6 ms·

I think they are rightly calling out that iMessage as part of Apple's moat building is both bad for their customers and people their customers interact with. An

I think they are rightly calling out that iMessage as part of Apple's moat building is both bad for their customers and people their customers interact with. And while I agree with you, and I won't be using the service, I think from their POV it is the correct messaging.

richwater 3y ago
> Apple's moat building is both bad for their customers and people their customers interact with I bought into the ecosystem exactly because of the quality and functionality of iMessage. There's absolutely no spam, everything works and the ecosystem is tight-knit.
- doublerabbit 3y ago
  But other side of the Apple reality is your then stuck when all your other relatives use Android. I am then forced to use some $app, persuade my contacts to use said app. Defeating the point of iMessage when I just want native support all around. Something that Apple had never implemented anywhere else and for which it could decades ago. I wouldn't switch to an Android because the feature became available. If all your contacts use Apple Devices, sure go nuts. But when others don't iMessage becomes unpractical. But hey, vendor device lock-in money is very nice. It's unfortunate that they don't water the lawns of the walled-garden nor restock the bird feeder. We are expected to do that ourselves using a wooden ladder with missing prongs.
  - jamiek88 3y ago
    You aren’t though because sms exists as fallback.
    - oarsinsync 3y ago
      Group chat SMS doesn’t work globally the same way as it apparently works in the USA. (This is one of the reasons why WhatsApp is big in the rest of the world)
- oarsinsync 3y ago
  > I bought into the ecosystem exactly because of the quality and functionality of iMessage. There's absolutely no spam I’m glad I bought into the ecosystem for other reasons, as I definitely receive occasional iMessage spam. It’s about as frequent as WhatsApp spam.
micromacrofoot 3y ago
I think it's valid feedback from Beeper, but to insinuate that this gives them to right to force Apple to run their reverse-engineered access is where things go a bit too far for me. Apple's customers are not Beeper's customers. They have completely different incentives. I guess the approach is to try and force Apple's hand or push some legislation for interoperability, but Apple is working on RCS so it's not like they've been completely ignoring criticism...
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  Apple's RCS implementation is meaningless unless they cut out the blue/green bubble shit.
  - nickthegreek 3y ago
    It will be far from meaningless if I can send a high resolution image easily to a groupchat containing a mix of android and ios users.
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      Sure, but if Beeper keeps working, likely some free alternative isn't far behind, and if that means your messages don't come up as blue, that will be everyone's preference.
  - placatedmayhem 3y ago
    "Meaningless" isn't accurate at this point. Media doesn't get nearly as severely downgraded (if at all), so the user experience of using an RCS chat is better than SMS/MMS. There are still disparities, though, that should be presented. There's no standardized end-to-end encryption yet for RCS (although it could be argued Google's protocol is a de facto standard), and Apple has indicated it will be implementing RCS as the standard dictates, i.e. with no E2E encryption. Using blue bubble to indicate E2E encrypted and green to indicate otherwise is a reasonable UX choice. After Apple implements E2E encryption over RCS via whatever standard (which can be reasonably inferred as their intention from their announcements), if the delineation for green-vs-blue is still iMessage/not-iMessage (rather than E2E vs not-E2E), then I think "meaningless" applies. But we're not there yet.
echelon 3y ago
Apple is at a scale in smartphone dominance that they're anticompetitive. There are only two vendors. They control everything about one of the most essential functional pieces of modern society. A smartphone is essential. Apple and Google tax 30%, control when and how software can be deployed, control browser tech (Apple), prevent web downloads of executable software (Apple) or scare and confuse you about it (Google). They control the payment rails and increasingly enforce using their identity and customer management, so they can sink more claws into business and innovation. They're partnering with governments to be authoritative identify providers. They're usurping payment rails to become the entire payment ecosystem of the future. The devices are user unfriendly. Can't repair them, can't use third party components, can't replace the battery. Unofficial pieces break core features due to unnecessary cryptographic locks. Updates obsolete old hardware. Nevermind the petty bullshit about green and blue bubbles giving children (and even adults) fear about their image and reputation. Being bullied for not buying the latest and greatest. This is scary shit and we're letting them do this. Nevermind all the fluff of them owning movie studios and music and the arts to keep eyeballs locked. Car companies wish they had it this good. They'd love to charge you for third party accessories, or to charge McDonalds a fee every time they drive you there. That's essentially the deal Apple and Google are getting. This is all at once worse than Standard Oil, and comes with heavy Orwellian vibes. We need more than two vendors, and we need different companies to own different parts of the stack. As it stands, these two companies own everyone and everything these people touch.
- oldandboring 3y ago
  I had started writing basically this and stopped because you did a much better job. Thanks for taking the time to articulate this. I want to add a subtle but important part: outside of the tech community, almost nobody knows this problem exists. If you try to explain it their eyes glaze over. Normies with iPhones, if they think anything, think iMessage is "texting". Blue bubbles mean they can see when you're typing and can send reactions, green bubbles mean you can't because you're on Android (or, "Samsung"). None of them think of iMessage as a "chat application" on par with WhatsApp... it's texting. And all the government officials we wish would step in are included in this lot. They all have iPhones and they love them. iPhone is synonymous with 'smartphone' in common discourse and Apple is happy to trade brand dilution for that kind of "default" brand status. And, as you eloquently point out, we could break the world trying to loosen Apple's grip on texting, only to find that we just transferred some of their power to Google, which isn't much better.
solardev 3y ago
As a Google Android user using a Google Pixel and Google's RCS on Google Fi, the messaging system is a total clusterfuck. There's no way to reliably send or receive messages, and sometimes my images will be degraded silently, group messages to other Fi users often don't work before several retries, reactions are totally hit and miss... IMessage is a much much much better experience. It's not at all bad for their customers. It's a huge plus of that system over Android and other platforms that still try to piggyback off SMS or haphazardly support RCS.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  GNU Jami or similar messaging systems are the solution, not some proprietary vendor locking solution.
  - solardev 3y ago
    That sounds like an uphill battle, lol. Signal came and went, WhatsApp and WeChat and Line dominate in much of the world, even email these days is mostly proprietary webmail. I think the average person will always prefer ease of use over openness or security.
  - guyomes 3y ago
    Olvid [0,1] seems interesting too. [0]: https://olvid.io https://olvid.io [1]: https://github.com/olvid-io/olvid-android https://github.com/olvid-io/olvid-android

