Pressure grows on Apple to open up iMessage

One reason for that is industry pressure. Google has for around a year now been trying to publicly shame Apple into adopting the Rich Communication Services standard, which is the communication industry’s successor to old-school SMS (text) and MMS (multimedia) messaging, with added features such as read receipts and the ability to send media in high quality. Google baked RCS support into Android back in 2019, so there’s clear self-interest involved here, but now Samsung—whose Android phones have made it the global smartphone market leader—is also piling into the fight.

“Green bubbles and blue bubbles want to be together. Help Apple #GetTheMessage,” Samsung declared in a video posted to YouTube yesterday, using Google’s preferred hashtag for the campaign. (In iMessage, blue bubbles are used for messages sent between iMessage users, while green bubbles are for messages sent to or from users outside the system, which denotes a fallback to those more archaic, less secure messaging protocols.)

This campaign on its own is likely to have no effect whatsoever on Apple, a company that famously ignores industry standards in favor of locking customers into its own ecosystem. But Google and Samsung’s combined assault is only part of the picture.

Also yesterday, Reuters reported that the European Commission has begun trying to establish whether iMessage should be brought under the remit of the EU’s new antitrust law, the Digital Markets Act, which imposes interoperability requirements (among other things) on so-called gatekeeper services that are part of many people’s daily lives.

Apple’s iOS operating system, App Store, and Safari browser already fall under the DMA, which is likely to force Apple to allow third-party app stores on iPhones and iPads, but Apple so far managed to lobby the Commission into leaving iMessage out of it. If the Commission decides after its investigation that iMessage is worth regulating in this way, Apple would have until August next year to introduce some form of interoperability—presumably with RCS.

The best analogy here is what we’ve just seen happen with the iPhone 15’s adoption of USB-C for charging and data transfers. Apple didn’t care that the rest of the industry had gone with USB-C. It did care when the European Commission said it had no choice but to follow suit, on sustainability grounds. Depending on the outcome of the Commission’s current investigation, I think regulatory compulsion is far more likely to effect change than any shaming attempt by Apple’s rivals.

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David Meyer

NEWSWORTHY

Amazon’s labor-trafficking links. Many Nepali workers in Amazon’s Saudi Arabian warehouses say they were tricked—by a Saudi recruitment firm, not by Amazon itself—into paying stiff recruitment fees, then subjected to harsh conditions at Amazon’s facilities. They faced further fees if they tried to leave before their contract was over. As investigative journalists from outlets including the Guardian report, these practices are consistent with labor trafficking. Amazon says its own investigations “surfaced violations of our standards,” and has pledged to repay the recruitment fees, but Amnesty International researchers claim this move only followed outside investigations.

A desktop slump low point? Gartner says worldwide PC shipments were down 9% year on year last quarter, with Apple seeing the biggest drop of 24%. As Bloomberg reports, the analyst house expects this to be the bottom of the ongoing desktop slump. Gartner’s Mikako Kitagawa: “The good news for PC vendors is that the worst could be over by the end of 2023.” IDC puts the drop at 7.6% and sees generative AI support as a key selling point for near-future PCs.

Californian diversity law. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a law forcing venture capitalists to provide annual reports on the diversity of their investments’ founders—and to make their diversity data public, albeit in aggregated form. TechCrunch reports that many hope this will begin to change a situation where women and founders of color attract a mere 5% of funding each year.

SIGNIFICANT FIGURES

$20

—The average amount that Microsoft has been losing per month for each user of its $10/month GitHub Copilot AI assistant, according to one of the Wall Street Journal’s sources, who said the figure goes as high as $80 for some users. This is a function of the high computing costs currently associated with AI.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Bankman-Fried’s trial enters week 2: What’s happened so far, and what to expect when his ex takes the stand, by Ben Weiss

Can AI fix Wall Street’s ‘spaghetti code’ crisis? Microsoft and IBM are betting that it can, by Ben Weiss

Rogue AI will learn to ‘manipulate people’ to stop it from being switched off, predicts British ‘Godfather of AI,’ by Ryan Hogg

Israel is facing an onslaught of cyberattacks, including some tied to Russia, while battling Hamas, by Bloomberg

BEFORE YOU GO

Sustainability search results. Google is to start providing enhanced search results for people who are shopping for things like heat pumps and electric vehicles, to help them make better decisions. So a search for a new EV will come with information about government tax credits that might apply and about battery range.

As The Verge reports, Google is also updating cycling routes—and in France, it’s even suggesting public transit and walking routes to those looking up driving routes, as long as those more sustainable options don’t take a lot more time. It’s also making Google Earth more useful to urban planners, by giving them more insight into things like the solar reflectivity of roofs.