It definitely seems like there's an undercurrent of geopolitics involved here, as there's not a single EU company on this list.

It makes me wonder if the US is coming after ASML, the lone EU technology powerhouse, and this is a bargaining chip.

There's no EU company involved because there's no EU company big enough to matter to the degree that those regulations seek to fix.

What's really surprising here is that iMessage escaped this. Apple claims it has 25mil monthly users in the EU, so now the EU will investigate that claim.

I honestly doubt that's true. But let's see.

In EU, WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal are way more popular. Lots of friends do own an iPhone, but seldom or never use iMessage. The first they do is installing WhatsApp. This is in part because WhatsApp had a head start in Europe and was cross platform all the time. I would not surprised if Apples claim not to have 45 Mio _active_ _monthly_ users will hold.

As other said, everyone is using WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Viber, ..., however the reason to why iMessage is marginal in EU is because it is using SMS to communicate with people without iOS, and SMS are usually not free. So people are using applications which are guaranteed to be free per message.

That might have been the original reason, but right now most plans come with unlimited text messages in my country and that didn’t entice anyone to switch back. iMessage is great when all your contacts own an Apple device, but if not, your using ancient text messages with very limited functionality compared to the cross-platform messaging app that everyone is already using.