For the time being, no one is able to breach Apple‘s blue bubble. After conducting a study, officials from the European Union have concluded that iMessage and Microsoft’s Bing, Edge, and Microsoft Advertising do not possess sufficient market dominance to warrant more stringent regulation under the Digital Markets Act. If Apple were to include iMessage under the DMA regulations, it would have to be compatible with other messaging services.
Under the DMA, iMessage and the three Microsoft products satisfy the quantitative requirements for regulation. The four platform services in question each have at least 45 million monthly active users in the EU and more than 10,000 annually active business users in the union, while Apple and Microsoft comfortably above the income and market capitalization limits set forth by the law.
However, the companies argued that iMessage, Bing et al do not qualify as gatekeeper services. In Apple’s case, it claimed iMessage’s “small scale relative to other messaging services” and other factors meant that it should evade the DMA’s rules. Despite Google and mobile carriers pushing the EU to designate iMessage as a gatekeeper service, the bloc ultimately sided with Apple. Still, the EU’s executive arm noted that it will “continue to monitor the developments on the market with respect to these services, should any substantial changes arise.”
While the EU won’t force iMessage to play nicely with other messaging services, Apple has creaked open the door to interoperability. The company has pledged to support the RCS messaging standard starting this year, meaning that messaging between iMessage and Android should be more secure and feature-rich. RCS texts will still be in green bubbles, however, rather than the blue of iMessage missives.
Meanwhile, Apple and Microsoft haven’t avoided the DMA’s clutches entirely ahead of the rules coming into force on March 7. Some of their other products are subject to the law, including Windows and LinkedIn on the Microsoft side and iOS, the App Store and Safari in Apple’s case. Meta, Google, Amazon and TikTok parent ByteDance will also need to abide by the DMA. Notably, the EU has designated Meta’s Messenger and WhatsApp as gatekeeper services, meaning they’ll need to play nicely with other messaging apps.
Apple recently spelled out how it will open up the App Store to competitors, including third-party payment options, though rivals have called out the company’s implementation of the DMA rules. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney criticized it for adding “new junk fees on downloads and new Apple taxes on payments they don’t process.”
