I'm not surprised by the iMessage decision*, but on the Bing case I'm personally still on the bench. I guess that API-only use is exempt from DMA?
* Americans, virtually no one uses iMessage outside your country, or at least to the point that it'll force you to get an iPhone. Even Japan, with their love with iPhones, uses a homegrown service for their messaging needs.
LINE is as homegrown as Tiktok with a front-end built by an American dev. It was initially owned by a Korean company (Naver), and a lot of the wikipedia article reads like a hagiography.
Calling LINE a win over iMessage is a huge stretch. The privacy policies on LINE were not good at all when I last looked at it several years ago; transferring your account from one phone to another was (is?) really annoying, and getting a username isn't necessarily that easy.
Say what you want, but Apple didn't punish me as much for having moved from Japan to Canada.
Swiss datapoint: my whole extended family/friends circle has iPhones and they only use WhatsApp (and FaceTime for video). I'm not even sure I ever heard the name "iMessage" before.
> I'm not even sure I ever heard the name "iMessage" before
Nobody I know colloquially calls it that in the US either. The app is called "messages", and people just call it "texting"... "on an iPhone". I don't think most people even realize it is not SMS/MMS.
French here. I still use iMessage for family and friends one to one discussions but group chats are exclusively on WhatsApp here… and I’ve got tons. Too much. For every circle and sometimes more than one per circle depending on the subject. Are US people using iMessage for this ?
WhatsApp is almost the de-facto standard for messaging in Europe, with cash transfers usually seconded to Revolut.
iMessage in the US is, to put it bluntly, a self-selecting cult. The amount of articles, podcasts and dating vlogs that detail how common it is to straight up discount a member of the opposite sex from dating based on not having an iPhone is testament to this.
In an OKCupid Poll (which is about as transparent as dating bigdata ever got) 27% of respondents felt that green bubbles were less desirable than mansplaining in terms of dealbreakers in a potential partner...
> I think iMessage is common in English speaking countries with high iPhone usage.
I can confirm that iMessage is extremely common in Australia. WhatsApp is very uncommon, outside of people with European (and maybe South American?) friends or family to keep in touch with. And given the country's demographics, I suspect there are far more people using WeChat to keep up with their overseas contacts in Aus than there are people using WhatsApp.
>Even Japan, with their love with iPhones, uses a homegrown service for their messaging needs.
Meanwhile Europe uses another US tech giant's service. The simple answer is that most of Europe is not wealthy enough to afford iPhones and not adept enough at developing competing services without first kneecapping competition with regulation.
European countries that have high disposable income like the US have higher market share of iPhones. In general, iPhones owners are wealthier across the board than Android phone owners.
* Americans, virtually no one uses iMessage outside your country, or at least to the point that it'll force you to get an iPhone. Even Japan, with their love with iPhones, uses a homegrown service for their messaging needs.