5 ms·

Default option is still usual phone call/iMessage in a lot of places - in some you can long press and select another option, but not all. Also, merely opening

Default option is still usual phone call/iMessage in a lot of places - in some you can long press and select another option, but not all. Also, merely opening a separate app doesn't really help. How about instead of having 5 different apps (that the system one sometimes generously allows you to open), you had one app that can seamlessly speak all protocols? You can add multiple e-mail or contacts accounts (even from different providers) and it'll seamlessly merge them in the system Mail/Contacts apps - why can't we have the same for messages?

tinus_hn 3y ago
You wonder how anyone survives in all of the world where nobody uses iMessage (which is everywhere except the US). How do people even manage to open WhatsApp? How do people survive this horror!
- rplnt 3y ago
  I have an iPhone (and macbook if that matters) and have no idea what all the rage is about. Is iMessage the default sms client? It's just called Messages on my phone. What does it offer? Mine looks like the stock android one. I see virtually zero options to do anything else than to send a message. Is it US only thing?
  - tinus_hn 3y ago
    If you only have friends that also have iOS devices, you can create an iMessage group and send messages in it. I don’t know how that works in the US but apparently it’s really popular.
  - dwaite 3y ago
    Messages sends SMS/MMS (on a Phone or configured Mac/iPad/Watch), but will transparently upgrade to the iMessage protocol when talking to another Apple user. This has substantially better features over SMS, including network access and the ability to send higher quality multimedia. If you don't ever want to fall back to SMS, you pick some other app (WhatsApp, Signal, etc). In the US, unlimited texting became a thing much earlier than in the EU, partly because the carrier and network relationship is structured differently. So SMS is bad but free, and thus a bit more tolerable. A higher percentage of iPhone users means that more often than not, you'll find your text is using the much better protocol. As a result, many in the US never had to pick a third party to be "winner" via network effects (like say LINE in certain asian countries). This puts things into a weird state, where SMS and iMessage sort of act like a single pseudo-"product" in the US available to both iPhone and Android users, but where Android users get a way worse experience and where iPhone users get a worse experience when talking with Android users. Which is where I get to personal opinion, and say this is mostly Google's fault. https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo-hangouts-talk-messaging-mess-timeline https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo... . As owner of the other major platform and with the ability to release a compatible chat app for iPhone, they've had and squandered every opportunity to own the space.
    - rplnt 3y ago
      Thanks for the details and background. If I recall correctly, back when I had an Android, every app (Signal, Telegram, Messwnger I think) wanted to become my default messaging app. I'm assuming to do basically do what you are describing. Google had like 20 messaging apps over the years, but they never combined ot or I guess other vendors went with stock sms-only one instead?
      - Zak 3y ago
        Android has a concept of a default SMS client, but not one of a default messaging app that isn't an SMS client. Signal, for example used to include an SMS client but no longer does.
    - pixelmonkey 3y ago
      Your summary is right but is missing one key detail. In the period since iMessage was developed, every single direct messaging and group messaging app that got to scale has been x-platform across Android and iOS, and many of them have even been x-platform to web/browser clients and/or desktop apps across Windows, macOS, and Linux. Namely: Telegram, Signal, LINE, WhatsApp, Discord, among others. That is, all except one. The one exception is, of course, Apple's iMessage.
haswell 3y ago
> You can add multiple e-mail or contacts accounts (even from different providers) and it'll seamlessly merge them in the system Mail/Contacts apps - why can't we have the same for messages? And on top of this, other voice apps are merged with the list of incoming calls, e.g. discord calls show up in the same list as phone calls. This really highlights the intentional degradation of chat behavior. From a pure user experience standpoint, Apple’s own product does not meet their own philosophy and guidelines applied to other categories of app.
rezonant 3y ago
Or just one app that spoke a single protocol that all phones implement, like SMS used to be. That way you wouldn't have to install and juggle 20 apps to cover all of your friend's preferences, and manage which type of messenger they prefer over time.
- borski 3y ago
  Because then SMS would never progress, and we’d all be stuck with 140 characters under the hood along with optional subjects and zero security. There was no push for RCS until iMessage came along.
  - rezonant 3y ago
    Internet Explorer introduced a lot of new capabilities to the web platform. Those features were highly innovative and we take them for granted today. But for many of those features they did not do the work to get them standardized, or under-standardized them. They did not work with other vendors to get them implemented. Apple's automatic replacement of SMS is similar and had the same result: vendor lock in. Also it's worth noting that RCS originally launched in 2008, a year after the iPhone and iMessage launched in 2011. Many features we expect from both iMessage and RCS today were not present at the time, but a next-generation messaging spec was there- Apple chose not to engage with it- which is too bad because at the time Apple could have helped to defragment the implementations and make it a better specification. The carriers fumbled pretty hard on compatibility, also probably because they saw it as a way to produce vendor lock in for their customer base.
    - dwaite 3y ago
      FWIW, my understanding was that Apple did try to engage with carriers, but there was't interest in turning RCS into what Apple wanted (for instance, adding E2EE). AFAIK 15 years later, RCS still hasn't started to define E2EE.
      - rezonant 3y ago
robertlagrant 3y ago
> why can't we have the same for messages? I wonder if e2ee makes this difficult.
dwaite 3y ago
> You can add multiple e-mail or contacts accounts (even from different providers) and it'll seamlessly merge them in the system Mail/Contacts apps - why can't we have the same for messages? Because there are standards there - SMTP and MIME and HTML for email, vCard for contacts. For the contacts app, whatever fun graph or RDF or whatever format you use for contacts, your extension has to provide contacts via the surface of the SDK, which luckily had vCard to influence it. That may mean that the contacts app cannot support round-trip edits of those contacts, and you need to go back to whatever source to change things. Same with calendar events - applications can expose a calendar, but this is typically not editable and you need to go back into the application to change things (e.g. to remove a session from your calendar, go into the conference app and say you no longer intend to attend it). The message apps typically have none of this. They don't have commonalities in terms of identifiers (and may all claim authoritative use of say a phone number, with no approval of the carrier). They have no consistency in formatting. They have a varying set of additional features, none of which are designed to be compatible (e.g. person-to-person payments in Facebook Messenger vs in iMessage). They may also support extensions by third parties, business accounts with custom routing and workflow, etc. XMPP and later Matrix tried to create standards around this, and for XMPP there was a brief time we thought there'd be buy in by larger parties like Google and Facebook. I'm very curious to see if we see uptake in ActivityPub, or if the same product/market forces make its popularity transient as well.
mlindner 3y ago
> you had one app that can seamlessly speak all protocols? There's nothing that does that though so this seems a bit of an odd statement.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software) ?

