a texting app. It's the one that sends text messages to phone numbers

- Within a user's texting app, the underlying technology chosen by the app (SMS, RCS, iMessage) is mostly transparent and automatic. It is not a conscious choice by the user, nor is it something the texting app goes to pains to ensure you understand. And in Apple's case, it is not an option to choose a technology for a specific conversation, you can only configure the entire app to use one technology versus another.

- End users consider it to be an overall unified platform, despite the technology mess. Consumers say "I'll text you", they don't say I'll SMS you.

[jonhohle]

I don’t have specific metrics for the US, but estimates for What’s App globally are 100B per day, Telegram 16B per day, SMS 23B per day, WeChat 45B per day, and iMessage 8.6B per day. I couldn’t find estimates for Signal, Google Chat, or Facebook Messenger.