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> They aren’t Facebook. Nobody has to buy an iPhone to keep in touch with all their friends who have iPhones. I have a different perspective. Many of my diffe

> They aren’t Facebook. Nobody has to buy an iPhone to keep in touch with all their friends who have iPhones. I have a different perspective. Many of my different friend groups use the "group messaging" feature on their phones. If everyone is using an iPhone in that group, it defaults to using iMessage. I switched to Android about 18 months ago, and it broke all of the group text message chains I had because some of their phones continued to use iMessage even though my phone no longer supported it. Sometimes their messages came through to me, sometimes they didn't. I would see half of a conversation, and many of my messages wouldn't reach members of the group. Eventually, people stopped including me in group text messages because it made the chats unreliable. After 18 months of being increasingly isolated from all my friends, I switched back to an iPhone. I switched only for the reason that it was difficult to keep in touch with people without it. One-to-one messaging worked fine, but I was left out of group chats, a critical way my friends and I stay in touch.

brennebeck 7y ago
In that case wouldn’t it make sense to try to get your friends to use another group chat? I get people love to use the iMessage groups, but every friend I have on Android create a WhatsApp group, etc. and it’s pretty trivial to use and maintain, especially with close friends.
- jonahx 7y ago
  > In that case wouldn’t it make sense to try to get your friends to use another group chat? This greatly underestimates the power of habit and default choice. I can tell you for sure that if I tried to mount such campaign among my (non-techie) friends, there would be a lot of pushback and annoyance.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - baddox 7y ago
    But this doesn't seem at all relevant to market competition and antitrust laws. It's not much different than disagreements over which coffee shop your friends are going to meet at (maybe you're the only one that lives really far away from the group's most convenient location), or who gets invited to a group of friends' parties.
- untog 7y ago
  Wouldn’t it be easier to get each and every one of your friends to change their daily behaviour to suit a personal choice you made? Erm, no, no it would not be.
joefourier 7y ago
I've only heard of this happening in the US and Canada. Outside of North America, everyone uses Whatsapp, which supports group messaging on every platform. I'd be curious to know why it hasn't penetrated into those countries.
- teekert 7y ago
  I think it has to do with the fact that the US (and Canada) very early on had unlimited texting plans, and iMessage would make use of that (iPhones just send texts for iMessages in absence of a data connection). WhatsApp can only use data, which is cheaper and used to be unlimited (that's gone) in the EU. In contrast, texting was and still is insanely expensive in the EU (per byte it is staggering even, compared to normal data). Since data coverage was poor in the US in the 2G days (is this true? In the EU 2G was GPRS, meaning available when normal voice was available... I think it differs for US networks?) and texting was often included in a subscription, iMessage made a lot if sense and was very reliable. I remember early iPhone users complaining here in the EU that their iPhone unpredictably would sent iMessages either for free over wifi or for 50ct/message over sms/text (us EU citizens avoid sms/texting like the plague, allthough unlimited plans are now more commonplace, it's just too late). I recently set Signal to deal with my sms/text messages. Boy was that an expensive mistake when I accidentally texted my friend in Curacao instead of sending a normal Signal message.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Texting plans got huge allowances early on in the UK. I don't remember ever seeing unlimited data plans. However, the thing that was really expensive was "multimedia" messages (MMS), and occasionally you'd generate one of these by mistake by including an emoji in an SMS then suddenly be charged a whole pound for it. International texting is expensive though, while it's free in Whatsapp. Which is why it took off among various diasporas.
  - simias 7y ago
