The U.S. Department of Justice and 16 state attorneys general sued Apple for allegedly violating federal antitrust laws on Thursday. The 88-page complaint lays out the government’s case against Apple, claiming the tech titan abused its monopoly in the smartphone market by imposing unfair practices for developers, blocking super-apps and cloud-streaming apps, and prohibiting tap-to-pay services outside of their own.
But on page 38, prosecutors get to the real juicy stuff: Apple’s long-standing assault on Android users via the infamous green text bubble.
Apple, the government says, “affirmatively undermines the quality of rival smartphones” by its creation of dueling texting interfaces for iPhone and non-iPhone users. It’s not just about aesthetics—and, yes, I’ll admit there’s something unpleasant about that green-on-white look. Apple also limits functionality for these conversations outside of the iMessage experience: They’re not encrypted, videos are pixelated and grainy, and users aren’t allowed to edit messages nor see when the other person is typing.
“This signals to users that rival smartphones are lower quality because the experience of messaging friends and family who do not own iPhones is worse—even though Apple, not the rival smartphone, is the cause of that degraded user experience,” the complaint says.
But the government doesn’t stop there. “Many non-iPhone users also experience social stigma, exclusion, and blame for ‘breaking’ chats where other participants own iPhones,” the complaint states. The effect is worse for teenagers, it says, because well isn’t every social stigma worse for teenagers?
While Google’s Android devices, and other non-Apple devices are more popular than expensive iPhones overseas, Apple controls over 70 percent of the U.S. smartphone market by revenue. And when they throw their weight around with the green-bubble nonsense, it constitutes an illegal abuse of that monopoly power, per the DOJ. The complaint includes messages from an Apple executive to CEO Tim Cook that put it plainly: “moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us.” And when one iPhone user lamented at a conference in 2023 that he couldn’t text his Android-using mom high-quality videos, Cook told him to buy his mom an iPhone—an incident that, of course, ended up in the lawsuit.
Fixing the green-bubble issue won’t be a panacea, but it would do one thing for certain: It’d allow my Android-using brother-in-law to join the family group chat for the first time. Until then, it’s not worth the green bubbles and blurry videos. (Sorry, Ben.)
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