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I think I understand your point of view better now. Thanks! I still wish Apple would have pushed to develop an open standard as the path to improved user exper

I think I understand your point of view better now. Thanks! I still wish Apple would have pushed to develop an open standard as the path to improved user experience and messaging rather than making the progressive enhancement path go from an open network to a proprietary one. On the other hand, walled gardens have always been a productive pursuit for them, so why change?

SllX 5y ago
To be fair to Apple, they have variously supported both closed and open standards, and often at the same time. The protocol support in iChat went from OSCAR (AIM & ICQ, .Mac) to SIP to Bonjour to XMPP (functionally Google Talk for most people, although I did experiment with Gizmo Project and the Facebook Messenger XMPP bridge) to Yahoo Messenger. Messages wasn’t their first multi-protocol chat client, but it does work fundamentally differently as I think you well know. SMS and MMS might have been open at the time, and I appreciated the capability of point to point messaging someone that didn’t have to be signed in and in front of their computer to read it, but absolutely sucked compared to the plethora of proprietary push notification messengers that existed or were coming into existence circa 2011. They still suck, and that’s the best argument for additionally supporting RCS (and while I’m still trying to form an intelligent opinion around RCS specifically, it looks like a mixed bag at best but maybe still also a QoL improvement from where I sit now). I agree with you that there should be a decent interoperable standard between iPhones and Androids, even if that’s functionally just between iPhones and Google’s Android, and maybe that will be RCS. I mean we have no evidence that Apple is not working on adding RCS to the list of protocols Messages supports, but as someone who has migrated across too many messaging clients and servers that all pretty much serve the same purpose, I also don’t want it to come at the expense of something I have already that works and works reliably just to chase the open standards dream. There’s too many cross platform options today for me to be invested in having one more.

SllX 5y ago

To be fair to Apple, they have variously supported both closed and open standards, and often at the same time. The protocol support in iChat went from OSCAR (AIM & ICQ, .Mac) to SIP to Bonjour to XMPP (functionally Google Talk for most people, although I did experiment with Gizmo Project and the Facebook Messenger XMPP bridge) to Yahoo Messenger. Messages wasn’t their first multi-protocol chat client, but it does work fundamentally differently as I think you well know. SMS and MMS might have been open at the time, and I appreciated the capability of point to point messaging someone that didn’t have to be signed in and in front of their computer to read it, but absolutely sucked compared to the plethora of proprietary push notification messengers that existed or were coming into existence circa 2011. They still suck, and that’s the best argument for additionally supporting RCS (and while I’m still trying to form an intelligent opinion around RCS specifically, it looks like a mixed bag at best but maybe still also a QoL improvement from where I sit now). I agree with you that there should be a decent interoperable standard between iPhones and Androids, even if that’s functionally just between iPhones and Google’s Android, and maybe that will be RCS. I mean we have no evidence that Apple is not working on adding RCS to the list of protocols Messages supports, but as someone who has migrated across too many messaging clients and servers that all pretty much serve the same purpose, I also don’t want it to come at the expense of something I have already that works and works reliably just to chase the open standards dream. There’s too many cross platform options today for me to be invested in having one more.