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If ever Apple needed to open source server and client code for a public good it is with imessages. Yes it has clear limits with a centralized server, but it is

If ever Apple needed to open source server and client code for a public good it is with imessages. Yes it has clear limits with a centralized server, but it is realistically how a lot of “secure” messaging happens and it’s very difficult to endorse being tied to expensive hardware. You can say the same about facetime: it is clearly higher quality than competitors in every experiment I’ve tried, but their refusal to interact with the wider software community means we all use zoom or skype instead for personal chatting. These are tools; they should be effectively free and universal.

philwelch 6y ago
The main selling point of Zoom seems to be their handling of large group conferences though.
- dpeck 6y ago
  FT goes up to 32 participants now I think. Well before that you're into 1-many kind of mode vs a 1-few, they're very different experiences and different use cases.
- monadic2 6y ago
  Absolutely a good point. You can’t have “FaceTime” parties in the same way you can on zoom.
rrdharan 6y ago
Who's "we all" here? The "wider software community"? There are certainly tens of millions of users of FaceTime; I'd wager more than the entire population of the "wider software community". I don't disagree with the ideological position but personally I find it harder to argue with the economics without having also created and operated a billion dollar services and hardware business. Interestingly I can't find recent authoritative DAU/MAU stats for iMessage or FaceTime; the last time Tim Cook seems to have quoted numbers was in 2014: https://www.ubergizmo.com/2014/02/apple-handles-40-billion-imessages-15-20-million-facetime-calls-daily/ https://www.ubergizmo.com/2014/02/apple-handles-40-billion-i...
est31 6y ago
iMessage motivates people to people buy iPhones instead of Android when everyone else in a social circle has it. Why should Apple give up on that? What will Apple gain from making it ubiquitous? It would in fact disappoint many people as now they can't use their phone to distance themselves from the people who don't have that blue circle. Note that I'm arguing from Apple's perspective here. From my own I believe they should absolutely open it up.
- kelnos 6y ago
  > iMessage motivates people to people buy iPhones instead of Android Why, though? Does your average iPhone user actually care if the bubbles they see in their chats are blue or green? If so, why? Note that I'm talking about average users. Sure, there are likely a bunch of privacy-conscious users who believe in Apple's commitment to security and privacy and prefer iMessage on those grounds. But otherwise, why? > It would in fact disappoint many people as now they can't use their phone to distance themselves from the people who don't have that blue circle. If that's truly the case, I don't think I'd want to be friends with people who place importance on such superficial, trivial things. Full disclosure: I've been an Android user for 10 years and the closest I ever got to owning an iPhone was an iPod Touch I stopped using in 2012 or so. SMS is fine for my needs most of the time, though MMS for group texting is ridiculously unreliable so I try to funnel people to Signal or WhatsApp for those use-cases. I guess I just don't see a closed iMessage as that huge of a competitive advantage for Apple. But presumably they know better as to what drives sales.
  - harpratap 6y ago
    > Why, though? Does your average iPhone user actually care if the bubbles they see in their chats are blue or green? If so, why? They definitely do. Not sure what your age or demographic is, but young folks do care a lot about higher social status which is tied to blue bubble because of iPhone prices. It has nothing to do with privacy though.
    - spideymans 6y ago
      They care because the green bubbles indicate a severely impaired user experience. For example, multimedia may not work, and even if it does, its typically very poor quality.
iphone_elegance 6y ago
Is't facetime pretty must a standard softphone (eg: sip/srtp) using h264? i wonder if it's only "closed" due to authentication concerns there's not much else to "open up" that's not already
- casefields 6y ago
  FaceTime has used h.265 since the iPhone 6: https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/09/13/apples-iphone-6-iphone-6-plus-use-h265-codec-for-facetime-over-cellular https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/09/13/apples-iphone-6-i...
ponker 6y ago
Apple built iMessage and FaceTime to move Apple devices. Why would or should they open it? Not to mention, it is probably tied into the hardware at a deep level — it clearly works much better on more modern phones, and better on iOS than MacOS.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  My recollection is that FaceTime isn't open beyond the Apple ecosystem because of patents. I believe Apple had to pay millions in a related lawsuit.
- teruakohatu 6y ago
  > Why would or should they open it? They said they would make it an open standard. People took them on their word. https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/06/make-facetime-an-open-standard/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/06/make-facetime-an-open-standar...
  - halostatue 6y ago
    Then they got hit with by a patent troll.
    - harpratap 6y ago
      Dealing with patent trolls is the rite of passage. It shouldn't be a deterrent if you really cared about open sourcing your software
    - dingaling 6y ago
      I'm sure that the ~richest company on Earth could have consumed VirnetX without a hiccough.
- statictype 6y ago
  Because Apple has signalled an intent to become more service oriented instead of device oriented. Because theres a limit to how many physical devices they can sell and would like to keep growing after they hit that limit. Its why Apple Music works on Android and has a Javascript SDK
randomdata 6y ago
Facetime was announced as an open standard to be. It is speculated that it never came to light because of a patent dispute[1]. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/06/make-facetime-an-open-standard/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/06/make-facetime-an-open-standar...
- joshspankit 6y ago
  Apple set up colocated servers across the world and changed the Facetime protocol significantly to work around a single patent (a patent for direct device to device communication of all things). I can’t imagine a patent dispute actually stopping them if they were firm on making FT an open standard.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    A lawsuit that they paid out $400 million for, even after rearchitecting how FaceTime worked to avoid the patent?
    - patentatt 6y ago
      Speculation, but the settlement could be for past damages while the workaround would avoid future damages.
  - giancarlostoro 6y ago
    How that patent is even valid astounds me. It saddens me more Apple did not challenge the patent!
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      They did and lost. Eastern Texas, I tell you…
