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Apple’s iMessage may come pre-installed on every iPhone it sells, but this week’s news confirmed that it’s now completely irrelevant unless you live in the United States.
Apple iMessage—Is it just for Americans now?
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If iMessage is your main go-to messenger, I know two things about you. First, you have an iPhone. Apple won’t let anyone who doesn’t have an iPhone comfortably play iMessage. And secondly, you’re probably in North America. Because the rest of us mainly use WhatsApp. iMessage is considered SMS texting, but people don’t do that anymore.
This is not news. It is well documented that iMessage has become a Gen Z phenomenon in the United States. It is where the battle between blue and green bubbles has been fought, and social distinctions do not resonate in other parts of the world. But now, two unrelated news events have suddenly reinforced the realism of iMessage’s maps.
First, we asked US FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr to send a new message calling for the FCC to investigate Apple over last year’s controversial Beeper Mini debacle. Apple stopped startups from taking over the blue bubble of his Android users.
“While Apple’s broad exclusionary practices warrant scrutiny by antitrust and competition authorities, the FCC must examine this particular incident in light of the Part 14 rules regarding accessibility, usability, and compatibility,” Kerr said. “There is,” he warned. Rule 14, perhaps an unexpected twist in this rollercoaster saga, protects access to advanced communications for people with disabilities.
I have reached out to Apple for comment on Carr’s statement.
Second, just one day later, the opposite happened. The European Union has, unsurprisingly, confirmed that iMessage is not a European “gateway” technology as defined in the Digital Markets Act. Not surprisingly, iMessage isn’t as widely used in Europe. iMessage doesn’t need to be opened up to competitors, the walled garden will remain.
Apple reluctantly switched to bringing RCS to the iPhone later this year. However, this runs in parallel with iMessage, so it improves the green bubbles, but doesn’t make them any less green.
The contrast between these two news events within 24 hours could not be more stark. US regulators are furious that Apple is blocking software that allows Android users to play inside the walled garden of iMessage. Meanwhile, Europe, like other countries, is rejecting the opportunity to use new legislation to mandate just that.
“Why did they go through so much effort to pass a law that applied to just a handful of companies, but let the biggest companies get away with it?” Beeper’s Eric Migi Kofsky lamented:
However, even though iMessage is often quoted as having over 1 billion users, it’s important to remember that it is the world’s stock messenger. every iPhone. The app stores all your SMS information, including one-time passcodes, spam, and the occasional text from an elderly relative who hasn’t signed up for WhatsApp yet.
Compare this with WhatsApp’s own news from a week ago. The Meta-owned platform has confirmed that it will open itself up to other messaging platforms according to DMA rules and explains how it will work.
So why did this happen? Simply put, it’s a network effect. In the United States, the iPhone is overwhelmingly popular, especially among young people. So it’s no problem if iMessage doesn’t work well on his Android phone. And to be honest, the blue bubbles and green bubbles are kind of cool.
But without a high level of iPhone adoption, iMessage wouldn’t be able to thrive among groups of friends, family, and colleagues. Apple’s girlfriend iMessage approach, which drops you into a green bubble if even one of your girlfriends in your group uses her Android device, doesn’t make sense in a market that isn’t dominated by iPhones. That’s too big of a compromise.
It’s the same network effects elsewhere that have made WhatsApp the world’s most popular messenger. With nearly 3 billion users worldwide sending 100 billion messages every day, everything, including SMS messaging, seems dwarfed. It’s seamless cross-platform, so the usual combinations of iPhone and Android will work. This is especially true in markets in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America, where cheap Chinese phones have a strong foothold. This is not the same in North America.
Which brings us to the real development of all this. WhatsApp is on a mission to accelerate growth in the United States, the last major market standing out from its global dominance, other than China, which has understandably banned WhatsApp.
WhatsApp seems to realize that its messaging hub could be its next big thing. Apple even mentioned the wide choice of platforms and ease of switching in a statement after the DMA decision. DMA. iMessage is a great service that Apple users love because it provides an easy way to communicate with friends and family while offering industry-leading privacy and security protections. Today’s consumers have access to a variety of messaging apps and often use many messaging apps at once, reflecting how easy it is to switch between them. ”
So for hyperscale WhatsApp, this is an opportunity to offer a one-stop shop. As well as end-to-end encryption, we are reinforcing our role as a pioneer.
But as always, when bureaucrats try to influence technology, the laws of unintended consequences kick in. While it does provide an opportunity for users on smaller platforms to send messages to contacts on larger platforms, it’s hard to think of this as anything other than an opportunity for those larger opportunities. To attract users.
But the final twist in all this is that WhatsApp’s response to Europe’s DMA must be seen against the backdrop of America’s obsession with growth. This is his Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal agenda, and the enemy in front of him is his iMessage.
So while Apple continues to build on the iPhone’s dominance by signing up younger users for lifetime access to iCloud services, storage and entertainment, Meta is eyeing messaging integration as an opportunity to unseat rivals in the US. is paying attention to. And that will be helped by the fact that despite Apple’s dominance, the most popular messaging platform in the US is Facebook Messenger, not iMessage. This suggests a potential pincer attack that expands Meta’s message at Apple’s expense.
“Meta wants this to work, feels the momentum and is working hard to capitalize on it,” Alex Kantrowitz wrote about the US move in his technology newsletter. Ta. World wide. That possibility is less far-fetched than it was in the recent past. ”
But in a world where iMessage’s future depends heavily on American iPhone users, this would represent a very serious setback for Apple.
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