    >WhatsApp can only use data, which is cheaper and used to be unlimited (that's gone) in the EU. In contrast, texting was and still is insanely expensive in the EU (per byte it is staggering even, compared to normal data). You need to specify where in the EU, because it doesn't mirror my experience in France for instance. Data used to be very expensive while there were no shortages of plans with near-unlimited texts. It also isn't the case in many other countries in the world in my experience. AFAIK the advantage of WhatsApp over plain texts isn't that it's cheaper per-se, it's that it works over wi-fi which means that as long as you find a hotspot anywhere in the world you can use it. No need to worry about roaming fees, no need to worry about how many texts or MB of data are in your plan.
mprev 7y ago
Is that a sign of Apple’s dominance, though? It just feels like inertia because the existing solution worked well enough for your friend group.
Angostura 7y ago
If anyone else is facing the issue, here's how to deregister your number from iMessage: https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/ https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/ Should be Job Done.
- untog 7y ago
  It isn’t, though. Group MMSes are notoriously fickle, and doing something like sending a video to the group without it appearing in potato quality feels all but impossible at times. iMessage simply is better for group messaging.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    The fact that SMS group messages suck isn't something that Apple can really fix without an oob protocol which would basically be iMessage again.
    - untog 7y ago
      They could open up iMessage, which they originally said they were going to do, then stopped talking about it entirely. Even if they didn’t want to open it up they could make an iMessage Android app, like their Apple Music app.
      - Twisell 7y ago
        Feel free to thanks VirnetX about that... https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/10/17222380/apple-virtnetx-patent-troll-litigation-500-million-imessage-facetime-case https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/10/17222380/apple-virtnetx-p... It tough to blame Apple for not open-sourcing a protocol they are sued about by a patent troll. Until resolved properly this would be a toxic code-base anyway. Of course they could restart from scratch, but I guess they have no incentive to make efforts about that. What will be meaningful however is be what they'll do after patent exhaustion date of infringed VirnetX "patents".
        7y ago
logfromblammo 7y ago
I once heard my spouse complaining about Signal, and how they only had it loaded on their iPhone so they could talk to me. I asked why Signal was not their default SMS application, like it is on my Android phone. And that's when I discovered that Apple hoards certain core phone features for itself. Signal for iOS cannot send or receive ordinary SMS messages. This is a significant impediment to adoption of end-to-end encryption, because checking two applications to receive different kinds of messages is inconvenient, and inconvenience is the death of mobile applications. And here I note that Apple is effectively punishing users for apostasy. If you leave the Apple ecosystem, you are excommunicated from your former chat contacts. I, having never entered the Apple ecosystem, have no problem being included in group chats with iPhone users. (I occasionally have problems receiving media attachments, though.) This makes me even more wary of ever buying in, knowing that trying to leave later will cause all manner of problems as I try to reclaim functions that Apple will take over. Entering the walled gardens make me afraid of being locked in.
- bmarquez 7y ago
  Another issue with Signal -- you can't backup your chat logs on iOS like you do on Android (chat logs are encrypted btw). I'm not sure if that's a Signal issue or an Apple restriction.
  - pseudalopex 7y ago
    It's Signal.
- dpkonofa 7y ago
  >Signal for iOS cannot send or receive ordinary SMS messages. That's not an iOS limitation, though. I can send and receive SMS messages through Google Voice on iOS without any issue.
  - dpkonofa 7y ago
    I don't really understand why I got downvoted for a 100% accurate and truthful statement.
innagadadavida 7y ago
SMS group chats work fine on all platforms I know of. If your friends don’t like you for having an android phone and kick you off for forcing the Green bubble in group chats, the problem is not Apple’s phones or software. It’s something else entirely.