  - ajconway 6y ago
    I come from a land where patents don’t really work. I often wonder, are there any examples of patents in the field of software engineering that worked like they supposed to, protecting small collectives from powerful corporations?
loosescrews 6y ago
I think Google Duo and WhatsApp are the competitors to Facetime. Zoom is more of a competitor in the video conferencing space along with Google Meet, Skype for Business and Cisco WebEx. Regular Skype is more of a competitor in the all-in-one consumer messaging space along with Google Hangouts. Unfortunately all are proprietary and it was the previous generation, iChat and Google Talk, that were based on the open XMPP standard.
- klodolph 6y ago
  Is Google Duo much of a competitor? Hangouts is circling the drain, Allo is dead, and everyone I know is confused by Duo, including Google employees. If you made a list of the ways Google employees made video calls to each other outside work, I’d be suprised if Duo were in the top three.
  - jvolkman 6y ago
    What is confusing about Duo? It's a phone-number-based video caller. It's one of the simpler messaging apps that Google has made.
    - klodolph 6y ago
      Duo: A simple app with a confusing name, released four years ago to compete with another app that Google made that did the same thing but more, and released as a matched set with a different app which also had a confusing name but is now discontinued. Forgive me if I’m getting old and can’t keep up with this shit. I make video calls through four different apps depending on who I’m talking to, and I just can’t be bothered to deal with Google’s constantly-changing messaging landscape. I know people who are still angry about the Messenger app being split off from Facebook, but that’s nothing compared to the dumpster fire that is Google’s messaging app landscape. So if I want to make a video call to one of my Google employee friends it’s not going to be through Duo because it seems like they don’t have time for this shit either. Who knows, maybe Duo will take off?
      - 6y ago
shireboy 6y ago
Absolutely have been saying this for years. It’s ridiculous for iMessage to be a walled garden. How would it be if emails from iPhone could only go to other iPhones? Yet shrink the email and put a blue bubble around it and that’s just fine.
on_and_off 6y ago
the state of messaging is quite depressing. You have apple doing its own thing and with apparently no intention to have its communication service on all the major platform. Google doing what google does and running like an headless chicken creating a new service every minute instead of creating one good one. Last time I tried to launch WeChat, you had to surrender to it a disgusting amount of personal information to even launch the app. You have some outliers like Telegram or Signal, but good luck getting all your contacts on there. As a result I just have a dozen of messaging apps installed on my devices.
sytelus 6y ago
I'd read about an article how there is a significant "dark" black hat companies which do nothing but dig up into the open source codes to find the exploits. They invest big time to develop proprietary tools for autonomous scanning of latest vulnerabilities. Such exploits then get sold for millions of dollars. They do open source code scanning to everything from popular Python packages to popular Chrome extensions to Office plugins to Linux kernel to open source phone apps. One might think that opening the source will lead to code reviews by many and fix security bugs. In my own experience with open sourcing few projects, I've not seen that happening. Vast majority of contributors aren't willing to spend a lot of time in reviewing security issues and fixing for you. In fact, virtually all contributors will send you patches that are often half assed and have security issues which you might unknowingly accept because all tests are passing, you don't have much time and in code reviews everything look ok. For things like iMessage, I suspect billions of dollars worth of important decisions are made by everyone from Jeff Bezos to the President of USA. In my opinion, open sourcing something like this would give a handsome payday to many black hat hacking groups including state owned agencies.
- monadic2 6y ago
  So you would prefer to keep open exploits around and approach with security-by-obscurity? Somehow I think Apple can muster the resources to respond to vulnerabilities in exactly the same way you’re claiming they respond to open source exploitation. You may have a point with much smaller projects, but this is apple and they can easily outfund exploiters before there’s mass exploitation according to your analysis of increased attention.
  - sytelus 6y ago
    That's not how it works. I think you have little idea, if any, how easy it is to find exploits if you had a source code vs if you didn't. With source code you can immediately see the conditions that will cause buffer overruns, for example. One of the huge target has always been jpeg decoder code in Chrome. If you can somehow figure out conditions that will result in buffer overrun, you will have exploit just by creating artificial jpeg. Your victim simply needs to visit your webpage with that jpeg which even can be pushed by narrowly targeted ads, Facebook etc. Building such exploits is much harder to accomplish without having source code. This is rather outdated example but think about possibilities in JavaScript engine, HTML rendering, graphics drivers, OS calls, extensions, APIs etc. When you have 10 million lines of code, you almost inevitabily have some exploit. Such zero day are often sold for 10s of millions of dollars. Its much much harder to find same vulnerabilities without having source code. Your argument that somehow Apple will do better than these black hat guys is also flawed. Apple can higher N security experts but Apple will always unlikely to match in number of firms and state agencies who can hire M >> N in aggregate. Think of Apple running centralize effort with N people while whole world running distributed attack every day every hour with 10X more eyes and time on hand. Also it has been very well understood within security professionals that source code gets far more scruitiny from black hat then white hat guys. Finally, remember that people don't update their systems for months and even years. You should know that Bezos iPhone was hacked by an exploit developed by a black hat firm which ultimately cost him $40B in divorce. Think about that for a second. A single software vunerability cost was $40 billion, more than market cap of many companies and GDPs of many countries. This is a guy who literally owns huge chunk of public and private infrastructure, has the best of the best security experts at his finger tips and he got hacked.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
Even in an all Apple ecosystem my family is using Zoom because we can't add multiple Facetime people to a call for some reason and there is no messaging explaining why. Probably one of us running an old OS or something (All devices are recent) but whatever why should I waste my time debugging that with my elderly parents when Zoom just works.

