“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?

I think it’s weird because:

Your iMessage and FaceTime conversations are encrypted end-to-end, so they can’t be read while they’re sent between devices.

Source

Is completely bullshit. It’s not secure, they can be read because iMessage is the way you send texts to Android as well as iOS, and apples absolute refusal to budge or to adopt other standards means that regulation is the only way to modernize a 30 year old protocol.

I think they’re getting away with it because of the phrasing.

Messages sent through the iMessage service are encrypted, but not all messages you sent through the Messages (note the lack of i) app are iMessage messages. It’s the exact type of fucking sneaky bullshit that should be regulated so hard it stops existing, but I guess our regulators don’t think it’s a big deal right now.

@[email protected] mentions in another comment that

A recent … EU law mandates that if your platform is big enough … to gatekeep users from using other platforms, then it must interoperate with competing services.

And I think this is how Apple would “sneak” through this as well. The Messages app doesn’t lock you into a communications protocol. If the recipient has iMessages, it sends via that, if not, it sends via SMS/MMS. No idea if that argument would hold, I hope it wouldn’t. I would honestly prefer it if there was just a single open messaging standard that anyone could hook into, because closed proprietary tech is fucking bullshit on every single level.