16 ms·

Dear Apple: Please set iMessage free

160 points by stalled 14y ago

epistasis 14y ago
Yes, please. And if the protocol doesn't turn out to be too horrid to work with, this will allow interoperable implementations. The last thing we need is another messaging protocol that only works with one vendor's products. However, FaceTime was supposed to be submitted to be made into a standard, but I haven't heard much about that, and with the percentage of time that FaceTime breaks for me, I'm guessing that it's a pretty nasty protocol and they're too embarrassed to follow through. Hopefully iMessage is better.
- napierzaza 14y ago
  Not to mention that if you have a Mac that isn't compatible with Mountain Lion (like the first Xeon Mac Pro) you can't use iMessage unless you kept a copy of the iMessage Beta.
- CrazedGeek 14y ago
  There's a rumor that FaceTime wasn't supposed to be a standard -- when Jobs announced on-stage that it was going to be, it (supposedly) surprised the FaceTime developers. http://zachholman.com/posts/steve-jobs-sometimes-lies/ http://zachholman.com/posts/steve-jobs-sometimes-lies/
  - pmjordan 14y ago
    This reminds me of the Mountain Lion/Gatekeeper announcement. We heard it second hand from John Gruber [1] so it's possible the facts got mixed up on the way, but developer IDs for Gatekeeper were supposed to be free. As it turns out, they require you to pay for the Mac developer programme to be able to sign your apps, just as you do for the App Store. I can't help but get the feeling they deliberately make these false announcements to generate goodwill. The gatekeeper misinformation in particular seems to be extremely pervasive and it causes users to believe Apple is acting in everyone's interest: it improves security and is free for developers, right? Of course, it could just be accidental. Which would strike me as odd for a company that so closely guards what it communicates. [1] http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion
    - huxley 14y ago
      From the Macworld article of the same day it was pretty clear that you needed to be part of the Apple developer program: http://www.macworld.com/article/1165408/mountain_lion_hands_on_with_gatekeeper.html http://www.macworld.com/article/1165408/mountain_lion_hands_... The Ars Technica article also is pretty clear: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/02/developers-gatekeeper-a-concern-but-still-gives-power-users-control/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/02/developers-gatekeeper-a... If there is confusion it may have been from reading more into what Gruber wrote than was actually there. The Gatekeeper certificates are free to registered developers, but I don't Apple ever suggested that you didn't have to be part of the Apple Developer Program.
      - quonn 14y ago
        They did suggest it and I understood it like that as well.
      - makomk 14y ago
        Gruber explicitly stated that it was "free-of-charge" full stop, and a lot of people at the time chose to believe him over the information on the Apple website that said paid membership in the Apple developer program was required and the other reports correctly saying the same thing.
Zash 14y ago
Or just use XMPP.
- LaGrange 14y ago
  iMessage is based around APNS, which, while proprietary, doesn't require a background process on the client. This is way better than XMPP, and also doesn't try to do things that are pointless on mobile, like maintaining "presence". This doesn't really preclude things like federation, but it's a fundamentally different approach from XMPP (though bridges are possible -- see, for example, Verbs app, also see how buggy it is, and What's App, which apparently is pulling it off quite well). But bare XMPP doesn't really work that well.
  - onli 14y ago
    Also a push-notification needs something on the client to react to it, be that a running normal or a background-process. Pull needs maybe an additional background-process and generally wastes more energy, but APNS can't be that much magic.
    - mikeash 14y ago
      I think the power consumption advantages of APNS come from the fact that it's built into the OS and it's multiplexed, meaning that you only ever need one persistent connection/monitoring/etc. no matter what needs to listen. If you did XMPP directly, you'd need a separate background process and connection just for that, in addition to APNS. If you had two different apps doing this, then you'd need two processes and connections, etc.
    - LaGrange 14y ago
      You need only one process, and, furthermore it being push means it's possible to handle it with way more resources (you don't really have to maintain anything on the client, excluding the relatively rare situations when something important changes and you have to tell about that to the server).
  - Zash 14y ago
howardr 14y ago
Protocol aside is there anything significantly different in the way blackberry handles BBM messages and Apple handles iMessage messages?
- JCB_K 14y ago
  from the article: It's built into the normal iPhone texting application and turned on by default. When my Mom texts another Apple user, iMessage will automatically route her message over the Internet. She doesn't have to approve this, and honestly, probably won't even know the difference.
  - howardr 14y ago
    I see. Do you know if messages are encrypted from device-to-device on BBM or if they are just encrypted to the hub like I message seems to be
    - HorizonXP 14y ago
      BBM messages are encrypted end-to-end. However, BBM messages sent through the BlackBerry Internet Services (BIS) network (i.e. via your carrier) are encrypted using a RIM possessed by RIM. That means, that if/when required, they can be subpoenaed and asked for those messages. The same is not true for BBM messages sent via the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). Those are also encrypted, but using a key possessed only by your company's IT department. That means that if someone wants to read you messages, they have to subpoena your company. RIM can't help them, at all. I'm not sure what happens when a BlackBerry connected via BES sends a BBM to a person using BIS, or even another BES network. Either decryption and re-encryption occur, or it reverts back to using RIM's private key. But it would be safe to assume that BBM messages sent within your own company's BES network are safe and secure.