philwelch 6y ago

The main selling point of Zoom seems to be their handling of large group conferences though.

dpeck 6y ago
FT goes up to 32 participants now I think. Well before that you're into 1-many kind of mode vs a 1-few, they're very different experiences and different use cases.
monadic2 6y ago
Absolutely a good point. You can’t have “FaceTime” parties in the same way you can on zoom.

rrdharan 6y ago

Who's "we all" here? The "wider software community"? There are certainly tens of millions of users of FaceTime; I'd wager more than the entire population of the "wider software community". I don't disagree with the ideological position but personally I find it harder to argue with the economics without having also created and operated a billion dollar services and hardware business. Interestingly I can't find recent authoritative DAU/MAU stats for iMessage or FaceTime; the last time Tim Cook seems to have quoted numbers was in 2014: https://www.ubergizmo.com/2014/02/apple-handles-40-billion-imessages-15-20-million-facetime-calls-daily/ https://www.ubergizmo.com/2014/02/apple-handles-40-billion-i...

est31 6y ago

iMessage motivates people to people buy iPhones instead of Android when everyone else in a social circle has it. Why should Apple give up on that? What will Apple gain from making it ubiquitous? It would in fact disappoint many people as now they can't use their phone to distance themselves from the people who don't have that blue circle. Note that I'm arguing from Apple's perspective here. From my own I believe they should absolutely open it up.