richwater 3y ago

> Apple's moat building is both bad for their customers and people their customers interact with I bought into the ecosystem exactly because of the quality and functionality of iMessage. There's absolutely no spam, everything works and the ecosystem is tight-knit.

doublerabbit 3y ago
But other side of the Apple reality is your then stuck when all your other relatives use Android. I am then forced to use some $app, persuade my contacts to use said app. Defeating the point of iMessage when I just want native support all around. Something that Apple had never implemented anywhere else and for which it could decades ago. I wouldn't switch to an Android because the feature became available. If all your contacts use Apple Devices, sure go nuts. But when others don't iMessage becomes unpractical. But hey, vendor device lock-in money is very nice. It's unfortunate that they don't water the lawns of the walled-garden nor restock the bird feeder. We are expected to do that ourselves using a wooden ladder with missing prongs.
- jamiek88 3y ago
  You aren’t though because sms exists as fallback.
  - oarsinsync 3y ago
    Group chat SMS doesn’t work globally the same way as it apparently works in the USA. (This is one of the reasons why WhatsApp is big in the rest of the world)
oarsinsync 3y ago
> I bought into the ecosystem exactly because of the quality and functionality of iMessage. There's absolutely no spam I’m glad I bought into the ecosystem for other reasons, as I definitely receive occasional iMessage spam. It’s about as frequent as WhatsApp spam.

micromacrofoot 3y ago

I think it's valid feedback from Beeper, but to insinuate that this gives them to right to force Apple to run their reverse-engineered access is where things go a bit too far for me. Apple's customers are not Beeper's customers. They have completely different incentives. I guess the approach is to try and force Apple's hand or push some legislation for interoperability, but Apple is working on RCS so it's not like they've been completely ignoring criticism...

