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>You will upgrade because all of your data will be in iCloud and all of your finances will be in Apple Pay, and you will have no choice: you will upgrade or die

by jolux 11y ago

>You will upgrade because all of your data will be in iCloud and all of your finances will be in Apple Pay, and you will have no choice: you will upgrade or die. You can download all of your iCloud data from the web client, and Apple Pay doesn't involve the cloud at all. It's all stored and encrypted locally and you have to re-add your cards with every new device. (I don't even think they persist over backups?) >Even if Apple doesn't implement this strategy, they could, and that to me is cause for concern. Personally, I don't want the only thing standing in the way of being coerced in this way to buy things I don't want to be the continued benevolence of the largest corporation in the world. I want an escape hatch to keep Apple in check. And right now, I don't see one. Yes, and Microsoft could do the same. Will either of them actually do so? I doubt it, but I suppose it's possible on an infinite timeline. Keep in mind that Apple needs a platform for their own developers to use, and for app developers, and closing the Mac would make that very difficult. Apple also knows how many of its customers are developers and they wouldn't just throw that away for questionable gains. Lock-in is fragile because eventually you get users using your stuff because they have to instead of because they want to, which is never a good situation. >And the tools are set up so that you can only build for supported version of the OS. Near as I can tell, this is false. I can set my deployment target all the way back to OS X 10.4. Will this not work?

n0us 11y ago
I went from iPhone to Android and back again to iPhone. I had no troubles at all with either transition. Tech journalism can be so dramatic sometimes.
- rcraft 11y ago
  No problems with iMessage screwing you over when switching from Apple to Android? If you ever participate in any group mms messages its borderline impossible to escape apples ecosystem without serious drawbacks. If you switch to android and want to still receive group mms from friends, every member of the group mms that has an iPhone has to delete the entire thread and start a new thread. Not only that, they each need to add you or another non ios member as the first person in their new mms. Pretty ridiculous and irresponsible if you ask me.
  - jolux 11y ago
    iMessage is free, SMS is not. That's the tradeoff. iMessage is also encrypted. How do you propose adding those benefits to SMS without any cost to the user? Exactly. iMessage exists because SMS sucks, not just because they don't want you leaving. Same reason for the green bubbles. They know you'll berate your Android friends into switching because of them.
    - ac29 11y ago
      SMS are free in the US on all but the lowest of the low end plans. If you are paying for them you likely don't have a data plan to use with iMessage anyways, or a prohbitively expensive one. Ideally something like Signal would take off. Its free, cross-platform, encrypted, and supports more or less everything that SMS/MMS does without actually using those protocols. That being said, aside from encryption, I think SMS really doesn't suck. What messaging system exists on virtually every phone manufactured in the past 15 years, is a built in feature, isn't tied to a country, carrier, or platform, doesn't require data service, and costs nothing or next to it?
      - jolux 11y ago
        When iMessage was created SMS wasn't free on almost every data plan. That's a huge part of why it exists. I say it sucks because they charge for it at all when it doesn't actually cost them anything to provide and they aren't doing a heckuva lot of R&D work on SMS. It's also slower than iMessage and doesn't support delivery confirmations or read receipts. Signal is great. It would be awesome if more people used Signal. But iMessage is the next best thing IMO and it has what really matters: users.
  - n0us 11y ago
    MMS In general on Android never functioned properly, even for people who didn't have my contact before I got the phone. It was usually okay in the default messaging app but any 3rd party texting interface would mess up entirely when images or media were sent. I never had any issues like you are describing with group messaging to my knowledge but for that sort of thing I am primarily a groupme user so even if I did it wouldn't affect me.

by jolux 11y ago

n0us 11y ago

I went from iPhone to Android and back again to iPhone. I had no troubles at all with either transition. Tech journalism can be so dramatic sometimes.

rcraft 11y ago
No problems with iMessage screwing you over when switching from Apple to Android? If you ever participate in any group mms messages its borderline impossible to escape apples ecosystem without serious drawbacks. If you switch to android and want to still receive group mms from friends, every member of the group mms that has an iPhone has to delete the entire thread and start a new thread. Not only that, they each need to add you or another non ios member as the first person in their new mms. Pretty ridiculous and irresponsible if you ask me.
- jolux 11y ago
  iMessage is free, SMS is not. That's the tradeoff. iMessage is also encrypted. How do you propose adding those benefits to SMS without any cost to the user? Exactly. iMessage exists because SMS sucks, not just because they don't want you leaving. Same reason for the green bubbles. They know you'll berate your Android friends into switching because of them.
  - ac29 11y ago
    SMS are free in the US on all but the lowest of the low end plans. If you are paying for them you likely don't have a data plan to use with iMessage anyways, or a prohbitively expensive one. Ideally something like Signal would take off. Its free, cross-platform, encrypted, and supports more or less everything that SMS/MMS does without actually using those protocols. That being said, aside from encryption, I think SMS really doesn't suck. What messaging system exists on virtually every phone manufactured in the past 15 years, is a built in feature, isn't tied to a country, carrier, or platform, doesn't require data service, and costs nothing or next to it?
    - jolux 11y ago
      When iMessage was created SMS wasn't free on almost every data plan. That's a huge part of why it exists. I say it sucks because they charge for it at all when it doesn't actually cost them anything to provide and they aren't doing a heckuva lot of R&D work on SMS. It's also slower than iMessage and doesn't support delivery confirmations or read receipts. Signal is great. It would be awesome if more people used Signal. But iMessage is the next best thing IMO and it has what really matters: users.
- n0us 11y ago
  MMS In general on Android never functioned properly, even for people who didn't have my contact before I got the phone. It was usually okay in the default messaging app but any 3rd party texting interface would mess up entirely when images or media were sent. I never had any issues like you are describing with group messaging to my knowledge but for that sort of thing I am primarily a groupme user so even if I did it wouldn't affect me.