5 ms·

The crap Apple does with iMessage really should be illegal.

by swiley 5y ago

williamtwild 5y ago
This is a comment that should be kept to the annals of reddit. You can say this about any company who does thing out of spec and to create and ecosystem to drive profits. Google, twitter, Ford, IBM.
- JadeNB 5y ago
  > You can say this about any company who does thing out of spec and to create and ecosystem to drive profits. Google, twitter, Ford, IBM. The fact that abuse of standards and customer lock-in is ubiquitous doesn't make it any less abusive.
Kaze404 5y ago
What does Apple do with iMessage? I don't have an iPhone and always assumed it's just glorified SMS.
- ratww 5y ago
  iMessage is exclusive to iPhones and works in the same application that does SMS, seamlessly. The problem OP is alluding to is that some people avoid talking with people who don’t have iMessage, because SMS costs money. So there is a bit of peer pressure to use it, and a lot of people are stuck in iOS because of that. It’s not that different from Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp, those apps are also closed and rely on network effects. But they are free and work on other OSs, while iMessage requires a relatively expensive phone.
  - vdqtp3 5y ago
    Text messages between iPhones are also invisibly shunted to iMessage
  - prionassembly 5y ago
    Should SMS cost money? (Or at least, more than ~10X the bandwidth bill so there's nice monopoly rent for the operator... I can't imagine the actual cost being over ~1 USD/1000 messages.)
    - ratww 5y ago
      It should be free, but spam should cost $5 per message.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
    OP here. The problem I had was actually more referring to the fact that Apple does not offer fine grained control over how messages are delivered or sent on a per device basis. I can’t easily say, for instance, that I want outgoing messages on all my non phone devices (Mac, iPad, etc) to use iMessage but inbound messages sent from phones should be received via SMS. I also can’t say that I want all messages from certain users to be received via SMS (like my wife, who I should always want to receive on my phone so I can respond quickly).
- andrewla 5y ago
  When people with iPhones reply to someone who has switched away from Apple, and they use "Messages" (which does both iMessage and SMS) then there's a reasonable chance that the message will go into a black hole, where it will be delivered to iMessage and never appear on the other party's new phone. This is doubly true if they have ever used an Apple PC to receive iMessages; in that case it will almost certainly never reach the new phone via SMS. I don't believe there is a fix to this; sometimes you can repair it on the other party's phone by munging the contact, but most messages will just be blackholed.
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203042 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203042 Two solutions. The first requires an iPhone (to disable iMessages on your account with) and the other does not. This has been around for years now.
kbenson 5y ago
Apple's only slightly worse than all the others in that they severely limit what you can use iMessage on, but I'll always be a lot more pissed at them because they kicked off this whole mess. I really miss the days of when I could load all my accounts into Pidgin (Gaim!) and have almost everything centralized. Now I have a teams window (which doesn't bother me too much since it's a work app), a tab for slack, a tab for the umpteenth iteration of whatever Google has decided to call their chat platform, a tab to get SMS messages through google messenger (a welcome change), a window for signal on the desktop, and tabs for Facebook and LinkedIn (both or which I try to never visit, but would like to know if someone contacts my on, and I refuse to load on my phone). I just realized I've apparently abandoned my ICQ/AIM accounts to the past. That's the desktop. I have almost all those as separate apps on my phone, with separate ways to use them, separate notification preferences, etc. The instant messaging ecosystem has gone to complete shit, and I doubt anyone that used it seriously before this happened will disagree. And what we got in exchange for every company walling off their own IM system? Honestly, I'm not sure anything that couldn't be recreated fairly easily in a client with a couple months work if someone had extended their protocol to do more.
- mxuribe 5y ago
  > ...I really miss the days of when I could load all my accounts into Pidgin (Gaim!) and have almost everything centralized... Me too! I'm very much hoping that matrix - the protocol - continues its steady climb (both popularity and adoption), because that is what i see as the future for that kind of experience where if not everything at least lots/most of my comms interactions will be managed on my side by a single "interface". I'm an admitted fanboy of the matrix protocol (as well as matrix apps like Element, FluffyChat, Quaternion, etc.)...so maybe i'm biased, but have you tried playing around with matrix, and its associated apps, to see if it gets you closer to that older Pidgin/Gaim/Adium-like experience? (I'm not affiliated with the matrix org. nor any app/client builder, as noted i'm just a fanboy.)
  - kbenson 5y ago
    I haven't, but I have seen discussions of it here. I'm not sure how it could make the situation any better really unless it can actually interoperate with closed protocols (how?) or actually takes over a significant enough portion of the market that people choose to use it in lieu of hangouts or iMessage or facebook, etc, and there are lots of incentives those use to make that unlikely. In any other case, it's just the XKCD standards meme[1] all over again, in that it might be better in many ways, but I doubt it will actually help market fragmentation. 1: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ which actually specifically mentions instant messaging.