PrimeMcFly 3y ago
Apple's RCS implementation is meaningless unless they cut out the blue/green bubble shit.
- nickthegreek 3y ago
  It will be far from meaningless if I can send a high resolution image easily to a groupchat containing a mix of android and ios users.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    Sure, but if Beeper keeps working, likely some free alternative isn't far behind, and if that means your messages don't come up as blue, that will be everyone's preference.
- placatedmayhem 3y ago
  "Meaningless" isn't accurate at this point. Media doesn't get nearly as severely downgraded (if at all), so the user experience of using an RCS chat is better than SMS/MMS. There are still disparities, though, that should be presented. There's no standardized end-to-end encryption yet for RCS (although it could be argued Google's protocol is a de facto standard), and Apple has indicated it will be implementing RCS as the standard dictates, i.e. with no E2E encryption. Using blue bubble to indicate E2E encrypted and green to indicate otherwise is a reasonable UX choice. After Apple implements E2E encryption over RCS via whatever standard (which can be reasonably inferred as their intention from their announcements), if the delineation for green-vs-blue is still iMessage/not-iMessage (rather than E2E vs not-E2E), then I think "meaningless" applies. But we're not there yet.

echelon 3y ago

Apple is at a scale in smartphone dominance that they're anticompetitive. There are only two vendors. They control everything about one of the most essential functional pieces of modern society. A smartphone is essential. Apple and Google tax 30%, control when and how software can be deployed, control browser tech (Apple), prevent web downloads of executable software (Apple) or scare and confuse you about it (Google). They control the payment rails and increasingly enforce using their identity and customer management, so they can sink more claws into business and innovation. They're partnering with governments to be authoritative identify providers. They're usurping payment rails to become the entire payment ecosystem of the future. The devices are user unfriendly. Can't repair them, can't use third party components, can't replace the battery. Unofficial pieces break core features due to unnecessary cryptographic locks. Updates obsolete old hardware. Nevermind the petty bullshit about green and blue bubbles giving children (and even adults) fear about their image and reputation. Being bullied for not buying the latest and greatest. This is scary shit and we're letting them do this. Nevermind all the fluff of them owning movie studios and music and the arts to keep eyeballs locked. Car companies wish they had it this good. They'd love to charge you for third party accessories, or to charge McDonalds a fee every time they drive you there. That's essentially the deal Apple and Google are getting. This is all at once worse than Standard Oil, and comes with heavy Orwellian vibes. We need more than two vendors, and we need different companies to own different parts of the stack. As it stands, these two companies own everyone and everything these people touch.

oldandboring 3y ago
I had started writing basically this and stopped because you did a much better job. Thanks for taking the time to articulate this. I want to add a subtle but important part: outside of the tech community, almost nobody knows this problem exists. If you try to explain it their eyes glaze over. Normies with iPhones, if they think anything, think iMessage is "texting". Blue bubbles mean they can see when you're typing and can send reactions, green bubbles mean you can't because you're on Android (or, "Samsung"). None of them think of iMessage as a "chat application" on par with WhatsApp... it's texting. And all the government officials we wish would step in are included in this lot. They all have iPhones and they love them. iPhone is synonymous with 'smartphone' in common discourse and Apple is happy to trade brand dilution for that kind of "default" brand status. And, as you eloquently point out, we could break the world trying to loosen Apple's grip on texting, only to find that we just transferred some of their power to Google, which isn't much better.

solardev 3y ago

As a Google Android user using a Google Pixel and Google's RCS on Google Fi, the messaging system is a total clusterfuck. There's no way to reliably send or receive messages, and sometimes my images will be degraded silently, group messages to other Fi users often don't work before several retries, reactions are totally hit and miss... IMessage is a much much much better experience. It's not at all bad for their customers. It's a huge plus of that system over Android and other platforms that still try to piggyback off SMS or haphazardly support RCS.

prmoustache 3y ago
GNU Jami or similar messaging systems are the solution, not some proprietary vendor locking solution.
- solardev 3y ago
  That sounds like an uphill battle, lol. Signal came and went, WhatsApp and WeChat and Line dominate in much of the world, even email these days is mostly proprietary webmail. I think the average person will always prefer ease of use over openness or security.
- guyomes 3y ago
  Olvid [0,1] seems interesting too. [0]: https://olvid.io https://olvid.io [1]: https://github.com/olvid-io/olvid-android https://github.com/olvid-io/olvid-android