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Apple murders this space. iMessage does all of the stuff whatsapp does regarding groups, etc AND it has a killer desktop client (the mac). Not only that but my

by tbrock 10y ago

Apple murders this space. iMessage does all of the stuff whatsapp does regarding groups, etc AND it has a killer desktop client (the mac). Not only that but my non iMesssage text messages are proxied to my mac as well. I can communicate via wifi, on a plane, and talk to my sister in Belgium or my other sister in Argentina for free. I can choose to use text, voice, or video, crystal clear, no hassle, no money, no setup. However, the killer feature is seamlessly having conversation on my phone, then continuing on my phone, then continuing on my laptop... etc

madeofpalk 10y ago
Theoretically, and providing who you want to talk to has an iPhone. I use iMessage almost exclusively (with one group of friends on Facebook Messenger for some historic reason), but when a friend switched to Android, and because I don't use WhatsApp, my communication with him outside of work has dropped significantly.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
dilap 10y ago
yeah but it totally falls down if you have any friends w/o iphones! are there any imessage clients for android? apple should just make an official one, and make it good. no immediate benefit, but long term it's always valuable to own the platform, and it's (amazingly) still ripe for the taking in the u.s. side note: it's amazing how shitty the native fb messenger and google hangout apps are for iphone.
- moftz 10y ago
  I don't see Apple ever opening up iMessage for any device other than their own. iMessage has some neat features but nothing that is totally unique from things like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, PushBullet, etc. Apple isn't making any money directly off of iMessage, its a feature of their platform. Opening it up would just increase Apple's cost for running it and remove one of the last things that makes an iPhone unique over the other major flagship phones. It's their killer app in a world where all phones look alike and all run near identical hardware specs.
  - dilap 10y ago
    sure, but this was the same argument about keeping ipods mac only, itunes, safari, etc. there's some truth in it, but overlooks the much larger advantages of having more people use your stuff, and, most importantly, of owning a dominant platform. owning the de-facto messaging platform would be a hugely great position to be in. right now messaging is mostly just that, messages, but there's a ton of stuff that would be quite natural to integrate into and on top of it (look to china as an example). also, like you say, messaging apps themselves aren't super-rare; it's not like oh-my-god secret sauce selling 1000x iphones. but it does happen to be, arguably, the nicest messenger that's currently out there. if they opened it up to android, they could become the dominant messaging platform (maybe). huge wasted opportunity.
uola 10y ago
"Apple murders this space." Not really, you just don't know what you're missing because you've never had an ecosystem like wechat and qq.
mcphage 10y ago
> iMessage does all of the stuff whatsapp does regarding groups Well, it can. But it can also be a nightmare. I've had a long running group chat with 2 other people (so only 3 people!) and it frequently fucks up—one person no longer getting texts on certain devices. Random copies of our group being formed and reformed. Receiving texts in one version of the group, and when sending them, they show up in another. The group name is common, so occasionally it gets renamed. Our avatar images getting replaced by random images (I think this is a bug in the iPhone address book rather than iMessages, but it still annoys me in iMessages). And so on. Most of the time it works nicely, but once every few months it's a real pain for a few days.

by tbrock 10y ago

madeofpalk 10y ago

Theoretically, and providing who you want to talk to has an iPhone. I use iMessage almost exclusively (with one group of friends on Facebook Messenger for some historic reason), but when a friend switched to Android, and because I don't use WhatsApp, my communication with him outside of work has dropped significantly.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

dilap 10y ago

yeah but it totally falls down if you have any friends w/o iphones! are there any imessage clients for android? apple should just make an official one, and make it good. no immediate benefit, but long term it's always valuable to own the platform, and it's (amazingly) still ripe for the taking in the u.s. side note: it's amazing how shitty the native fb messenger and google hangout apps are for iphone.

moftz 10y ago
I don't see Apple ever opening up iMessage for any device other than their own. iMessage has some neat features but nothing that is totally unique from things like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, PushBullet, etc. Apple isn't making any money directly off of iMessage, its a feature of their platform. Opening it up would just increase Apple's cost for running it and remove one of the last things that makes an iPhone unique over the other major flagship phones. It's their killer app in a world where all phones look alike and all run near identical hardware specs.
- dilap 10y ago
  sure, but this was the same argument about keeping ipods mac only, itunes, safari, etc. there's some truth in it, but overlooks the much larger advantages of having more people use your stuff, and, most importantly, of owning a dominant platform. owning the de-facto messaging platform would be a hugely great position to be in. right now messaging is mostly just that, messages, but there's a ton of stuff that would be quite natural to integrate into and on top of it (look to china as an example). also, like you say, messaging apps themselves aren't super-rare; it's not like oh-my-god secret sauce selling 1000x iphones. but it does happen to be, arguably, the nicest messenger that's currently out there. if they opened it up to android, they could become the dominant messaging platform (maybe). huge wasted opportunity.

uola 10y ago

"Apple murders this space." Not really, you just don't know what you're missing because you've never had an ecosystem like wechat and qq.

mcphage 10y ago

> iMessage does all of the stuff whatsapp does regarding groups Well, it can. But it can also be a nightmare. I've had a long running group chat with 2 other people (so only 3 people!) and it frequently fucks up—one person no longer getting texts on certain devices. Random copies of our group being formed and reformed. Receiving texts in one version of the group, and when sending them, they show up in another. The group name is common, so occasionally it gets renamed. Our avatar images getting replaced by random images (I think this is a bug in the iPhone address book rather than iMessages, but it still annoys me in iMessages). And so on. Most of the time it works nicely, but once every few months it's a real pain for a few days.