The regulation was originally an antitrust case leveled against Apple by the European Commission. It contained many things that are unrelated to saving human lives, but will make developers and users lives better in the long run. We do this because the status quo (Apple having unfettered control over their ecosystem) hasn't worked out for people outside of the ecosystem. In lieu of trusting the world's largest company to build a text-messaging replacement that works on other phones, we do have to drop the life-saving legislation to focus on nannying the next iPhone.
Developers lives, not necessarily users. It was also a huge waste of time and money for all parties as it achieves nothing - Facebook are the market leader with WhatsApp both globally an in Europe - iMessage barely registers in the top 5.
The law isn't specific to Apple, it also affects WhatsApp. Indeed in the EU that's probably much more important. Personally I don't know anybody who consciously uses iMessage, but the extreme network effects of WhatsApp make it socially impossible to move away from.
Why wouldn't it improve? Currently none of these services offer interop; in the future they might. That's a static upgrade to me, and I'd imagine most other people too.
Some in the United States would be grateful that a large multinational regulatory agency would focus on an issue whereupon green bubble people identify as blue bubble people versus matters of more import.
They would call this a win.
Not arguing against your comment. Just adding a viewpoint that some have. I.e Big government should spend more time on these kind of things instead of “life saving” things.
