There’s a surprising twist to the Apple versus Facebook battle. While Apple’s new privacy innovations may have stripped billions from Facebook’s revenues, the iPhone maker’s mistaken messaging plans are now getting even worse, boosting Facebook, handing the social media giant a critical win in the ongoing battle over your privacy.
Apple is steadfastly refusing to compromise its commercial stance, rejecting cross-platform collaboration with Google to offer iPhone users a choice to Facebook’s messaging platforms. Now, it seems likely Apple will add its contentious photo monitoring to iMessage in its forthcoming iOS 15.2 release. This makes the situation much worse for iMessage users, and gives them a reason to switch to WhatsApp, one of the platforms owned by the very same Facebook that Apple is battling.
Apple has certainly damaged Facebook with App Tracking Transparency and Privacy Labels, but it seems that the iPhone maker sees Google’s Android as a competitive threat, while Facebook is more a nuisance and a foil for its privacy-first marketing.
Enabling Multi-Device Beta
WhatsApp / iOS 15
This dynamic is playing out perfectly in the multi-billion-dollar world of hyper-scale messaging. This week, we saw an acceleration of WhatsApp’s latest feature advance—its multi-device access beta. We have also seen the belated end to multiple security code change warnings in chats with users that have joined the beta, you’ll likely have seen this with some of your contacts in recent weeks.
On the surface, this radical WhatsApp update can be seen as targeting iMessage, with its seamless multi-device access already in place. But realistically, it’s retaining Android users that’s much more critical to WhatsApp. That’s where most of its users can be found, and that’s what has come under threat from Signal and Telegram and now, critically, Google’s own revamped and converged assault on Android messaging.
Yes, Facebook dominates the global messaging market, with WhatsApp and Messenger, it owns the two most popular cross-platform services with 2 billion and 1.3 billion users. But it hasn’t cracked the U.S. at its usual scale, blaming Apple. As Zuckerberg complained earlier this year, “we increasingly see Apple as one of our biggest competitors. iMessage is a key linchpin of their ecosystem—which is …….