  - dave1010uk 14y ago
    How does your phone know that another phone has iMessage? Is it set up manually by the user or do phones lookup the phone number on Apple's servers? If the latter then would it be possible to reverse engineer this to test if any number was an iOS device?
Nerdfest 14y ago
As someone else has pointed out, it's an irrelevant protocol until it's made an open protocol. This will join the pile with FaceTime, iBooks, etc, that exist merely to lock people into Apples 'garden'. People should want to use your platform, not be forced to remain there cause they have to. Provide an open protocol, and make people want to use your products because you have the best implementation of it.
- Shenglong 14y ago
  I understand the technical issues at hand, and I don't want to dismiss them as being unimportant--because they are important. However, the majority (who are non-technical end users) simply don't care. Security is great, and everyone wants to know that their text messages are as secure as possible. When it comes to iMessage, however, I've yet to meet a single regular user who counts improved security as a reason to use iMessage. Heck, none of them even think iMessage is more secure than a regular text message. What do they use iMessage for? It tells you when someone read your text. It tells you when someone is responding. It sends faster than regular text messages and confirms that it's actually been sent. Even more importantly, it allows us to send international text messages for free. As a Canadian being charged $.35 per text to the US (even though US and Canadian numbers formats are identical), this means I don't need to reroute a Google Voice number through 3 numbers just to keep in touch with my US friends. The selling point of iMessage has never been technical; it's been functional.
  - mikeash 14y ago
    A lot of the people out there using iMessage don't even know it. Because it hooks in so transparently with text messaging, people who used to SMS between iPhones now iMessage between them and many don't even realize that anything has changed. Among those who do know the difference, my experience is that by far the most common reason to use it is to avoid paying for text messages. (I'm in the US here, so it's common.) A secondary reason, but really secondary compared to that, is the fact that it works on other iDevices, not just iPhones. Until I read these comments, it didn't even occur to me that security might be an advantage of iMessage. I think the number of people who use iMessage because of that is roughly zero.
tptacek 14y ago
Bear in mind that your telco can absolutely read your SMS messages, and does not need to play games with a CA to do so.
- matthewdgreen 14y ago
  And this isn't good. But two points: 1. Your Telco doesn't advertise secure end-to-end encryption. 2. Cellular protocols are (relatively) hard to intercept /and/ interception is prevented by a whole bunch of FCC regulations. iMessage will happily use an insecure Wi-Fi access point.
  - sillysaurus 14y ago
    Worrying about evesdropping is derailing your otherwise fine train of arguments. Security against evesdropping comes down to one and only one factor: The evesdropper cannot distinguish the bytes transmitted by iMessage from a stream of random bytes. This is a solved problem, and getting it right in practice comes down to the simple rule, "Don't try to implement a crypto scheme. Use an existing library." That's so easy to do nowadays that Apple would have to be breathtakingly incompetent to get that aspect of the security equation wrong.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      That's so easy to do nowadays that Apple would have to be breathtakingly incompetent to get that aspect of the security equation wrong. No.
      - Someone 14y ago
        Do you mean "no, they do not have to be incompetent to get it wrong" or "I agree, but incompetency is the norm, so it would not surprise me if they erred there"?
        sillysaurus 14y ago
        Just to be absolutely clear: if Thomas Ptacek says this is a problem, then it's absolutely a serious concern and I was a complete idiot for saying it wasn't.
chmike 14y ago
I'm interrested to develop a new messaging system that truly provides end to end encryption and is as secure as possible. All that with an open source protocol. I would be glad to share the work with people sharing the same interest.
- biafra 14y ago
  The protocol and several implementations (at least in C and in Java) are already there. It's called OTR (Off The Record) http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/ http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/ Not to confuse with a GTalk feature that has the same name.
aw3c2 14y ago
Maybe porting TextSecure would be an alternative? https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure
stickystone22 14y ago
There is a simply way to answer one part of this problem (Can Apple read iMessages?): court records. If Apple can read these things, then so can divorce attorneys and criminal lawyers via subpoena. There would be records of that. Anyone have knowledge of iMessage subpoena results?
- awakeasleep 14y ago
