Europeans using Apple, Google and other major tech platforms woke to a new reality Thursday as a landmark law imposed tough new competition rules on the companies — changing European Union citizens’ experience with phones, apps, browsers and more.
The new EU regulations force sweeping changes on some of the world’s most widely used tech products, including Apple’s app store, Google search and messaging platforms, including Meta’s WhatsApp. And they mark a turning point in a global effort by regulators to bring tech giants to heel after years of allegations that the companies harmed competition and left consumers worse off.
It would certainly be a technical challenge. But I think the utility would be very high. In my experience, it’s difficult to convince people to use an app like Signal if they can’t use it to communicate with their Whatsapp contacts (etc.).
It would probably just use RCS as the backend and have some different functionalities, they could easily just highlight “this person isn’t using Signal so chat features are limited”. Hell, Signal had exactly this when they made the app work as an alternative SMS client. They removed that feature, but it existed previously.