You are free to choose an android phone or an Apple one; that part of the market is absolutely free. Apple is the top seller of smartphones, I believe this qualifies as "competing successfully".
That part of the market not being separate from the other part of the market is the issue. There could be a dozen different reasons that someone might want an iPhone over some competitor, and if they buy one for that reason, they're stuck with Apple's store even if they would have chosen something else given the option.
Not only that, the markets are tied together in both directions.
Suppose that you do want to go into competition with Apple and Google and make your own competing phone platform. The biggest problem you're going to have is that people expect you to have a lot of apps available for your phone before they'll buy one, but you have to have a lot of customers before anyone will make apps for your platform.
The traditional way to solve this is by creating a cross-platform framework and then giving developers an incentive to use it, generally by making it easy to distribute apps to existing platforms. For example, Valve wants game developers to develop for SteamOS, so they provide cross-platform frameworks and a distribution system that also works on popular incumbent platforms like Windows. Then developers make games that run on Windows and incidentally also on Linux/SteamOS, and now there are more games available for SteamOS than ever before and it's the most promising competitor to Windows for PC gaming in a long time.
Conversely, Microsoft is prevented from making an app store for iOS, so they can't do that and their ambition to create a viable competitor to Apple and Android faltered. Likewise Ubuntu Touch and Firefox OS and every other attempt to create a viable alternate phone platform. And then you say "just buy a different phone platform" -- as if that wasn't the problem.
At least in the US, imessage gives apple an effective monopoly. Their are strong social repercussions for not having imessage. If you want to be included you pretty much must have an iPhone.
Apple is well aware of this and plays into it hard.
> At least in the US, imessage gives apple an effective monopoly. Their are strong social repercussions for not having imessage. If you want to be included you pretty much must have an iPhone.
That's because people are idiots. There's nothing that iMessage does that whatsapp, telegram, kakao, line can't do. In fact, US/Canada are the only ones that actually use SMS or iMessage, as far as I know, and the rest of the world use other messaging apps. I have been living in Canada for 5 years already, and in no instance I had any issue whatsoever. I now use iPhone, but nobody talks to me via iMessage, it's all either Messenger or Whatsapp, or Instagram
If Apple is able to hold such a stronghold over Americans because of something so easily bypassed, then you deserve to be controlled, really.
Oh stop it, Apple isn’t responsible for people’s choice of friends, they do need to provide a UI affordance that someone may not be getting messages displayed corrected
> Oh stop it, Apple isn’t responsible for people’s choice of friends, they do need to provide a UI affordance that someone may not be getting messages displayed corrected
Apple has been repeatedly requested to change the colour to a less ugly shade, or to give users the choice to disable the feature or to give Android apps an API of some sort so they can comply with whatever Apple's requirements and get the blue text boxes.
Apple hasn't taken action because they like the current state of affairs, they want the social ostracism of non-Apple users.