  I've always wondered if there are multiple levels of this. We know of at least two: one reaches public court records. The other level we know about, for sure, is NSA level stuff, which remains secret forever as a matter of national security. Do others exist? For example it's possible an agency could use the information to gather internal investigation evidence, and keep that evidence dark only using it for further gathering of more traditional evidence. That way their techniques would remain secret. Anyway, the technique of discovering government agency abilities through court records seems to be a vital part of our civilian rights that I don't see enough information about. If anyone knows anything about it and reads this, please share some info!
whalesalad 14y ago
I want to direct this towards the folks commenting here who might be in the anti-Apple camp. Yes, a walled garden is no fun for anyone once it reaches a critical mass. We're sort of starting to see this with Twitter, with their recent API adjustments. Decentralized and open platforms are also really tough, just look at OpenID. The adoption is not there. Apple saw that the current SMS implementation was flawed in many ways and sought out to improve/replace it. For example, all of the carriers (at least in the US, with the exception of the underdog Sprint) charge an exorbitant amount of money just to send/receive text messages. I pay $20 per month for that ability. SMS also has a limit of 160 characters. It also only works via cellular, whereas iMessage works via data connection. This is awesome for me, as I live in the boonies where I don't always have a cell connection (but do have excellent wifi). Being able to reply from multiple devices is also nice. Let's not forget all of the little 'nice-to-haves' like knowing when a message has been delivered and/or read, knowing when the other party is replying, etc... Alas, they did this because the carriers wouldn't. Prior to Apple releasing the iPhone, you couldn't buy a phone that didn't have some one-off UI, preloaded with garbage apps, etc... Apple forced the hand of the mobile industry with their iPhone (this is obvious to many, but concrete evidence exists inside of the Samsung vs. Apple court documents recently released) Apple is now doing this again with iMessage. They took something that really needed revolutionizing, and did it. It began as something great for members of the Apple ecosystem. They used their users and platform to prove it, and it's been successful. I can communicate via my Mac, iPhone, and iPad in a (mostly) unified experience. So, I do agree and hope that this expands to a wider audience. That being said, it will be tough. An open consortium leads to all sorts of issues (ahem, Android) and sometimes having one chef in the kitchen yields the best overall experience for everyone (Apple).
- angryasian 14y ago
  for people that are pro apple - apple didn't revolutionize anything, there were plenty of third party apps and companies prior to imessage that were providing the same service along with being cross platform. Apple is actually cannibalizing those services that were providing a valuable service to their customers and now are cutting them out. This is nothing more than further attempt to lock in users into their ecosystem.
biafra 14y ago
iMessage fails on the security front. I have received more than one message (via wifi) after I removed the SIM card from an iPhone. This would not have happened with SMS.
- Someone 14y ago
  With iMessage, your account isn't (solely) linked to your SIM card. It cannot be, because iMessage also works on devices without SIM cards (iPod Touch, Mac). I do not think you can claim it fails because it still works after removing the SIM card. You cannot claim that SMS fails on the security front because you can receive SMSes without logging in to iCloud, either.
  - biafra 14y ago
    I did not login into his iCloud account. How would I? I did not have his apple id credentials.
- taligent 14y ago
  How is the fact that it works over WiFi a security issue ?
  - biafra 14y ago
    Because I received messages that were not meant for me. I got this iPhone from someone who removed his SIM card from it. And then I received messages for him that should have been delivered to his phone (the phone he put his SIM-card in).
    - swhitt 14y ago
      Under settings on the iPhone there's the option to completely wipe the phone. Before you give your phone to someone else you should do this. Otherwise you were still logged in to his iMessage account.
      - 14y ago
absolute-ly 14y ago
1. It's just a guess but I don't think many users care about iMessage's encryption. Cryptographers are the exception. 2. XMPP is not true peer-to-peer. If you are a fan of XMPP as a p2p "solution", and you're not the XMPP provider trying to make a buck offering this "service", then I would say you don't know enough about p2p. 3. If you really care about end-to-end cryptography the solutions exist. Working with the nacl library is not rocket science. It's a lot simpler than SSL/TLS. And I don't see any cryptographers cracking nacl anytime soon. 4. Decentralised and open platforms are not really tough if you keep things simple. But for most (but not all) designers of these systems that seems just about impossible. If it's not complex it's not worth their time. The biggest challenge I see with good, easy cryptography and a decent, simple peer-to-peer platform for the general public is that you will have a huge PR problem from day 1. Because the only folks who will want to use the system will be troublemakers who attract the wrong kind of attention, and a handful of smart people, like cryptographers, who no one pays attention to.
josteink 14y ago
Rather, consider this post as a plea for help. iMessage is important. People use it. If you have a problem with a closed service working only within a walled garden, maybe you should look at an actual open standard instead, like XMPP. It may not have "end to end" encryption, but at least you get to know how it works and how secure it really is. Nobody is forcing you to use Imessage. Apple may encourage you, by permissive defaults, yes. But nobody is forcing you to use it. It can be disabled. You can even buy a phone not made by Apple and avoid the problem all together.

