[mrweasel]

This comes up everything the EU/Europe and Apple comes up: iMessage is hugely popular, it is just not the most popular (or even third or second) messaging platform. Also the largest is Facebook Messenge, and in the top five is another Meta product, WhatsApp. So it's not like it's all Signal, Viper or Telegram, it's mostly platforms from another US tech giant.

[addicted]

iMessage is “hugely popular” only because it essentially replaces SMS. No one actually goes out of their way to communicate through iMessage.

WhatsApp, OTOH, is huge, and that’s an app that’s not installed by default and automatically consists of your entire address book as contacts but instead you have to go ahead and download it and explicitly add contacts to it, and yet it’s almost certainly bigger than imesssage outside the U.S. and is growing rapidly within the U.S.

[inkyoto]

> WhatsApp, OTOH, is huge, and that’s an app that’s not installed by default and automatically consists of your entire address book as contacts but instead you have to go ahead and download it and explicitly add contacts to it […]

… which has become a privacy issue now. If WhatsApp has been granted full access to the contact list, the contacts are passed onto Meta that uses numbers to track users, build out shadow profiles and whatever else they are not telling us about. It can be easily seen, e.g. if you add a new phone number that trickles through into WhatsApp, and if that new person happens to have an Instagram account, their Instagram profile will appear in the Instagram suggestions feed pretty much the next moment.

Meta has been agressively pushy in recent years with its attempt to monetise WhatsApp where they can't glean into the actual messages due to them being encrypted (unlike in Facebook Messenger). So they use the metadata and contacts (phone numbers, email, physical addresses etc) that Meta sells to third-parties, data brokers and businesses including. Messages on WhatsApp from South African, or Malaysian, or similarly remote locations offering jobs (!) or business opportunities are now a fairly regular occurence.

Considering the scale, the reach and popularity, the best option for WhatsApp would be to divest it from Meta (not that they would agree to it), however, the cost of running the platform, plus overall maintenance and feature development would be a substantial expenditure that has to be somehow funded since WhatsApp users will never agree to pay for WhatsApp, and many (who comprise a substantial to very large cohort) will not be able to afford paying for it.

[seec]

But any other app that would get big enough would end up just like that. All those behaviors are just what happens when power gets concentrated (in a single company/group/hand, whatever the case may be).

So, what is actually needed is an interoperable standard so that people have choices to go and leave as they please depending on the behavior of the developers/companies.

Which is exactly what is being done, so that's convenient.

Now I wish we could legislate a way to make a new standard for email and allow people to run it from their home (just like personal mailbox) to remove that power from big tech. The technical solution is probably not that hard but getting adoption without some sort of leverage is almost impossible...

[wiseowise]

I’ve never heard anyone using iMessage in NL. most use WhatsApp, Telegram and some Signal.

[mrweasel]

It's the same in Germany and France I think, but then you have Denmark where iMessage is like huge. The point is that the EU isn't particularly homogeneous in terms of messaging platforms. The only thing that is true across the EU is that Facebook/Meta is in control of most of messaging.

[bee_rider]

In the US, the regular message app (which is to say, the one you’d use to send an sms) automatically goes through iMessage if you send from one iPhone to another. The bubble turns blue, but I think most people just think of it as “a text,” generically, other than weirdos who are too into messaging protocols.

[Hamuko]

Is iMessage actually popular or is it just "popular" because it automatically takes over if you try to send an SMS to a person with an iPhone?

[mrweasel]

> takes over if you try to send an SMS to a person with an iPhone?

That's a huge part of it. Finding good stats is hard, but take Denmark and Sweden, it more likely that not that the person you're messaging also have an iPhone. Still most countries, from the statistics I've seem, have around 20 - 33% iMessage usage. Sure some of these people also have Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, but 30% is still a massive number.

The thing Apple has going for it is that people can't switch, or they can, but the alternative is SMS. Some seem to think that if iMessage goes away, people will just switch to WhatsApp or Signal. NO, they'll fallback to SMS/MMS.

[microtonal]

I have lived in Germany and The Netherlands. Not having iMessage would be a mild inconvenience. Not having WhatsApp would be social suicide. Everything, from sports to kids school stuff is arranged through WhatsApp.

I know many iPhone users here who don’t even use iMessage. It’s activated, so it would show in the stats, but they’ll message everyone through WhatsApp.

[Kwpolska]

> Some seem to think that if iMessage goes away, people will just switch to WhatsApp or Signal. NO, they'll fallback to SMS/MMS.

In the US? Maybe. In Europe, where many people have Android phones and iPhone users need WhatsApp/Messenger anyway? I doubt it.

[Scrapemist]

Switching is easy

[mrweasel]

Hard, the only platform I could realistically get more than 50% of friends and family on is Facebook, but I don't have Facebook.

Switching is super hard when your primary platform just fallback to SMS.

[Cthulhu_]

Switching yourself is easy, but you can't expect everyone you interact with to switch too when they don't have a reason for it (and they have the same problem of getting all of their contacts to switch).

If there's interop between the chat applications - and be honest, do any of them have a unique selling point that makes them significantly better to the average user? - then that restriction is lifted.

It improves competition, which is healthy in a free economy (something corporate liberals really push for), forcing the chat apps to innovate instead of benefit off of critical mass / first mover advantage.

[ben_w]

> Switching yourself is easy, but you can't expect everyone you interact with to switch too when they don't have a reason for it (and they have the same problem of getting all of their contacts to switch).

Sure, but "the old one is no longer available" is absolutely going to get everyone to switch in the approximately 60 seconds it takes to go from the notification to having a new account.

I mean, Google basically does this every time they change the default Android messaging app (though in fairness they do get a huge advantage of already knowing all your contacts): https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...

[kalleboo]

It's easier on Android where anyone can "become" the SMS app and integrate all your chats in one place. Apple does not allow that, so you're always going to end up going back to iMessage with some people if you just know their phone number and try to send an SMS.

[ben_w]

For now, but that doesn't apply in the hypothetical where Apple is told "change your behaviour or stop operating in the EU", no matter which option they pick.

[servus45678981]

Maybe you haven‘t heard about threema?