The latest lawsuit against Apple, this time from the Department of Justice, is focused on many things (although has less of a focus on the App Store than recent legislation from the European Union).
Aside from the suppression of “super apps” and gaming cloud apps, the lawsuit could lead to Apple making significant concessions across its products and services or paying a high fee.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, in his latest Power On newsletter, says that while some changes could happen, one item remains unthinkable for Apple at present – iMessage on Android.
While RCS is coming this year, Gurman says “the company will probably never enable iMessage on Android”.
Noting that Apple will likely need to make it “easier to transfer data from an iPhone”, Gurman says “The one big item that I think will never change, though, is bringing iMessage to Android.
“Apple is dead set against it,” he adds.
What changes could Apple make?
While Gurman seems certain iMessage won’t make the jump to the green side of the fence, he does believe there are some things Apple could do to respond to the DOJ lawsuit.
Apple currently keeps a tight grip on the NFC chip in its devices that it uses for Apple Pay in the name of security and privacy, but it also gets a royalty from Apple Pay transactions. The company has opened up some NFC restrictions in Europe, and Gurman says engineering work to do the same in the US is underway.
He also suggests Apple “should do more to support third-party devices on the iPhone, including watches”, in response to complaints that the company makes it hard to adopt a fitness tracker that’s not an Apple Watch.
“Besides opening up the NFC chip to third parties in the US, Apple will likely broaden its support of outside smartwatches, app stores, in-app payment services, physical trackers, browser engines and voice assistants.”
After the furore over Apple’s changes in the EU, it’ll certainly be fascinating to see how much it’ll change to satisfy the DOJ.