brennebeck 7y ago

In that case wouldn’t it make sense to try to get your friends to use another group chat? I get people love to use the iMessage groups, but every friend I have on Android create a WhatsApp group, etc. and it’s pretty trivial to use and maintain, especially with close friends.

jonahx 7y ago
> In that case wouldn’t it make sense to try to get your friends to use another group chat? This greatly underestimates the power of habit and default choice. I can tell you for sure that if I tried to mount such campaign among my (non-techie) friends, there would be a lot of pushback and annoyance.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- baddox 7y ago
  But this doesn't seem at all relevant to market competition and antitrust laws. It's not much different than disagreements over which coffee shop your friends are going to meet at (maybe you're the only one that lives really far away from the group's most convenient location), or who gets invited to a group of friends' parties.
untog 7y ago
Wouldn’t it be easier to get each and every one of your friends to change their daily behaviour to suit a personal choice you made? Erm, no, no it would not be.

joefourier 7y ago

I've only heard of this happening in the US and Canada. Outside of North America, everyone uses Whatsapp, which supports group messaging on every platform. I'd be curious to know why it hasn't penetrated into those countries.

teekert 7y ago
I think it has to do with the fact that the US (and Canada) very early on had unlimited texting plans, and iMessage would make use of that (iPhones just send texts for iMessages in absence of a data connection). WhatsApp can only use data, which is cheaper and used to be unlimited (that's gone) in the EU. In contrast, texting was and still is insanely expensive in the EU (per byte it is staggering even, compared to normal data). Since data coverage was poor in the US in the 2G days (is this true? In the EU 2G was GPRS, meaning available when normal voice was available... I think it differs for US networks?) and texting was often included in a subscription, iMessage made a lot if sense and was very reliable. I remember early iPhone users complaining here in the EU that their iPhone unpredictably would sent iMessages either for free over wifi or for 50ct/message over sms/text (us EU citizens avoid sms/texting like the plague, allthough unlimited plans are now more commonplace, it's just too late). I recently set Signal to deal with my sms/text messages. Boy was that an expensive mistake when I accidentally texted my friend in Curacao instead of sending a normal Signal message.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Texting plans got huge allowances early on in the UK. I don't remember ever seeing unlimited data plans. However, the thing that was really expensive was "multimedia" messages (MMS), and occasionally you'd generate one of these by mistake by including an emoji in an SMS then suddenly be charged a whole pound for it. International texting is expensive though, while it's free in Whatsapp. Which is why it took off among various diasporas.
- simias 7y ago
  >WhatsApp can only use data, which is cheaper and used to be unlimited (that's gone) in the EU. In contrast, texting was and still is insanely expensive in the EU (per byte it is staggering even, compared to normal data). You need to specify where in the EU, because it doesn't mirror my experience in France for instance. Data used to be very expensive while there were no shortages of plans with near-unlimited texts. It also isn't the case in many other countries in the world in my experience. AFAIK the advantage of WhatsApp over plain texts isn't that it's cheaper per-se, it's that it works over wi-fi which means that as long as you find a hotspot anywhere in the world you can use it. No need to worry about roaming fees, no need to worry about how many texts or MB of data are in your plan.

mprev 7y ago

Is that a sign of Apple’s dominance, though? It just feels like inertia because the existing solution worked well enough for your friend group.

Angostura 7y ago

If anyone else is facing the issue, here's how to deregister your number from iMessage: https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/ https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/ Should be Job Done.

untog 7y ago
It isn’t, though. Group MMSes are notoriously fickle, and doing something like sending a video to the group without it appearing in potato quality feels all but impossible at times. iMessage simply is better for group messaging.
- Spivak 7y ago
  The fact that SMS group messages suck isn't something that Apple can really fix without an oob protocol which would basically be iMessage again.
  - untog 7y ago
    They could open up iMessage, which they originally said they were going to do, then stopped talking about it entirely. Even if they didn’t want to open it up they could make an iMessage Android app, like their Apple Music app.
    - Twisell 7y ago
      Feel free to thanks VirnetX about that... https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/10/17222380/apple-virtnetx-patent-troll-litigation-500-million-imessage-facetime-case https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/10/17222380/apple-virtnetx-p... It tough to blame Apple for not open-sourcing a protocol they are sued about by a patent troll. Until resolved properly this would be a toxic code-base anyway. Of course they could restart from scratch, but I guess they have no incentive to make efforts about that. What will be meaningful however is be what they'll do after patent exhaustion date of infringed VirnetX "patents".
      - 7y ago

logfromblammo 7y ago

I once heard my spouse complaining about Signal, and how they only had it loaded on their iPhone so they could talk to me. I asked why Signal was not their default SMS application, like it is on my Android phone. And that's when I discovered that Apple hoards certain core phone features for itself. Signal for iOS cannot send or receive ordinary SMS messages. This is a significant impediment to adoption of end-to-end encryption, because checking two applications to receive different kinds of messages is inconvenient, and inconvenience is the death of mobile applications. And here I note that Apple is effectively punishing users for apostasy. If you leave the Apple ecosystem, you are excommunicated from your former chat contacts. I, having never entered the Apple ecosystem, have no problem being included in group chats with iPhone users. (I occasionally have problems receiving media attachments, though.) This makes me even more wary of ever buying in, knowing that trying to leave later will cause all manner of problems as I try to reclaim functions that Apple will take over. Entering the walled gardens make me afraid of being locked in.

bmarquez 7y ago
Another issue with Signal -- you can't backup your chat logs on iOS like you do on Android (chat logs are encrypted btw). I'm not sure if that's a Signal issue or an Apple restriction.
- pseudalopex 7y ago
  It's Signal.
dpkonofa 7y ago
>Signal for iOS cannot send or receive ordinary SMS messages. That's not an iOS limitation, though. I can send and receive SMS messages through Google Voice on iOS without any issue.
- dpkonofa 7y ago
  I don't really understand why I got downvoted for a 100% accurate and truthful statement.

innagadadavida 7y ago

SMS group chats work fine on all platforms I know of. If your friends don’t like you for having an android phone and kick you off for forcing the Green bubble in group chats, the problem is not Apple’s phones or software. It’s something else entirely.