The Problem with iMessage
10 minutes to read — 2001 words
The U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple claims that Apple’s iMessage service degrades messaging quality when iOS users communicate with anyone using a device that doesn’t run Apple’s operating system. iMessage is an excellent—almost pardigmmatic—example of a market dominator excluding competition. But as the tech and legal worlds have digested the DOJ’s complaint, the discussion has mostly missed the key problem with iMessage: it’s rarely had to compete fairly with other messaging apps, and when it does, it loses.