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Sen. Warren calls out Apple for shutting down Beeper's iMessage on Android app
- grok24 3y ago[dead]
- withinboredom 3y agoDidn’t Steve Jobs originally say that iMessage would be an open protocol? Or am I misremembering that?
- wmf 3y agoHe said FaceTime would be an open protocol.
- grok24 3y agoYou’re misremembering. He said that about FaceTime.
- Someone 3y agoI thought iMessage is post-Jobs, so I checked. It’s close. Steve Jobs went on medical leave from Apple since January 2011. Wikipedia says iMessage was announced June 6, 2011 by Scott Forstall and launched October 12, 2011. Steve was at the announcement but died a week before that launch. ⇒ I think it’s unlikely he said anything about it in public.
- wutwutwat 3y agoFaceTime or iMessage doesn’t matter, it’ll never happen. They want you to buy their expensive hardware to get those features, and releasing an open proto would create dozens of android implementations and hurt their sales, in some amount
- withinboredom 3y agoThe cost of switching to/from iOS just isn't worth it for "just" iMessage. I don't think you're making a valid argument here.
- digital-cygnet 3y agoI know multiple people who cited iMessage compatibility as their top reason for switching and even have considered it myself -- the chilling effect that "green text" has on including non-iMessage users in group messages is real and has small but measurable impact on some of my relationships. It is particularly pernicious among teens[1], who drive a lot of this market (and, of course, become adults and bring their habits with them) [1] (paywall) https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-teens-dread-the-green-text-bubble-11641618009 https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
- CharlesW 3y ago> It is particularly pernicious among teens… In my experience as a parent with two high-school-age kids, this is mostly a media-created narrative fueled by Google PR. I've witnessed their many text chains, all of which are standards-based (green bubble) because some participants are Android users. When I asked about it explicitly their response was "that's not a thing" (at least in SoCal). Note that I'm speaking in generalities. I have no doubt there are individual elite cliques where the alpha children demand that members have certain types of phones, wear certain types of clothing, ride certain models of ebikes, etc.
- nucleardog 3y agoI know multiple people that have said the same. It had nothing to do with “green text”. They were annoyed that when people shared photos with the group they came through at shit quality. Outside of what I’m sure are some articles very in tune to teenage culture (BRB, POS), I’ve literally never heard of this as a status symbol—purely as a functional issue.
- dvngnt_ 3y agolock-in is real. green bubble vs blue bubble will has social and dating implications
- cute_boi 3y agoI don't know why Beeper was putting their future on something that was reversed engineered. It is so easy for apple to deny list those keys used from hacked iphones...
- gnicholas 3y agoApparently they have a broader offering that aggregates messaging across various different platforms (though not iMessage anymore). I have also wondered if the value prop is sufficient if iMessage is not in the mix, but have concluded that their team is probably smarter/more well informed than me, and they're dedicating years of their lives to this!
- shermozle 3y agoI've been using Beeper for a while now and have zero interest in iMessage. It aggregates Discord, Signal, SMS, LinkedIn, Slack, Twitter, WhatsApp message into one place. It's fantastic! (Though it's recently developed a weird bug where my Signal messages out aren't delivered to the remote recipient... Such is the nature of adversarial interoperability.)
- gnicholas 3y agoAre you paying for this, or are all of the features you use part of their free offering? I didn't realize until just now that they created a free tier: https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-is-now-free https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-is-now-free
- shermozle 3y agoFree tier but I'd be willing to pay for it.
- atlas_hugged 3y agoIsn’t signal’s client code open source?
- pipeline_peak 3y ago“Big Tech executives are protecting profits by squashing competitors” Beeper isn’t a competitor to Apple, they’re a pest. The type of pest that could be squashed like a bug if Apple ever chose to support Android. But they chose not to, and while I don’t agree with that, it’s their platform. All this company is doing is cashing in on that. I’m an advocate for reverse engineering and FOSS, but once you try to monetize like this, that’s a dangerous game.
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoI'm so glad we're seeing people trying to do iMessage interop. I have zero hope for it, but until recently no one was bothering to try. So it was kind of unclear what the situation really was. Having seen two different folks interop in the last 30 days, it's clear that there's some will & desire & that technically it was feasible. I kind of see it as the market finally ante-ing in. Zero surprise, it's what everyone expected, but the sheer alacrity with which Apple has legally & technically refused any competitive compatibility says the quiet part out loud, that preventing people from communicating across devices is a hill Apple absolutely will throw every last body it can find to hold.
- hulitu 3y agoWhat is so special about iMessage ? A better MMS ?
- cyanydeez 3y agobrand identity crossed with conspicuous consumption and intentional degregdation of interoperability.
- gnicholas 3y agoOne benefit is that you can remove yourself from a group conversation if everyone is on iMessage. If there is one person on SMS, there’s no way out (you can mute notifications, but if there are unread messages it will show up in the red number for the iMessage app. I don’t know if this is a result of Apple purposely making it impossible to excuse yourself from a mixed conversation. It would certainly be possible for them to make the unread count ignore muted conversations.