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Steve Jobs Promised Open Source FaceTime Back in 2010: What Happened?
- nextstep 8y agoThis article is silly: they answer their own question at the end but pretend like this is still some big mystery or Apple never actually intended to nor wants to open source FaceTime. But without the VirnetX patents and the peer-to-peer architecture, this service requires significantly greater backend resources. I’m not sure how Apple could feasibly open this standard to third party clients now.
- raldi 8y ago> they answer their own question at the end They do? Where?
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago> There's also an ongoing lawsuit to consider -- as Ars Technica documented in 2013, Apple was forced to majorly change how FaceTime works to avoid infringing on the patents of a company called VirnetX. Instead of letting phones communicate directly with each other, Apple added "relay servers" to help the phones connect. > Presumably, someone would have to pay for those servers, and/or figure out a way for them to talk to Google or Microsoft or other third-party servers if FaceTime were going to be truly open.
- raldi 8y agoI don't see why the patents made an open standard impossible, or even relatively difficult.
- duskwuff 8y agoThe patents covered parts of the technology which Apple planned to make an open standard. This would have left the standard patent-encumbered, making it hazardous to implement.
- dingaling 8y agoVirnetX is a listed company. Apple could simply buy them out from under the Board's feet and throw them in the dumpster and not even notice the cost.
- raldi 8y agoMarket cap: 202M
- cpmouter 8y agoApple makes that in what? Ten minutes? ;-)
- glenra 8y ago> Apple makes that in what? Ten minutes? ;-) About a day and a half. (that's based on 2017's $48 billion net income) So Apple almost certainly could afford to buy the company, but they'd need a business case for doing so, weighing that option against all the OTHER nice things they might want to spend $200 million on.
- code_duck 8y agoApple also has something like 250 billion in liquid assets.
- gsich 8y agoIt's dead anyway, unless all your contacts (the ones you want to communicate with) own Apple devices.
- overcast 8y agoSo essentially everyone I know. We're not talking windows mobile here.
- blowski 8y agoOnly the person you want to talk with at that moment needs to be on an Apple device. For example, my wife and I both have iPhones, so we use FaceTime because it’s easier. My niece doesn’t, so we use Skype. Just because you personally aren’t using it, doesn’t mean it’s “dead”.
- gsich 8y agoIt's dead. If Email would only work between the same vendor, I would call it dead too. So dead means technologically dead. I would not recommend anyone using it. It doesn't allow cross vendor communication.
- gsich 8y agoLove the downvotes from Apple fan(atics). It means that the truth stings.
- skrowl 8y agoThey love their walled garden. When you point out > 80% of new devices sold are Android and can't use FaceTime, they don't care and just downvote without comment.
- blowski 8y agoHN in general frowns upon flamewar topics. Making comments like “FaceTime is dead” with no data to back it up, and “it’s only iPhone fanatics downvoting me” doesn’t contribute to a meaningful discussion. That’s why it’s being downvoted.
- awat 8y agoJump off point for VirnetX https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirnetX https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirnetX
- urda 8y agoNon mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirnetX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirnetX
- pluc 8y agoHe died?
- gowld 8y agoThe article title is simply wrong. Jobs promised to make open standards, not open source. To people talking about Virtex and server hosting: an open protocol doesn't imply that that a server must handle traffic for free. Your webserver runs an open protocol (HTTP) but only allows connections from authorized clients. Video-chat providers could sell access to their chat-hosting, or make peering agreements with other providers, like the regular Internet. But Jobs wasn't really interested in that; he was riding a marketing wave making promises he didn't have to keep.
- satai 8y agoIt's just a long way to say he was laying...
- minimaxir 8y agoIncidentally, an unexpected benefit of the server-relay FaceTime implementation is the ability for Apple to allow 32-person FaceTime calls which was a feature just announced on Monday.
- koolba 8y agoWouldn’t that require not being end to end encryption as well? They can’t stitch and re-encode the video streams if they can’t decode it server side.
- MBCook 8y agoCouldn’t you just encode the video for all 31 other public keys? I believe Apple explicitly said it was still end-to-end encrypted.
- greiskul 8y agoWouldn't this increase the upload bandwidth needed by 31? There might be a way for it to be end-to-end encrypted, but it's not a simple problem.
- dogma1138 8y agoYou never encrypt anything but the session key with the public key in this case all chat participants will exchange a single shared session key.