The crap Apple does with iMessage really should be illegal.

by swiley 5y ago

The crap Apple does with iMessage really should be illegal.

This is a comment that should be kept to the annals of reddit. You can say this about any company who does thing out of spec and to create and ecosystem to drive profits. Google, twitter, Ford, IBM.

JadeNB 5y ago
> You can say this about any company who does thing out of spec and to create and ecosystem to drive profits. Google, twitter, Ford, IBM. The fact that abuse of standards and customer lock-in is ubiquitous doesn't make it any less abusive.

Kaze404 5y ago

What does Apple do with iMessage? I don't have an iPhone and always assumed it's just glorified SMS.

ratww 5y ago
iMessage is exclusive to iPhones and works in the same application that does SMS, seamlessly. The problem OP is alluding to is that some people avoid talking with people who don’t have iMessage, because SMS costs money. So there is a bit of peer pressure to use it, and a lot of people are stuck in iOS because of that. It’s not that different from Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp, those apps are also closed and rely on network effects. But they are free and work on other OSs, while iMessage requires a relatively expensive phone.
- vdqtp3 5y ago
  Text messages between iPhones are also invisibly shunted to iMessage
- prionassembly 5y ago
  Should SMS cost money? (Or at least, more than ~10X the bandwidth bill so there's nice monopoly rent for the operator... I can't imagine the actual cost being over ~1 USD/1000 messages.)
  - ratww 5y ago
    It should be free, but spam should cost $5 per message.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
  OP here. The problem I had was actually more referring to the fact that Apple does not offer fine grained control over how messages are delivered or sent on a per device basis. I can’t easily say, for instance, that I want outgoing messages on all my non phone devices (Mac, iPad, etc) to use iMessage but inbound messages sent from phones should be received via SMS. I also can’t say that I want all messages from certain users to be received via SMS (like my wife, who I should always want to receive on my phone so I can respond quickly).
andrewla 5y ago
When people with iPhones reply to someone who has switched away from Apple, and they use "Messages" (which does both iMessage and SMS) then there's a reasonable chance that the message will go into a black hole, where it will be delivered to iMessage and never appear on the other party's new phone. This is doubly true if they have ever used an Apple PC to receive iMessages; in that case it will almost certainly never reach the new phone via SMS. I don't believe there is a fix to this; sometimes you can repair it on the other party's phone by munging the contact, but most messages will just be blackholed.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203042 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203042 Two solutions. The first requires an iPhone (to disable iMessages on your account with) and the other does not. This has been around for years now.

kbenson 5y ago

Apple's only slightly worse than all the others in that they severely limit what you can use iMessage on, but I'll always be a lot more pissed at them because they kicked off this whole mess. I really miss the days of when I could load all my accounts into Pidgin (Gaim!) and have almost everything centralized. Now I have a teams window (which doesn't bother me too much since it's a work app), a tab for slack, a tab for the umpteenth iteration of whatever Google has decided to call their chat platform, a tab to get SMS messages through google messenger (a welcome change), a window for signal on the desktop, and tabs for Facebook and LinkedIn (both or which I try to never visit, but would like to know if someone contacts my on, and I refuse to load on my phone). I just realized I've apparently abandoned my ICQ/AIM accounts to the past. That's the desktop. I have almost all those as separate apps on my phone, with separate ways to use them, separate notification preferences, etc. The instant messaging ecosystem has gone to complete shit, and I doubt anyone that used it seriously before this happened will disagree. And what we got in exchange for every company walling off their own IM system? Honestly, I'm not sure anything that couldn't be recreated fairly easily in a client with a couple months work if someone had extended their protocol to do more.

mxuribe 5y ago
> ...I really miss the days of when I could load all my accounts into Pidgin (Gaim!) and have almost everything centralized... Me too! I'm very much hoping that matrix - the protocol - continues its steady climb (both popularity and adoption), because that is what i see as the future for that kind of experience where if not everything at least lots/most of my comms interactions will be managed on my side by a single "interface". I'm an admitted fanboy of the matrix protocol (as well as matrix apps like Element, FluffyChat, Quaternion, etc.)...so maybe i'm biased, but have you tried playing around with matrix, and its associated apps, to see if it gets you closer to that older Pidgin/Gaim/Adium-like experience? (I'm not affiliated with the matrix org. nor any app/client builder, as noted i'm just a fanboy.)
- kbenson 5y ago
  I haven't, but I have seen discussions of it here. I'm not sure how it could make the situation any better really unless it can actually interoperate with closed protocols (how?) or actually takes over a significant enough portion of the market that people choose to use it in lieu of hangouts or iMessage or facebook, etc, and there are lots of incentives those use to make that unlikely. In any other case, it's just the XKCD standards meme[1] all over again, in that it might be better in many ways, but I doubt it will actually help market fragmentation. 1: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ which actually specifically mentions instant messaging.