I think people use “anticompetitive” as a catch-all for both anticompetitive and competitive practices.
Making your product better than that of the competition, as Apple did with iMessage (moving between-iPhone data traffic out of the, certainly at the time, expensive and limited amount of SMSes included in many phone plans) isn’t anti-competitive. You could even say they built competition for the SMS network, just as WhatsApp did later.
I also don’t see how signaling, in the UI, which messages are subject to different rules would be a anti-competitive.
And yes, that is useful even today. My smartphone subscription has a limit of 200 SMS per month (any following costs about a quarter of a dollar)
There's an "easy" solution for Apple to stop being perceived as uncompetitive: create an Android app, with feature-parity.
If Apple was a small company, no issue; but they are a $3T company, and conscious decisions taken by such behemoths to increase lock-in should be treated differently. They also have >50% of the market, not a minuscule of it.
Of course they won't do it on a virtue, because they know it will lower the friction of switching. Every big company loves walled gardens that maximize the friction of changing; that's why maybe they should get some scrutiny from a regulator.
What Apple did might have just been a well-intentioned engineering hack but it became insidious: giving the minimum compatibility, meaning you can have non-Apple people in the chats (our hands are clean! plus, disincentivizes groups to look for alternative tools), but everyone gets inferior experience (non-Apple folks get less features, Apple folks get the white-text-on-green-bg which is unpleasant to read), and "blaming the victim" starts.
What about the reports of users that were iMessage users, and then decided to switch to Android? And then Apple just does buggy, shitty things to them like sometimes not send SMS messages from iPhones to them. Which causes users to blame Android, for an apple bug? How is that no anti competitive?
If Apple wants imessage to compete with SMS, they could have made one app for SMS, and one app for imessage. But Apple doesn't want to compete with SMS. Apple wants to kill SMS, and be the only game left in town. It's similar to the old tactics that Microsoft used to use. Only difference is Apple has a much better marketing department.
> I also don’t see how signaling, in the UI, which messages are subject to different rules would be a anti-competitive
I think the anti-competitive part is refusing to make iMessage available anywhere other than on apple products, even though there are clearly users who would like to use it on other platforms
Deciding not to serve a market isn’t anti-competitive. I also don’t think keeping the protocol closed so that competitors cannot implement it is anti-competitive, but that’s getting borderline for me.
I also think Apple, if they decided to provide android support, should be allowed make that a paid service. After all, it runs on their back-end. I guess even a reasonable pricing scheme would be met with resistance.
Making your product better than that of the competition, as Apple did with iMessage (moving between-iPhone data traffic out of the, certainly at the time, expensive and limited amount of SMSes included in many phone plans) isn’t anti-competitive. You could even say they built competition for the SMS network, just as WhatsApp did later.
I also don’t see how signaling, in the UI, which messages are subject to different rules would be a anti-competitive.
And yes, that is useful even today. My smartphone subscription has a limit of 200 SMS per month (any following costs about a quarter of a dollar)