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The U.S. Division of Justice and 16 state attorneys common sued Apple for allegedly violating federal antitrust legal guidelines on Thursday. The 88-page complaint lays out the federal government’s case in opposition to Apple, claiming the tech titan abused its monopoly within the smartphone market by imposing unfair practices for builders, blocking super-apps and cloud-streaming apps, and prohibiting tap-to-pay providers exterior of their very own.
However on web page 38, prosecutors get to the actual juicy stuff: Apple’s long-standing assault on Android customers through the notorious inexperienced textual content bubble.
Apple, the federal government says, “affirmatively undermines the standard of rival smartphones” by its creation of dueling texting interfaces for iPhone and non-iPhone customers. It’s not nearly aesthetics—and, sure, I’ll admit there’s one thing disagreeable about that green-on-white look. Apple additionally limits performance for these conversations exterior of the iMessage expertise: They’re not encrypted, movies are pixelated and grainy, and customers aren’t allowed to edit messages nor see when the opposite particular person is typing.
“This alerts to customers that rival smartphones are decrease high quality as a result of the expertise of messaging family and friends who don’t personal iPhones is worse—regardless that Apple, not the rival smartphone, is the reason for that degraded person expertise,” the criticism says.
However the authorities doesn’t cease there. “Many non-iPhone customers additionally expertise social stigma, exclusion, and blame for ‘breaking’ chats the place different contributors personal iPhones,” the criticism states. The impact is worse for youngsters, it says, as a result of effectively isn’t each social stigma worse for youngsters?
Whereas Google’s Android units, and different non-Apple units are extra fashionable than costly iPhones abroad, Apple controls over 70 percent of the U.S. smartphone market by income. And after they throw their weight round with the green-bubble nonsense, it constitutes an unlawful abuse of that monopoly energy, per the DOJ. The criticism contains messages from an Apple govt to CEO Tim Cook dinner that put it plainly: “shifting iMessage to Android will damage us greater than assist us.” And when one iPhone person lamented at a convention in 2023 that he couldn’t textual content his Android-using mother high-quality movies, Cook dinner instructed him to purchase his mother an iPhone—an incident that, after all, ended up within the lawsuit.
Fixing the green-bubble subject received’t be a panacea, however it will do one factor for sure: It’d permit my Android-using brother-in-law to affix the household group chat for the primary time. Till then, it’s not definitely worth the inexperienced bubbles and blurry movies. (Sorry, Ben.)
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