kelnos 6y ago
> iMessage motivates people to people buy iPhones instead of Android Why, though? Does your average iPhone user actually care if the bubbles they see in their chats are blue or green? If so, why? Note that I'm talking about average users. Sure, there are likely a bunch of privacy-conscious users who believe in Apple's commitment to security and privacy and prefer iMessage on those grounds. But otherwise, why? > It would in fact disappoint many people as now they can't use their phone to distance themselves from the people who don't have that blue circle. If that's truly the case, I don't think I'd want to be friends with people who place importance on such superficial, trivial things. Full disclosure: I've been an Android user for 10 years and the closest I ever got to owning an iPhone was an iPod Touch I stopped using in 2012 or so. SMS is fine for my needs most of the time, though MMS for group texting is ridiculously unreliable so I try to funnel people to Signal or WhatsApp for those use-cases. I guess I just don't see a closed iMessage as that huge of a competitive advantage for Apple. But presumably they know better as to what drives sales.
- harpratap 6y ago
  > Why, though? Does your average iPhone user actually care if the bubbles they see in their chats are blue or green? If so, why? They definitely do. Not sure what your age or demographic is, but young folks do care a lot about higher social status which is tied to blue bubble because of iPhone prices. It has nothing to do with privacy though.
  - spideymans 6y ago
    They care because the green bubbles indicate a severely impaired user experience. For example, multimedia may not work, and even if it does, its typically very poor quality.

iphone_elegance 6y ago

Is't facetime pretty must a standard softphone (eg: sip/srtp) using h264? i wonder if it's only "closed" due to authentication concerns there's not much else to "open up" that's not already

casefields 6y ago
FaceTime has used h.265 since the iPhone 6: https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/09/13/apples-iphone-6-iphone-6-plus-use-h265-codec-for-facetime-over-cellular https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/09/13/apples-iphone-6-i...

ponker 6y ago

Apple built iMessage and FaceTime to move Apple devices. Why would or should they open it? Not to mention, it is probably tied into the hardware at a deep level — it clearly works much better on more modern phones, and better on iOS than MacOS.

reaperducer 6y ago
My recollection is that FaceTime isn't open beyond the Apple ecosystem because of patents. I believe Apple had to pay millions in a related lawsuit.
teruakohatu 6y ago
> Why would or should they open it? They said they would make it an open standard. People took them on their word. https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/06/make-facetime-an-open-standard/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/06/make-facetime-an-open-standar...
- halostatue 6y ago
  Then they got hit with by a patent troll.
  - harpratap 6y ago
    Dealing with patent trolls is the rite of passage. It shouldn't be a deterrent if you really cared about open sourcing your software
  - dingaling 6y ago
    I'm sure that the ~richest company on Earth could have consumed VirnetX without a hiccough.
statictype 6y ago
Because Apple has signalled an intent to become more service oriented instead of device oriented. Because theres a limit to how many physical devices they can sell and would like to keep growing after they hit that limit. Its why Apple Music works on Android and has a Javascript SDK

randomdata 6y ago

Facetime was announced as an open standard to be. It is speculated that it never came to light because of a patent dispute[1]. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/06/make-facetime-an-open-standard/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/06/make-facetime-an-open-standar...

joshspankit 6y ago
Apple set up colocated servers across the world and changed the Facetime protocol significantly to work around a single patent (a patent for direct device to device communication of all things). I can’t imagine a patent dispute actually stopping them if they were firm on making FT an open standard.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  A lawsuit that they paid out $400 million for, even after rearchitecting how FaceTime worked to avoid the patent?
  - patentatt 6y ago
    Speculation, but the settlement could be for past damages while the workaround would avoid future damages.
- giancarlostoro 6y ago
  How that patent is even valid astounds me. It saddens me more Apple did not challenge the patent!
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    They did and lost. Eastern Texas, I tell you…
- ajconway 6y ago
  I come from a land where patents don’t really work. I often wonder, are there any examples of patents in the field of software engineering that worked like they supposed to, protecting small collectives from powerful corporations?

loosescrews 6y ago

I think Google Duo and WhatsApp are the competitors to Facetime. Zoom is more of a competitor in the video conferencing space along with Google Meet, Skype for Business and Cisco WebEx. Regular Skype is more of a competitor in the all-in-one consumer messaging space along with Google Hangouts. Unfortunately all are proprietary and it was the previous generation, iChat and Google Talk, that were based on the open XMPP standard.

