I'd agree with this take where possible. Trying to explain the idea requires all the listeners to imagine the same thing in their head. If you can show them something, it's worth a thousand words..
I have this with a colleague right now who has a rather solid idea (I think). Trying to convince him that at least some diagramming would help get it across.
What is the blue and green bubble thing? I've never used an iPhone so don't understand the term. Does it classify messages as iMessage and non-iMessage?
iOS has two built-in messaging apps. Like all phones, they have SMS built in, and hardly anyone uses it for anything except SMS 2FA codes.
And then they have iMessage, aka blue bubbles, which are kinda like Signal or Whatsapp or Telegram. Everyone in Europe uses whatsapp, and a lot of people in the US use iMessage. If you don't use whatsapp in europe, you'll have a rough time communicating with some social groups, and the same thing for iMessage in the US.
However, unlike every other messenger app I can think of, iMessage isn't cross platform.
Also unlike every other messenger I can think of, it comes installed by default and for some reason uses the same app as the SMS app, and also claims encryption but randomly switches to SMS and breaks encryption making it obviously the least secure of all the apps (and also backs up your keys to iCloud in a way apple can access them by default, neither here nor there).
Blue bubbles are when iMessage is acting as the iMessage app, and has encryption and can use features like sending high resolution photos, location, invites, and a bunch of other apple-specific features.
Green bubbles are when the iMessage app has converted itself into the SMS and RCS app, and has a reduced feature set, like being unable to remove people from group chats.
It's frankly a quite confusing decision to have two quite different apps built into the same app and indicate which feature-set is active based on the color of a UI element. I think everyone would prefer if apple split it into the 'Messages' app (SMS + RCS) and an optional 'iMessage' app which doesn't come installed by default, but you can download on the app store from Apple. I'm frankly surprised the EU hasn't forced apple to show a prompt for "default messenger app" on startup with the options being "Whatsapp", "iMessage", etc etc, like they do for default browser.
No, Apple has one built-in messaging app: Messages. It switches between SMS, RCS, and iMessage automatically depending on the capabilities of the devices.
> I think everyone would prefer if apple split it into the 'Messages' app (SMS + RCS) and an optional 'iMessage' app which doesn't come installed by default, but you can download on the app store from Apple.
No, I don't think anyone would prefer that. People on iOS like iMessage, not SMS + RCS. Nobody is confused by it, they all know that green bubbles means you're texting someone who doesn't have an iPhone. It works seamlessly, it's just annoying when you want to have along conversation with a friend on Android because it doesn't have any nice iMessage extras available – that's why people don't like green bubbles.
I don't think any of what you're describing are legal "monopolies". I don't have a single Apple product in my life but I'm fairly sure there's nothing I'm prevented from doing because of that.
And back in the "Microsoft has a monopoly on IE6" ruling's days, I did not use Windows or Internet Explorer, and I was not prevented from doing anything because of that. Netscape Navigator on Linux worked fine. Sure, I occasionally hit sites that were broken and only worked in IE, but I also right now frequently hit apps that are "macOS only" (like when Claude Cowork released, or a ton of other YC company's apps).
Microsoft was found guilty, so clearly the bar is not what you're trying to claim.
Microsoft was found guilty of using their market power to do product bundling, which is illegal. The fact that they had dominance in the market is not what they got popped for, nor is it illegal.
It's possible on the Mac, but it's not easy. Apple uses an immutable system volume on macOS, so you can't just delete the Safari app like you would a user-installed app. To actually delete Safari you need to disable System Integrity Protection and reboot.
There are plenty of Linux distributions that use immutable root volumes. They protect the user in a huge number of ways by preventing the system from getting hosed (either by accident or by malicious unauthorized users / malware). Apple made the decision to do this for their users, and it has prevented a HUGE amount of tech support calls, as well as led to millions of happy users with trouble-free computers.
It also hasn't stopped users from installing Chrome and/or Firefox on their Macs, and millions of ordinary users have.
> It also hasn't stopped users from installing Chrome and/or Firefox on their Macs, and millions of ordinary users have.
You seem to be ignoring the part where you can't install the Chome and/or Firefox browser engines on iOS and the apps with those names on that platform are just skins over Safari. Notice in particular that the iOS version of "Firefox" can't support extensions.
> Let me know how I can unbundle Safari from macOS or iOS.
> Go ahead, I'll wait.
You can't get even macOS from the store without Safari, which is the thing Microsoft was doing, but what Apple does on iOS is far worse than what Microsoft was doing and talking about only macOS is kind of burying the lede.
For MacOS this is just as dumb of an argument as it was for Windows. The web engine is used to render system dialogs. You can easily choose a doffeeent browser on Macs. Chrome has quite a large market share on Macs
What next? Do you want to unbundle the built in drivers?