- therealmarv 8y agoWhatsApp has video group calling very soon too. But Facetime is at minimum an Apple account/id thing the same as Google Meet (which is great btw) is for Google accounts. So I don't see how Facetime really solves something in that area even when it would work for Android and Windows PCs. Side note: actually the algorithms used in Google Duo and Meet are better for low bandwidth (which you have in many areas of the world) than Facetime ever was.
- saurik 8y agoWe currently have only one person in our entire company of 15-20 people who uses both Android and Windows, and have been considering just buying her an iPod so she can use iMessage/Facetime.
- dogma1138 8y agoIm surprised she didn’t bought one herself it’s fairly easy usually to use an iPhone/Mac in a non-Apple environment the other way around is impossible because the native or exclusive solutions are quite good or at least entrenched enoguh to be used nearly exclusively.
- therealmarv 8y agoMarketing/Sales goal at Apple reached: 100%
- acct1771 8y agoBuying specific proprietary hardware to use specific proprietary software. The dream.
- seba_dos1 8y agoThat's rather a minority of companies out there.
- jedberg 8y agoRelatedly, what I don't get is how everyone is so excited about many-user FaceTime. I'm just glad they finally brought it back. Back in 2008 or 2009, all of team reddit used iChat AV to have a video meeting, and one of us was in California, one in Boston, and two in Australia. And it worked flawlessly. And it worked on Windows! FaceTime still hasn't caught up to Apple's own discontinued product ten years later.
- Schlaefer 8y agoYou could also show any Quicklook supported file in the iChat AV video stream. I remember doing some remote Keynote presentations that way. Resolutions wasn't great, but it worked. Ten+ years ago.
- Tloewald 8y agoI believe that they axed the mac product, then ported the iOS implementation to the Mac -- which makes perfect sense even if it was effectively a regression for those folks who had been happily using the desktop version. The new version looks amazing, even if it may still be technically a regression in some nooks and crannies.
- cp9 8y agothat is not what he promised. he promised standards, not an open source implementation
- SippinLean 8y agoThere's a Facetime-quality video chat app that runs on Apple and non-Apple hardware already, it's called Google Duo
- colejohnson66 8y agoBut is it end to end encrypted like FaceTime?
- jrs95 8y agoThat's not much better, it's still not an open standard. Plus since this is a Google chat app both it and it's successor will probably have been killed off in favor of yet another chat app within the next 2 years.
- mistermann 8y agoIs there anything that runs on iOS, Android, and Windows? Other than Skype (shudder).
- brazzledazzle 8y agoDiscord. I’m not sure if Slack can do multi-party video but it has person-to-person.
- skrowl 8y agoGoToMeeting, Hangouts, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, ooVoo, Viber, etc Wire or Signal is probably the closest in end-user use / UX to FaceTime, but I think their video calling is only 1:1 so far.
- shmerl 8y ago> And since there are good reasons for Apple to keep it that way, it probably never will. These reasons are far from good. Same as all Apple's obnoxious lock-in.
- st3fan 8y agoThe domain name is still available - openfacetime.org - I am happy to donate it to an open source project. Ping me on Twitter @satefan (I registered the domain while I was sitting in the audience at the WWDC where Jobs announced it would be open source)
- Djvacto 8y agoKind of sounds like the URL for a site about open-face sandwiches.
- hamilyon2 8y agoIsn't webrtc that open standard that everybody wants? We just need good client and server implementations with reasonable fallbacks for nat traversal, nice UI.
- thosakwe 8y agoHouseparty, another video chatting app that is picking up steam, uses WebRTC. WebRTC is P2P also, so I think that on a large scale it would be far less expensive, AND also afford way less laggy VoIP.
- beokop 8y agoWebRTC is garbage for group video. Since all clients have their own set of protocols they support you either have to a) re-encode N times to give each client what they want or b) use some sort of lowest common denominator encoding that all clients accept.
- lostsock 8y agohttps://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/ https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/ is pretty fantastic.
- gyrfalcon 8y agoIt's now an open standard inside apple, nowhere else... lol Promise kept.
- upofadown 8y agoAccording this article: * http://blog.krisk.org/2013/09/apples-new-facetime-sip-perspective.html http://blog.krisk.org/2013/09/apples-new-facetime-sip-perspe... ... FaceTime is more or less SIP hacked to work better with the crummy Internet we have to contend with these days. So we probably know enough to make something compatible. What we don't have is any assurance that Apple would allow such interoperation going forward. The problem is not actually technical...
- binnesjohn 8y agoMoney hungry apple was running to destroy any innovative or free functionality. Nooh, lets build sandboxes and licences to prevent this ..