Report: Apple claims iMessage not big enough to fall under purview of EU ‘gatekeeper’ competition law - eviltoast
  • Hillock@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Apple has the exact number. They could have released it to give the claim more weight.

    As it stands I find it hard to believe that less than 45 million people in the EU use the service monthly. I assume they use a definition of “active users” that pushes the number artificially down. Whether or not that definition is inline with the definition by the EU is something we will have to find out.

    • xNIBx@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      As it stands I find it hard to believe that less than 45 million people in the EU use the service monthly

      I believe it. Iphone has pretty low market share in EU and most people use third party apps like whatsup. So even iphone users are forced to use those third party apps.

      I think a demographic analysis would be more important. If imessage only has 20% share in total but 60% among teens, then that should be enough to be to be considered gatekeeper. Especially considering that those teens will eventually grow up and probably carry that market share into adulthood.

    • GenEcon@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I do not know a single person who uses iMessage. Europe uses Signal or WhatsApp. With an iPhone market share of 26 %, it just isn’t viable. People like to use a single (or at most 2) messaging app. No point in using iMessage.

      Even not considering this, the EU has 448 Million people and a smartphone penetration of roughly 85 %. So if every iPhone user would use iMessage, this would bring the number to 448 * 0.85 * .26 = 99 Million. I highly doubt more than half of the iPhone users use iMessage.

      • albert180@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Well my family uses it, I’m the only Android User in their “iMessage”-Group and I’m getting every Message as an SMS or MMS, but when I reply it doesn’t get shown in their group. It just flat out sucks. Apple should support RCS, but it won’t because they use their iMessage dominance in the US to pressure people to switch to iPhones

      • Hillock@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        iPhones aren’t the only products that can use iMessage. You have apple watches and iPads on top of it. Which puts the potential uses way up.

        While iPhones might have a market share below 30% in the EU as a whole, the share varies a lot in individual countries. In Poland it’s just 10% while in Denmark it’s above 60%.

        And iPhones tend to appear in clusters. In my experience they aren’t evenly distributed. I know of families where everyone uses iPhones while in my family no one has. So any kind of personal experience is rather pointless.

        Until numbers are publicized, I still find it hard to believe that fewer than 45 million people use iMessage a month. I fully believe that fewer than 45 million people use it daily. So it comes down to how you define active users. And Apple will almost certainly use a strict definition of what counts as an active users to reduce the number.