tinus_hn 3y ago

You wonder how anyone survives in all of the world where nobody uses iMessage (which is everywhere except the US). How do people even manage to open WhatsApp? How do people survive this horror!

rplnt 3y ago
I have an iPhone (and macbook if that matters) and have no idea what all the rage is about. Is iMessage the default sms client? It's just called Messages on my phone. What does it offer? Mine looks like the stock android one. I see virtually zero options to do anything else than to send a message. Is it US only thing?
- tinus_hn 3y ago
  If you only have friends that also have iOS devices, you can create an iMessage group and send messages in it. I don’t know how that works in the US but apparently it’s really popular.
- dwaite 3y ago
  Messages sends SMS/MMS (on a Phone or configured Mac/iPad/Watch), but will transparently upgrade to the iMessage protocol when talking to another Apple user. This has substantially better features over SMS, including network access and the ability to send higher quality multimedia. If you don't ever want to fall back to SMS, you pick some other app (WhatsApp, Signal, etc). In the US, unlimited texting became a thing much earlier than in the EU, partly because the carrier and network relationship is structured differently. So SMS is bad but free, and thus a bit more tolerable. A higher percentage of iPhone users means that more often than not, you'll find your text is using the much better protocol. As a result, many in the US never had to pick a third party to be "winner" via network effects (like say LINE in certain asian countries). This puts things into a weird state, where SMS and iMessage sort of act like a single pseudo-"product" in the US available to both iPhone and Android users, but where Android users get a way worse experience and where iPhone users get a worse experience when talking with Android users. Which is where I get to personal opinion, and say this is mostly Google's fault. https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo-hangouts-talk-messaging-mess-timeline https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo... . As owner of the other major platform and with the ability to release a compatible chat app for iPhone, they've had and squandered every opportunity to own the space.
  - rplnt 3y ago
    Thanks for the details and background. If I recall correctly, back when I had an Android, every app (Signal, Telegram, Messwnger I think) wanted to become my default messaging app. I'm assuming to do basically do what you are describing. Google had like 20 messaging apps over the years, but they never combined ot or I guess other vendors went with stock sms-only one instead?
    - Zak 3y ago
      Android has a concept of a default SMS client, but not one of a default messaging app that isn't an SMS client. Signal, for example used to include an SMS client but no longer does.
  - pixelmonkey 3y ago
    Your summary is right but is missing one key detail. In the period since iMessage was developed, every single direct messaging and group messaging app that got to scale has been x-platform across Android and iOS, and many of them have even been x-platform to web/browser clients and/or desktop apps across Windows, macOS, and Linux. Namely: Telegram, Signal, LINE, WhatsApp, Discord, among others. That is, all except one. The one exception is, of course, Apple's iMessage.

