I don’t know what you mean by “common good” in this context, but if a company has a dominant market position and uses its power to cripple competition, then it falls within antitrust laws.
iMessage is so important today, especially to young Americans, that its exclusivity to iOS has become a significant barrier to Android or other operating systems from being competitive.
It’s up to regulators and the court system to decide whether that is a violation of antitrust law. But if it is, then yes, the government should force them to open it. That’s what it means to enforce antitrust law.
Apple does not require any consumer to use iMessage, nor do they make installing alternatives such as Whatsapp difficult. iMessage is simply a messaging option. This is in stark contrast to how MS treated IE back in the antitrust lawsuit days.
The fact that lots of people prefer to use iMessage -- despite myriad easily-accessible alternatives -- doesn't feel anticompetitive in the slightest; in fact making a product that people freely choose over similar alternatives is the definition of winning competition.
The Messages app is the only one everybody has no choice but to use though, since it’s the only one on iOS that does actual SMS, which is needed for interacting with businesses and in other scenarios. It’s also the most discoverable one and the only one that comes on the phone by default. It has a privileged place in the ecosystem, and that’s why it’s a potential target for antitrust regulation.
It’s really nothing special. I personally use WhatsApp with most of my friends.
The problem is when you have one person in a group that is on Android when everybody else is on Apple. This causes the iMessage conversation to use SMS instead. To signify this in the app, texts appear as green bubbles instead of blue, so it’s obvious when it happens.
This is bad because SMS is totally obsolete. It causes images and videos to be shared in extremely low resolution, along with problems of messages not getting delivered reliably and other missing features.
So effectively to the iPhone user, Android users very visibly cause group chats to be super crappy in iMessage.
This is not the fault of the Android user really, because it’d work way better if Apple supported RCS like Android phones do, but many people have a very strongly negative impression of Android due to this.
In fact, some iPhone users put social pressure on people with Android devices due to this in the form of excluding them from group chats or complaining about how they cause problems.
Apple has been perpetuating this problem because it suits them. People know this, but it’s Android and Android users that suffer regardless due to Apple’s dominant market position.
It provides a much better group messaging experience than SMS (you can see who’s in a group and add and remove people), delivery/read receipts, better image quality, is encrypted (although that gets somewhat negated by automatic iCloud backups), and is free as long as a data connection is available.
Of course many other messengers offer most of these features too, but for some reason, no alternative has been able to establish itself in the US.
iMessage was heavily integrated into the ios flow when sms was the dominant mobile text messaging system. It's not special, and that's the point. It just worked the way people want texting to work as smart phones gained momentum, and iPhones have so much of the market share that it's way more irritating to use a separate messaging app when you can't change the default integration on ios. I miss the convenience of heavily integrated iMessage comms at least twice per day.
Interesting, I use both Messages and a few third-party messengers, and I wouldn't say that Messages is integrated more deeply with iOS, in the way that e.g. Safari and Mail were for a long time (before you could re-associate http and mailto URLs).
The share sheet just shows my most-frequently-used messengers, as well as direct contact names for my most important contacts, no matter what messenger they're actually on.
The only thing I can't yet do on my third-party messenger is initiate messages from my Apple Watch, but that's presumably due to a lack of a native watch app more than anything.
iMessage is so important today, especially to young Americans, that its exclusivity to iOS has become a significant barrier to Android or other operating systems from being competitive.
It’s up to regulators and the court system to decide whether that is a violation of antitrust law. But if it is, then yes, the government should force them to open it. That’s what it means to enforce antitrust law.