The argument for Windows is that you pay for Windows, and used to pay for Netscape Navigator, but now you have to get Internet Explorer if you want Windows. You can't say that you want to pay e.g. $160 for Windows without Internet Explorer and then $40 for Netscape, your only option is to pay $200 for Windows + Internet Explorer. It's tying. It's not really about whether you can remove it, it's about whether you can not pay for it when you don't want it. Notice that they quite successfully bankrupted Netscape with this.
The inability to remove it is just the dodge Microsoft attempted to use to claim that they're inseparably the same product, and was clearly a load of self-serving nonsense. Operating systems had system dialogs before there was any such things as browser engines.
The dynamic looks weird from the frame of reference of the modern browser market because the answer the market found to Microsoft's tying was to "pay for" the browser by allowing the vendor to choose the default search engine. No surprise then that the browser that ultimately supplanted Microsoft's was the one from the biggest search engine company. But that workaround came with negative consequences, e.g. Google now crippling ad blockers in Chrome.
And the tying problem is still there even if markets with low marginal costs are often weird. Okay, so the way we pay for browsers now is by letting the vendor choose the default search engine, but now we have Google paying Apple billions of dollars to be the default search engine in Safari, and Apple quashing Firefox ad blockers on iOS, instead of that money going to Mozilla or Ladybird or anyone else who has to compete by making a better browser instead of "competing" by tying use of their browser to an operating system, with correspondingly fewer resources and market share for competing alternatives.
> What next? Do you want to unbundle the built in drivers?
Making Asahi Linux get there by full reverse engineering actually is kind of a dick move? Intel publishes hardware documentation.
And it seems pretty obvious that Apple is tying their OS to their hardware and vice versa. Is that even supposed to be ambiguous?
And that argument is dumb in 2026. What are they supposed to do, use ftp to download a web browser?
> Notice that they quite successfully bankrupted Netscape with this.
Were you around back then? Absolutely no one paid for Netscape even before IE. And famously what bankrupted Netscape was because it “did things you should never do”.
Netscape was trying to make money selling web servers also. Should Linux and Windows not come with web servers? Should Apache not have been free?
People seem to forget that Netscape sucked around the time IE came out. It was so crash prone on every operating system it ran on that people use to brag on .advocacy groups about how good their operating systems were by how well they handled Navigator crashes.
And there has never been a point that Microsoft had to unbundle their browser in the US and there was never a browser choice screen.
> And it seems pretty obvious that Apple is tying their OS to their hardware and vice versa. Is that even supposed to be ambiguous?
This is about as bad of an argument as saying that Fors ties its motor to its cars or Nintendo forcing you to use their OS with their consoles. Apple doesn’t sell operating system, Apple sells computer products. What do you think should happen? Force Apple to create versions of its operating systems that run on other computers? Force Apple to sell Macs without operating systems? Anyone is free to choose an x86 PC and 90% of the market does
Firefox is also free to bundle an ad blocker with Firefox even if it does use WebKit and when you download Firefox for iOS - they get money from searches.
Are you suggesting that iOS shouldn’t come with a browser? Should ChromeOS also not come with a browser?
Absolutely no computer operating system comes bundled with Chrome besides ChromeOS yet Chrome still has the majority of the market share on desktop computers. Firefox competes with Chrome on an equal playing field on computers - people choose Chrome
> What are they supposed to do, use ftp to download a web browser?
How about, sell the product without restricting retailers from replacing the vendor's browser with another one, or give the customer a choice which browser they want the same as they choose how much RAM they want etc.
> And famously what bankrupted Netscape was because it “did things you should never do”.
Internet Explorer was bundled with Windows 95. The Netscape release before they attempted to rewrite was released in 1997. The rewrite was a failed attempt to make their browser good enough that people would pay for it when Microsoft was already bundling IE with Windows.
> And there has never been a point that Microsoft had to unbundle their browser in the US and there was never a browser choice screen.
Indeed, Microsoft successfully paid off the Bush administration to settle the case for a slap on the wrist after they'd already been found guilty by the court.
> This is about as bad of an argument as saying that Fors ties its motor to its cars or Nintendo forcing you to use their OS with their consoles.
Ford will happily sell you a motor without an entire car, or a frame or any other part of the car without a motor. Nintendo is forcing you to use their OS with their consoles.
> Force Apple to create versions of its operating systems that run on other computers?
This makes it sound like it's someone making Apple do something instead of Apple making someone do something.
What stops you from running macOS in qemu or a virtual machine on any non-Apple hardware with the same architecture? What stops Samsung from writing iOS drivers and offering iOS on Galaxy phones? Only Apple's refusal to sell it to you without making you also buy hardware.
> Anyone is free to choose an x86 PC and 90% of the market does
60% of phones in the US are iOS.