klodolph 6y ago
Is Google Duo much of a competitor? Hangouts is circling the drain, Allo is dead, and everyone I know is confused by Duo, including Google employees. If you made a list of the ways Google employees made video calls to each other outside work, I’d be suprised if Duo were in the top three.
- jvolkman 6y ago
  What is confusing about Duo? It's a phone-number-based video caller. It's one of the simpler messaging apps that Google has made.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    Duo: A simple app with a confusing name, released four years ago to compete with another app that Google made that did the same thing but more, and released as a matched set with a different app which also had a confusing name but is now discontinued. Forgive me if I’m getting old and can’t keep up with this shit. I make video calls through four different apps depending on who I’m talking to, and I just can’t be bothered to deal with Google’s constantly-changing messaging landscape. I know people who are still angry about the Messenger app being split off from Facebook, but that’s nothing compared to the dumpster fire that is Google’s messaging app landscape. So if I want to make a video call to one of my Google employee friends it’s not going to be through Duo because it seems like they don’t have time for this shit either. Who knows, maybe Duo will take off?
    - 6y ago

shireboy 6y ago

Absolutely have been saying this for years. It’s ridiculous for iMessage to be a walled garden. How would it be if emails from iPhone could only go to other iPhones? Yet shrink the email and put a blue bubble around it and that’s just fine.

on_and_off 6y ago

the state of messaging is quite depressing. You have apple doing its own thing and with apparently no intention to have its communication service on all the major platform. Google doing what google does and running like an headless chicken creating a new service every minute instead of creating one good one. Last time I tried to launch WeChat, you had to surrender to it a disgusting amount of personal information to even launch the app. You have some outliers like Telegram or Signal, but good luck getting all your contacts on there. As a result I just have a dozen of messaging apps installed on my devices.

sytelus 6y ago

I'd read about an article how there is a significant "dark" black hat companies which do nothing but dig up into the open source codes to find the exploits. They invest big time to develop proprietary tools for autonomous scanning of latest vulnerabilities. Such exploits then get sold for millions of dollars. They do open source code scanning to everything from popular Python packages to popular Chrome extensions to Office plugins to Linux kernel to open source phone apps. One might think that opening the source will lead to code reviews by many and fix security bugs. In my own experience with open sourcing few projects, I've not seen that happening. Vast majority of contributors aren't willing to spend a lot of time in reviewing security issues and fixing for you. In fact, virtually all contributors will send you patches that are often half assed and have security issues which you might unknowingly accept because all tests are passing, you don't have much time and in code reviews everything look ok. For things like iMessage, I suspect billions of dollars worth of important decisions are made by everyone from Jeff Bezos to the President of USA. In my opinion, open sourcing something like this would give a handsome payday to many black hat hacking groups including state owned agencies.

monadic2 6y ago
So you would prefer to keep open exploits around and approach with security-by-obscurity? Somehow I think Apple can muster the resources to respond to vulnerabilities in exactly the same way you’re claiming they respond to open source exploitation. You may have a point with much smaller projects, but this is apple and they can easily outfund exploiters before there’s mass exploitation according to your analysis of increased attention.
- sytelus 6y ago
  That's not how it works. I think you have little idea, if any, how easy it is to find exploits if you had a source code vs if you didn't. With source code you can immediately see the conditions that will cause buffer overruns, for example. One of the huge target has always been jpeg decoder code in Chrome. If you can somehow figure out conditions that will result in buffer overrun, you will have exploit just by creating artificial jpeg. Your victim simply needs to visit your webpage with that jpeg which even can be pushed by narrowly targeted ads, Facebook etc. Building such exploits is much harder to accomplish without having source code. This is rather outdated example but think about possibilities in JavaScript engine, HTML rendering, graphics drivers, OS calls, extensions, APIs etc. When you have 10 million lines of code, you almost inevitabily have some exploit. Such zero day are often sold for 10s of millions of dollars. Its much much harder to find same vulnerabilities without having source code. Your argument that somehow Apple will do better than these black hat guys is also flawed. Apple can higher N security experts but Apple will always unlikely to match in number of firms and state agencies who can hire M >> N in aggregate. Think of Apple running centralize effort with N people while whole world running distributed attack every day every hour with 10X more eyes and time on hand. Also it has been very well understood within security professionals that source code gets far more scruitiny from black hat then white hat guys. Finally, remember that people don't update their systems for months and even years. You should know that Bezos iPhone was hacked by an exploit developed by a black hat firm which ultimately cost him $40B in divorce. Think about that for a second. A single software vunerability cost was $40 billion, more than market cap of many companies and GDPs of many countries. This is a guy who literally owns huge chunk of public and private infrastructure, has the best of the best security experts at his finger tips and he got hacked.

whywhywhywhy 6y ago

Even in an all Apple ecosystem my family is using Zoom because we can't add multiple Facetime people to a call for some reason and there is no messaging explaining why. Probably one of us running an old OS or something (All devices are recent) but whatever why should I waste my time debugging that with my elderly parents when Zoom just works.