One fact that has emerged is that Apple is pushing lock-in as a strategy. So to everyone who has ever felt like they are too "invested" in the ecosystem to leave- that is by design. You are victims.
An example of lock-in is making a conscious decision not to port iMessage to Android, specifically because it would make it easier for iPhone users to move to Android[0].
Making Apple products work well with other Apple products isn't lock-in. Purposefully making Apple products work worse with other systems, phrased within the company as a way to punish users who switch, is the kind of thing we're talking about when we describe lock-in.
Is your argument that Google doesn't try to engage in lock-in? Or is your argument that lock-in is good for users?
Either way, when there are literal emails in the company saying that the reason iMessage isn't on Android is because otherwise it would be too easy for Apple users to switch to Android -- then that's what lock-in is.
I don't get the whataboutism here. It's lock-in. Google is also a crappy company, but that doesn't change anything about what Apple is doing, and it doesn't change anything about the fact that the court case has revealed enough documents to show that lock-in is a deliberate market strategy that Apple undertakes.
Google also acting crappy in a few cases does not mean that the very concept of lock-in is suddenly invalid. People forget that Apple is not the only company being sued for antitrust in regards to their app stores.
I don’t have time right now to expand, but the greater argument is that data portability is a much larger problem. There is nothing nefarious about Microsoft deciding to not support Office on Mac, just like iMessage on Android. It’s a business decision. There are plenty of cross-platform alternatives. If Apple actively blocked messaging apps from exporting their data then we’d have a story.
Absurdly, I've done it multiple times. It runs over SMS, literally any phone that can receive SMS' is already compatible.
I believe many of the messaging apps on Android also support exporting your messages as an archive, but no idea whether iMessage has any support for importing message history.
>Making Apple products work well with other Apple products isn't lock-in.
Cool. iMessage works perfectly well with SMS, which is the only true open messaging standard, and therefore will work with anything else that interoperates with SMS. Job done.
I agree that Apple not bringing iMessage to Android is lock in and very purposeful. But I don't think (at least not initially) it's because it works better than plain old SMS. I think there is quite a bit of social pressure to have "the blue bubble" especially in middle/high school.
Most of the iMessage features, text, video, pictures and "reactions/tap backs" work over SMS. The only real feature missing is delivery and read receipts but most people in my experience have read receipts turned off. Apps also don't work but I've yet to see someone actually use that feature.
> Most of the iMessage features, text, video, pictures and "reactions/tap backs" work over SMS
Other than 'text', none of those things use SMS:
Sending pictures and videos uses MMS, which is one of the most flakiest parts of the old feature-phone ecosystem because it's inextricably tied to the level of support from both the sender's carrier and the receiver's carrier for particular MMS message content - and how carriers love to charge insane $-per-byte for SMS/MMS content. While in the US exchanging video MMS between the 4 (or 3...) major carriers you likely won't experience any problems provided the video is under a few megabytes and using a well-supported codec like H.263/H.264, if you see what it's like for the rest of the world (Europe, India, etc) you'll understand why services like WhatsApp are so popular: because carrier SMS/MMS service is awful... if not obscenely expensive.
The "reactions" thing you mention, to my knowledge, is not supported by SMS either - it's either an Android-specific MMS extension or you're using RCS - and Apple has no incentive to support RCS, excepting any kind of laws requiring phone carriers and handsets to fully support RCS (I wish...) in order to be sold in a giving region.
Some time ago I received an ordinary SMS on the iPad but I couldn't read it until I signed into iMessage!
So iMessage app doesn't work like SMS reading app. It forces you into using iMessage account to just read an SMS. Later it lures you into using iMessage instead of SMS to make it harder to switch to another OS later.
Not mutually exclusive. You can build systems that work well together and are easy to use without lock-in. Users should want to use the product because it is the best, not because they feel trapped.
Sounds to me like the invisible hand of the free market economy. Use that phone, then. A given company is not obligated to serve all of your specific needs and desires.
Until these systems start aging and are no longer interoperable with more recent versions. It's not like Apple is giving us a bash like experience where things just work for decades.