> Firefox is also free to bundle an ad blocker with Firefox even if it does use WebKit and when you download Firefox for iOS - they get money from searches.
The Firefox ad blockers are extensions, e.g. uBlock isn't from Mozilla, but the ability to use it is a reason to use Firefox. The iOS browsers can't use extensions. Then you can't use uBlock on iOS and fewer people use Firefox.
> Absolutely no computer operating system comes bundled with Chrome besides ChromeOS
Android. And then people who want to use the same browser on desktop and mobile for sync.
> yet Chrome still has the majority of the market share on desktop computers. Firefox competes with Chrome on an equal playing field on computers - people choose Chrome
Chrome is made by the largest advertising company in the world. For years if you opened google.com, gmail or their other services in a non-Chrome browser you would get a huge banner imploring you to install Chrome. This was a successful strategy to overcome the inertia of the default browser on desktop operating systems, but Mozilla never had anything like that available to them, and then the two-front assault from Microsoft/Apple on one side and Google on the other resulted in declining Firefox market share and correspondingly declining revenue with which to improve it.
Mozilla the organization also suffers from significant mismanagement, but that doesn't explain why no one has been able to establish a popular fork or new independent browser, whereas the OS vendors successfully impeding anyone who can't command the equivalent of billions in advertising explains it really well.
> How about, sell the product without restricting retailers from replacing the vendor's browser with another one, or How about, sell the product without restricting retailers from replacing the vendor's browser with another one,
PC vendors have been and do ship any type of crapware they want on their computers.
> or give the customer a choice which browser they want the same as they choose how much RAM they want etc. browser they want the same as they choose how much RAM they want etc.
And when they had that choice in Europe - they mostly still chose Chrome…
> Android. And then people who want to use the same browser on desktop and mobile for sync.
And those people can still download Firefox on iOS or Android and sync bookmarks.
In fact Firefox and Chrome Windows users can sync their bookmarks to iOS Safari using extension written and supported by Apple.
> What stops you from running macOS in qemu or a virtual machine on any non-Apple hardware with the same architecture? What stops Samsung from writing iOS drivers and offering iOS on Galaxy phones? Only Apple's refusal to sell it to you without making you also buy hardware.
Is that really a reasonable argument when Samsung doesn’t even support its own hardware with drivers for more than a couple of years?
> whereas the OS vendors successfully impeding anyone who can't command the equivalent of billions in advertising explains it really well.
Just maybe Firefox - which is free to compete with Google on desktop computers just doesn’t make a compelling case for why no one wants it?
Apple has not, to my knowledge, required OEMs to bundle Safari with macOS alongside threats to withhold macOS if they don’t comply expressly to put Firefox out of business.
But hey, maybe some weird shit happened during the clone years that I’m not privy to.
The crucially important subtlety here is that Apple requiring developers to use the App Store doesn't leverage an existing monopoly (like what Microsoft had with Windows).
Compare the games console market. Nintendo is allowed to say you have to go through them to sell games for the Switch, ditto Microsoft with the Xbox. Sony doing the same thing with the Playstation is exactly equivalent, but they're approaching the sort of market dominance where it might soon be illegal for them (and them alone) to do that in some markets.
> The crucially important subtlety here is that Apple requiring developers to use the App Store doesn't leverage an existing monopoly (like what Microsoft had with Windows).
Copyright (e.g. over iOS) and patent (e.g. over iPhone hardware) are explicitly government-granted monopolies. Having that monopoly is allowed on purpose, but that isn't the same as it not existing, and having a government-granted monopoly and leveraging into another market are two quite distinct things.
> Compare the games console market.
Okay, all of the consoles that require you to sell you to sell through their stores shouldn't be able to do that either.
> but they're approaching the sort of market dominance where it might soon be illegal for them (and them alone) to do that in some markets.
Wait, your theory is that a console with ~50% market share has market dominance but Apple with ~60% of US phones doesn't?
There’s no such thing as “having a monopoly on iPhone” in law. You have to have a monopoly in a market, of which iPhone is part of the “smartphone” market. It is not a monopoly in the smartphone market, to the best of my knowledge.
> You have to have a monopoly in a market, of which iPhone is part of the “smartphone” market.
Products and markets are not a one to one mapping. For example, if you sell low-background steel, that's part of the broader "steel" market because anyone who needs ordinary steel could buy it from you and use it for the same purposes as ordinary steel. But low-background steel is also its own market, because the people who need that can't use ordinary steel. Likewise for sellers of products with higher purity levels, products that satisfy particular standards or regulatory requirements, etc. It's only the same market if it's the same thing. Clorox bleach is the same as other bleach; Microsoft Windows is not the same as MacOS.
