> Has that actually been decided? I know Apple pushed some weird arguments about their size, but AFAIK they're still counted as a gatekeeper.

Only in a tentative sense[0], but based on the facts it’s inevitable.

What you call “weird arguments”, I call simply the logical conclusion based on facts.

For Apple to be deemed a gatekeeper under the DMA w/r/t iMessage, Apple needs to pass a couple of thresholds. Nobody is arguing the revenue and market cap thresholds, so I’ll skip those.

That leaves either 45m monthly active users or 10k monthly active business users.

Apple’s claim is that they don’t meet those thresholds. Apple could of course lie, but companies of this size typically don’t commit fraud that could easily be disproven by a basic criminal investigation that could be triggered when fraud is suspected.

When you take into account the lower market penetration of iPhones and other Apple devices in the EU and then take into account the abysmal market penetration of iMessage in the EU it’s very plausible that Apple doesn’t have 45m monthly active users.

And frankly nobody is seriously disputing the 45m number. Instead people, including Google et al., were mainly focusing on the 10k monthly active business users, because they hoped that lower threshold was easier to prove.

Not only is the EU’s tentative conclusion that Apple doesn’t even have 10k monthly active business users, but this too is very plausible.

If you look at the US, where iMessage is most successful compared to other countries, you can’t even find 10,000 companies that support iMessage Business Chat.
I can tell you from personal experience that in the EU the amount of companies that have adopted it is in the single digits, mainly airlines that have adopted it to serve their international (often American) passengers.

Now one could argue that regular non-Business Chat iMessage should be included in that count, which is a minor debate that part of the greater debate, but even if that premise would be accepted, you’d then circle back to low adoption rates of iMessage amongst EU consumers and the question of how many companies will bother to send iMessages to their customers when SMS provides a near guarantee that the message will be received by the customer.

In my personal experience, I’ve never received an iMessage from a business in all my 30+ years of living in the EU. Businesses big and small will instead insist on sending messages via WhatsApp, if they insist on reaching out by non-traditional means at all (i.e., SMS, email, call).

None of my anecdotes are authoritative of course, purely a speck of data in an already plausible claim that Apple makes about their monthly active users.

As it stands, all signs, including the ones produced by the EU themselves, point to Apple not meeting the thresholds.

> Kinda. The Brussels effect is very real and multiple EU changes got effectively implemented worldwide. For example you can get a full data checkout from lots of online companies, regardless of your EU connection. (Including Apple https://www.mobileworldlive.com/featured-content/top-three/a... )

That only goes so far. In particular when it comes to pet peeves that Apple has, like iMessage and side-loading.
We already know that when it comes to the latter Apple intends to only enable that in the EU, going as far as developing a special “countryd” daemon to ensure that it’ll only be activated in the EU[1].

0: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-imessage-dodge-eu...

1: https://9to5mac.com/2023/04/25/ios-16-restrict-features-base...