[paulryanrogers]

Making Messages+iMessage the default on their platform whilst also prohibiting competitor apps to serve as the SMS/MMS/RCS client feels like anti-trust to me. Especially as their market share among some demographics approaches 90%.

[mikhailt]

> Making Messages+iMessage the default on their platform whilst also prohibiting competitor apps to serve as the SMS/MMS/RCS client feels like anti-trust to me. Especially as their market share among some demographics approaches 90%.

I agree with that part, no company should be allowed to set defaults without the ability to change the defaults.

That's not related to SMS though, that's a much larger problem that Apple (and MS) should be forced to change. I also think platform vendors should not be allowed to spam users about the said defaults either like how MS is forcing users to go through ads and so on whenever they search for Chrome to install and change to it as default.

[temp0826]

Maybe I just don't understand (maybe it's purely about principles?) but I really can't understand the desire for a separate app for sms, without imessage. Maybe for sms+potentially with other integrations?

[paulryanrogers]

There is a world of possibilities. Signal's optimistic encryption over SMS was one nice enhancement, at least before they dropped SMS support.

[no_wizard]

Which demographics do they have 90% market share?

[Mountain_Skies]

Teenagers in the US are close to 90% Apple. While that doesn't mean they all must use iMessage but it comes bundled with their phone and is what the vast majority of fellow teens have access to so it naturally becomes what they use.

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/10/10/iphone-teen-survey-2023...

Intentional or not, Apple gets to ride off of the natural inclination of teens to conform to their peer group.

[mikhailt]

That's true for any default apps on any platforms though.

It's why Google pay Apple tens of billions of dollars per year to be the default search engine.

That's why there needs to be regulations that default apps must be optional and must be permitted to switch to any apps for open standards that are available.

Apple should not get to pick which services I want to use, that's my choice on a device that I own. If I want to use Google Messages as the default SMS/RCS client, that should be permitted and without any pushback from the platform vendors.