And iOS is not the same as Android. I mean this really isn't that hard: Are they substitutes for each other? If you have a GE washing machine, can you use any brand of bleach? You can, so they're in the same market. If you have an app that exists for iOS and not Android, can you use an Android device? No, so they're not in the same market. Likewise, if you've written a mobile app and need to distribute it to your customers who have iOS devices, can you use Google Play? Again no, which is what makes them different markets. They're not substitutes, any more than a retailer in Texas is a substitute for a retailer in California when you have customers in both states -- or only have customers in California.
Yes, but that was coupled with other factors like them strongarming vendors, already being hugely dominant on desktops and abusing that position et al. I don't see this as being the same. Maybe my bar here is wrong, but it doesn't change whether they are a monopoly or not.
The issue was never "Microsoft has a monopoly on IE6". That's obviously nonsense.
The monopoly that Microsoft held was the home computer operating system market, first through DOS, then later through Windows. Holding a monopoly like that isn't illegal unto itself. What they were actually found guilty of was unfairly leveraging their monopoly on the OS market to gain the upper hand in a different market (the browser market). The subsequent range of issues we had with IE6 (compatibility, security, etc) was a result of Microsoft succeeding in achieving a monopoly on the browser market through illicit means.
Likewise, "Apple has a monopoly on the App Store" is just the same amount of nonsense. What you could argue is that Apple has a monopoly on the home computer market, or the mobile phone market, and that the way they integrate the App Store should be considered illegal leveraging of that monopoly, but that argument simply doesn't hold water — Microsoft's monopoly on the OS market at the time was pretty much incontrovertible, you simply couldn't walk into a shop and buy a computer running something else (except maybe a Mac at a more specialised place). Today, just about any shop you walk into that sells computers will probably have devices for sale running three different OSes (macOS, Windows, ChromeOS). Any phone place will have iPhones and Android devices, and probably a few more niche options. Actual market share percentage is nowhere near the high 90s that Microsoft saw in its heyday. At most, Apple is the biggest individual competitor in the market, but I don't think it hold an outright majority in any specific product class.
Mind you, I think that there is a good argument to be made that the Apple/Google duopoly on mobile devices does deserve scrutiny, but that's a very different kettle of fish.
You were not prevented from doing anything, but that doesn’t mean others weren’t. For example, OEMs were not allowed to offer any other preinstalled OS as a default option. That effectively killed Be and I’m sure hindered RedHat.
...and then you have long time Linux users (like me) who cannot feel any of the benefit of removing that overhead. The only difference I can tell between X and Wayland on my machines is that Wayland doesn't work with some stuff.
and then there are probably as many if not more that notice zero difference at all. and a sizable amount of people who notice things that are BETTER, such as for example actual support for HDR and 10bit, per-screen refresh rates etc
This is what I was thinking when I read this. Wouldn't it just be easier to use GTK (or Qt) everywhere? They are already well supported on every other platform and can look very native the last time I checked.
> Wouldn't it just be easier to use GTK (or Qt) everywhere?
Which of those? GTK apps look alien on KDE desktops, and Qt apps look alien on GNOME desktops. Also, if you only need to create a window with a GL or Vulkan canvas, pulling in an entire UI framework dependency is overkill. There's SDL, GLFW, winit etc etc - but those also don't fix the 'native window chrome' problem in all situations and they all have to work around missing Wayland features. The bare window system functionality (managing windows - including window chrome and positioning(!), clipboard, drag'n'drop, ...) should really be part of the OS APIs (like it is on *every other* desktop operating system). Why does desktop Linux have to do its own thing, and worse (in the sense of: more developer hostile) than other desktop operating systems?
Frankly I don't get your problem or how is it different on any other OS. So your solution to GTK or qt looking alien is to look alien to everyone? Like there is no universe where "GTK doesn't look good, I will go with a custom written vulkan canvas" is a realistic scenario. Especially when all this has been blown way out of proportion when companies happily wrap their web apps into a browser and ship it as their software.
So again, how is it different elsewhere? What about windows, where even their own frameworks look alien because they have 3-4 of them? How is that the fault of Wayland somehow?!
> So your solution to GTK or qt looking alien is to look alien to everyone?
No? Where did I write that? I want my window to look and feel consistent with all other Linux desktop applications, and this is mainly achieved by having common window decorations (a problem that had already been solved by any other desktop operating system in the last 50 years).
> a problem that had already been solved by any other desktop operating system in the last 50 years
I just gave you an example of Windows that by default fails this requirement (see settings vs control panel or what that is called), let alone when you install applications using sorts of different frameworks.
Maybe other OSs solved this, but Windows didn’t - it just kept adding new UI libraries replacing older ones so that old software could still run and look old.
At any one time I would assume there are thousands of people in the world who are replacing their existing vehicle right at this very moment for normal reasons.
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