The Department of Justice is right about the “green bubbles” in Apple iPhone messages. this is the reason.

Fellow iPhone users: picture the scene. You have just received someone’s phone number, and they are someone important. A new business partner, a potential romantic partner, a long-lost relative, whatever. You’re initiating what you hope will be a long, happy text relationship, so you turn on messages and enter the number.

What’s the last thing you want to see when you or the person you care about finishes typing in the To field? be honest. You don’t want the number to turn green, do you?

Because green numbers, as even the most casual iPhone user will notice over time, mean all sorts of annoyances compared to the nice blue conversations with other iPhone users. In chats with non-iPhone numbers, the links do not display a preview of the website in question. Photos and videos will likely be suspended when sent. If you also use the Messages app on your iPad or Mac, green conversations take longer to update, often up to 24 hours, making it pointless to talk on any device other than your iPhone. You won’t be able to tell when the other person is writing.

And you won’t be able to send what have become, for many of us, highly efficient nonverbal responses — the heart, the thumbs up, the “ha ha,” and the “!!!” – With one click. Well, you can, but you’ll soon discover that Apple is sending a succinct automated text instead of emojis, which is very annoying for your new friend.

None of these problems are insurmountable in communications. 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 who finds myself texting friends with fewer green numbers over time. But in isolation, it seems foolish to complain about any single issue.

That’s when the US Department of Justice an act This week’s complaint, as part of a larger lawsuit accusing Apple of anticompetitive practices, unsurprisingly had several social media commentators pulling two words out of context. What is the Ministry of Justice seeking? Green bubbles now? Have we run out of real criminals?

Beyond the bubbles

If you’re a Mac user, an iPad user, an iPhone user, or a fan of Apple history and wear watches like me, then yes, you’ll undoubtedly discover some issues with The full complaint is 88 pages long. The Justice Department lawyers certainly didn’t do themselves any favors by opening with old anti-competitive quotes from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs — 12 years later now — or writing a whine-worthy line about Apple not wanting smartphone users to “think differently” by abandoning her rights. Walled garden.

But when it comes to messaging, at least, the Justice Department has Apple’s rights. Even the most die-hard Apple supporters should be horrified to read these very specific accusations in the complaint, not including the green bubbles:

Apple could have delivered a better cross-platform messaging experience itself by creating iMessage for Android, but concluded that doing so would “hurt us more than help us.” [a direct quote from emails sent to CEO Tim Cook.] That’s why Apple continues to stifle innovation in smartphone messaging, even though doing so sacrifices the profits Apple could gain from increasing the value of the iPhone to users, because it helps build and maintain its monopoly power.

Apple realizes that its behavior hurts users and makes switching smartphones more difficult… Recently, Apple blocked a third-party developer from fixing a broken cross-platform messaging experience in Apple Messages and providing end-to-end message encryption between Apple Messages and Android users.

Apple sets the required APIs [for regular texting] As “private”, which means that third-party developers have no way to access 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 or not the person they want to talk to is 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 a message to someone, all they have to do is type in their phone number…

Third-party messaging apps cannot continue to run in the background when the app is closed, impairing functions such as 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 the call. Apple Messages includes these features.

Many non-iPhone users experience social stigma, exclusion, and blame for “breaking” chats where other participants have iPhones. This effect is particularly strong for some demographic groups, such as teenagers – where the iPhone share is 85 percent… This social pressure reinforces cost shifting and drives users to continue purchasing iPhones –Consolidating Apple’s dominance over smartphones is not because Apple made its smartphone better, but because it made communication with other smartphones worse.. [Emphasis mine]

Make it easy to be green

What stands out to you from all of this? To me, this is Apple’s complete refusal to create a messaging app for Android, which would allow the humiliating connectivity 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 this kind of thing at Apple” issue. The company has no problem Creating versions of the Apple TV experience for competitors Like Samsung, although that reduces the potential sales of Apple TVs. As the Justice Department rightly points out elsewhere in the complaint, the iPod would not have become a successful, company-saving product without a key piece of cross-platform software: iTunes for Windows computers.

It’s not that Apple is making Android users look like second-class citizens in its walled garden, exactly. But it doesn’t do anything to help users avoid that impression either.

But the smartphone market is said to be too important, and a significant portion of revenue for Apple, to allow users to communicate freely. So, instead of creating a Messages app for Android, Apple is enhancing all the fun things you can do in blue chats, drawing a greater contrast than ever with the green.

It’s not that Apple is making Android users look like second-class citizens in its walled garden, exactly. But it doesn’t do anything to help users avoid that impression either. We can laugh at the phrase “blame it for broken chats,” yet we all know the way stigma can stem from dozens of small interactions.

We know this in part because we’ve all been teenagers, and the 85% iPhone use rate among teens is a bit scary for that reason. (The number announced by the Department of Justice is actually fairly low, as a recent survey showed iPhone ownership is in the teens at 87 percent((88 percent of teens expect to have an iPhone after their next purchase.)) You don’t have to have a lot of high school memories to imagine what a digital life is like for the other 15 percent. It’s a subtle form of social isolation that has emerged in the past decade (in 2012, only 40 percent of teens reported owning an iPhone).

We’ve been here before. In 1997, Microsoft believed it had every right to push its Internet Explorer software as hard as it wanted on its proprietary platform, Windows, while putting pressure on the competing web browser, Netscape Navigator. It took three years of fighting with the government, which assembled an Avengers-like team of rival companies including Apple, before the tech giant was forced to give its customers more options.

Tim Cook doesn’t have to be Bill Gates; He could turn this around at any time. Announcing Messages for Android wouldn’t necessarily nullify the entire Justice Department antitrust lawsuit, but it would reduce the public’s appetite for it. It would improve the daily experience for Cook’s customers, who might suddenly find they have something to talk about with their green-numbered friends after all.