haswell 3y ago

> You can add multiple e-mail or contacts accounts (even from different providers) and it'll seamlessly merge them in the system Mail/Contacts apps - why can't we have the same for messages? And on top of this, other voice apps are merged with the list of incoming calls, e.g. discord calls show up in the same list as phone calls. This really highlights the intentional degradation of chat behavior. From a pure user experience standpoint, Apple’s own product does not meet their own philosophy and guidelines applied to other categories of app.

rezonant 3y ago

Or just one app that spoke a single protocol that all phones implement, like SMS used to be. That way you wouldn't have to install and juggle 20 apps to cover all of your friend's preferences, and manage which type of messenger they prefer over time.

borski 3y ago
Because then SMS would never progress, and we’d all be stuck with 140 characters under the hood along with optional subjects and zero security. There was no push for RCS until iMessage came along.
- rezonant 3y ago
  Internet Explorer introduced a lot of new capabilities to the web platform. Those features were highly innovative and we take them for granted today. But for many of those features they did not do the work to get them standardized, or under-standardized them. They did not work with other vendors to get them implemented. Apple's automatic replacement of SMS is similar and had the same result: vendor lock in. Also it's worth noting that RCS originally launched in 2008, a year after the iPhone and iMessage launched in 2011. Many features we expect from both iMessage and RCS today were not present at the time, but a next-generation messaging spec was there- Apple chose not to engage with it- which is too bad because at the time Apple could have helped to defragment the implementations and make it a better specification. The carriers fumbled pretty hard on compatibility, also probably because they saw it as a way to produce vendor lock in for their customer base.
  - dwaite 3y ago
    FWIW, my understanding was that Apple did try to engage with carriers, but there was't interest in turning RCS into what Apple wanted (for instance, adding E2EE). AFAIK 15 years later, RCS still hasn't started to define E2EE.
    - rezonant 3y ago

robertlagrant 3y ago

> why can't we have the same for messages? I wonder if e2ee makes this difficult.

dwaite 3y ago

> You can add multiple e-mail or contacts accounts (even from different providers) and it'll seamlessly merge them in the system Mail/Contacts apps - why can't we have the same for messages? Because there are standards there - SMTP and MIME and HTML for email, vCard for contacts. For the contacts app, whatever fun graph or RDF or whatever format you use for contacts, your extension has to provide contacts via the surface of the SDK, which luckily had vCard to influence it. That may mean that the contacts app cannot support round-trip edits of those contacts, and you need to go back to whatever source to change things. Same with calendar events - applications can expose a calendar, but this is typically not editable and you need to go back into the application to change things (e.g. to remove a session from your calendar, go into the conference app and say you no longer intend to attend it). The message apps typically have none of this. They don't have commonalities in terms of identifiers (and may all claim authoritative use of say a phone number, with no approval of the carrier). They have no consistency in formatting. They have a varying set of additional features, none of which are designed to be compatible (e.g. person-to-person payments in Facebook Messenger vs in iMessage). They may also support extensions by third parties, business accounts with custom routing and workflow, etc. XMPP and later Matrix tried to create standards around this, and for XMPP there was a brief time we thought there'd be buy in by larger parties like Google and Facebook. I'm very curious to see if we see uptake in ActivityPub, or if the same product/market forces make its popularity transient as well.

mlindner 3y ago

> you had one app that can seamlessly speak all protocols? There's nothing that does that though so this seems a bit of an odd statement.

Nextgrid 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software) ?