The DOJ accuses Apple of a 'green bubble' problem. Here's why they're right.
Fellow iPhone users: Picture the scene. You've just received someone's phone number, and it's an important someone. A new business partner, a potential romantic partner, a long-lost relative, whatever. You're inaugurating what you hope is a long and happy texting relationship, so you fire up Messages and enter the number.
What's the last thing you want to see when you, or the object of your interest, is done typing in that "To" field? Be honest. You don't want the number to turn green, right?
Because green numbers, as even the most casual iPhone user will notice over time, mean all sorts of annoyances compared with the cool blue chats with fellow iPhone users. In chats with non-iPhone numbers, links don't show a preview of the website in question. Pictures and videos are more likely to hang when they send. If you're also using Messages on an iPad or a Mac, green conversations take longer to update, often as much as 24 hours, making it pointless to converse on any device other than the iPhone. You won't be able to see when the other person is typing.
And you won't be able to send what has become, for many of us, highly efficient nonverbal responses — the heart, the thumbs-up, the "ha ha," the "!!!" — with a single tap. Well, you can, but you'll soon discover Apple sends a terse robotic text instead of an emoji, which is annoying as hell to your new friend.
None of these are insurmountable problems to communication. Together, along with the lack of end-to-end encryption in green chats, they clearly add up to a degraded experience, and I'm not the only iPhone user to find myself texting friends with green numbers less over time. But in isolation, it seems dumb to complain about any single issue.
So when the U.S. Department of Justice did complain this week, as part of a larger lawsuit accusing Apple of anticompetitive practices, it wasn't surprising that many social media commentators pulled two words out of context. What, the DOJ is going after green bubbles now? Did we run out of real criminals?
Beyond the bubbles
If you're a Mac-using, iPad-weilding, iPhone-toting, Watch-wearing Apple history fanatic like me, then yes, no doubt you'll spot some issues with the full 88-page complaint. DOJ lawyers certainly didn't do themselves any favors by opening with outdated anticompetitive quotes from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs — now 12 years gone — or penning a groan-worthy line about Apple not wanting smartphone users to "think different" by leaving its walled garden.
But when it comes to Messages, at least, the DOJ has Apple bang to rights. Even the most fanatic Apple partisan has to wince when reading these very specific accusations in the complaint, green bubbles not included:
Apple could have made a better cross-platform messaging experience itself by creating iMessage for Android but concluded that doing so “will hurt us more than help us” [a direct quote from emails sent to CEO Tim Cook.] Apple therefore continues to impede innovation in smartphone messaging, even though doing so sacrifices the profits Apple would earn from increasing the value of the iPhone to users, because it helps build and maintain its monopoly power.
Apple recognizes that its conduct harms users and makes it more difficult to switch smartphones ... Recently, Apple blocked a third-party developer from fixing the broken cross- platform messaging experience in Apple Messages and providing end-to-end encryption for messages between Apple Messages and Android users.
Apple designates the APIs needed [for regular texting] as “private,” meaning third-party developers have no means of accessing them and are prohibited from doing so ... If a user wants to send a message in a third-party messaging app, they must first confirm whether the person they want to talk to has the same messaging app and, if not, convince that person to download and use a new messaging app. By contrast, if an Apple Messages user wants to send somebody a message, they just type their phone number ...
Third-party messaging apps cannot continue operating in the background when the app is closed, which impairs functionality like message delivery confirmation. When users receive video calls, third-party messaging apps cannot access the iPhone camera to allow users to preview their appearance on video before answering a call. Apple Messages incorporates these features.
Many non-iPhone users experience social stigma, exclusion, and blame for “breaking” chats where other participants own iPhones. This effect is particularly powerful for certain demographics, like teenagers—where the iPhone’s share is 85 percent ... This social pressure reinforces switching costs and drives users to continue buying iPhones—solidifying Apple’s smartphone dominance not because Apple has made its smartphone better, but because it has made communicating with other smartphones worse. [Emphasis mine]
Make it easy to be green
What jumps out at you from all that? For me, it's Apple's point-blank refusal to make a Messages for Android app, which would allow those degrading communication issues to disappear (assuming your Android friends download the app, of course).
This is not a technical issue. It's not even a "we don't do that kind of thing at Apple" issue. The company has no problem making versions of its Apple TV experience for rivals like Samsung, even though that cuts into potential sales of Apple TVs. And as the DOJ rightly points out elsewhere in the complaint, the iPod would not have become a company-saving hit product without a key piece of cross-platform software: iTunes for Windows PCs.
It's not that Apple is making Android users look like second-class citizens in its walled garden, exactly. But it's not doing anything to help users avoid that impression either.
But the smartphone market is allegedly too important, too massive a chunk of revenue for Apple, to allow users to communicate freely. So instead of making Messages for Android, Apple reinforces all the fun things you can do in blue chats, drawing an ever-greater contrast with the green.
It's not that Apple is making Android users look like second-class citizens in its walled garden, exactly. But it's not doing anything to help users avoid that impression either. We can laugh at the "blame for breaking chats" line, and yet we all know the way stigma can spring from dozens of tiny interactions.
We know this in part because we've all been teenagers, and the 85 percent iPhone share among teens is somewhat chilling for this reason. (The DOJ's figure is actually somewhat low; a recent survey put teen iPhone ownership at 87 percent, with 88 percent of teens expecting to have an iPhone after their next purchase.) You don't have to retain many memories of high school to imagine what digital life is like for the other 15 percent. It's a subtle form of social isolation that has sprung up in the last decade (in 2012, just 40 percent of teens reported owning an iPhone).
We've been here before. In 1997, Microsoft thought it had the perfect right to push its Internet Explorer as hard as it wanted on its monopoly platform, Windows, while squeezing out the rival web browser Netscape Navigator. It took three years of fighting with the government, which had assembled an Avengers-like squad of rival companies including Apple, before the tech titan was forced to give its customers more choice.
Tim Cook doesn't have to be Bill Gates; he could turn this around at any time. Announcing Messages for Android wouldn't necessarily make the DOJ's entire antitrust lawsuit go away, but it would reduce the public appetite for it. And it would improve the day to day experience of Cook's customers, who may suddenly find they have something to talk about with their green-numbered friends after all.