“Through iMessage, business users are only able to send enriched messages to iOS users and must rely on traditional SMS for all the other end users,”

I don’t see how that’s weird at all? I can send “enriched messages” to other Discord users, but I can’t do that from Discord to Matrix. Or from Discord to SMS. I can’t text my friend’s Instagram either. I don’t dare say whether or not I can mail a post onto the fediverse because that definitely sounds like some niche functionality someone has implemented (or thought to implement) somewhere.

Doesn’t Google have that exact same thing anyway?

What a weird thing to take issue with. Like yeah I’d obviously prefer it if there was a widely adopted open standard that everyone could use, but that’s not how capitalism works, is it?

That’s weird because it’s against the law.

A recent (few months ago) EU law mandates that if your platform is big enough (in the EU market) to gatekeep users from using other platforms, then it must interoperate with competing services. That means you should thrive because you make a better product, and not because it has more users.

The fine is a considerable percentage of the company’s earnings, that supposedly even the likes of Amazon and Google cannot overlook.

This includes Whatsapp that in a few months will have to be interoperable with competing services like telegram. This requires a protocol, the IETF is working on that. Google probably wishes to use RCS, but Matrix is also working with the IETF.

Apple says iMessage is not that widespread in the EU and should not be included, Google says it is and should be regulated, that’s because this regulation will most likely have effects even outside the EU.

Apple says iMessage is not that widespread in the EU and should not be included, Google says it is and should be regulated, that’s because this regulation will most likely have effects even outside the EU.

I’m not surprised they’d say that, even though it’s a bald-faced lie. iMessages isn’t an opt-in service, you can’t even opt-out of it; it’s fully automatic. If your text recipient has an iPhone and can use iMessages, it’s sent via that. There seems to be a way to opt-out of this in settings. though I’ve not tried it myself.