160 points by stalled 14y ago

Yes, please. And if the protocol doesn't turn out to be too horrid to work with, this will allow interoperable implementations. The last thing we need is another messaging protocol that only works with one vendor's products. However, FaceTime was supposed to be submitted to be made into a standard, but I haven't heard much about that, and with the percentage of time that FaceTime breaks for me, I'm guessing that it's a pretty nasty protocol and they're too embarrassed to follow through. Hopefully iMessage is better.

napierzaza 14y ago
Not to mention that if you have a Mac that isn't compatible with Mountain Lion (like the first Xeon Mac Pro) you can't use iMessage unless you kept a copy of the iMessage Beta.
CrazedGeek 14y ago
There's a rumor that FaceTime wasn't supposed to be a standard -- when Jobs announced on-stage that it was going to be, it (supposedly) surprised the FaceTime developers. http://zachholman.com/posts/steve-jobs-sometimes-lies/ http://zachholman.com/posts/steve-jobs-sometimes-lies/
- pmjordan 14y ago
  This reminds me of the Mountain Lion/Gatekeeper announcement. We heard it second hand from John Gruber [1] so it's possible the facts got mixed up on the way, but developer IDs for Gatekeeper were supposed to be free. As it turns out, they require you to pay for the Mac developer programme to be able to sign your apps, just as you do for the App Store. I can't help but get the feeling they deliberately make these false announcements to generate goodwill. The gatekeeper misinformation in particular seems to be extremely pervasive and it causes users to believe Apple is acting in everyone's interest: it improves security and is free for developers, right? Of course, it could just be accidental. Which would strike me as odd for a company that so closely guards what it communicates. [1] http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion
  - huxley 14y ago
    From the Macworld article of the same day it was pretty clear that you needed to be part of the Apple developer program: http://www.macworld.com/article/1165408/mountain_lion_hands_on_with_gatekeeper.html http://www.macworld.com/article/1165408/mountain_lion_hands_... The Ars Technica article also is pretty clear: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/02/developers-gatekeeper-a-concern-but-still-gives-power-users-control/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/02/developers-gatekeeper-a... If there is confusion it may have been from reading more into what Gruber wrote than was actually there. The Gatekeeper certificates are free to registered developers, but I don't Apple ever suggested that you didn't have to be part of the Apple Developer Program.
    - quonn 14y ago
      They did suggest it and I understood it like that as well.
    - makomk 14y ago
      Gruber explicitly stated that it was "free-of-charge" full stop, and a lot of people at the time chose to believe him over the information on the Apple website that said paid membership in the Apple developer program was required and the other reports correctly saying the same thing.

Zash 14y ago

Or just use XMPP.

LaGrange 14y ago
iMessage is based around APNS, which, while proprietary, doesn't require a background process on the client. This is way better than XMPP, and also doesn't try to do things that are pointless on mobile, like maintaining "presence". This doesn't really preclude things like federation, but it's a fundamentally different approach from XMPP (though bridges are possible -- see, for example, Verbs app, also see how buggy it is, and What's App, which apparently is pulling it off quite well). But bare XMPP doesn't really work that well.
- onli 14y ago
  Also a push-notification needs something on the client to react to it, be that a running normal or a background-process. Pull needs maybe an additional background-process and generally wastes more energy, but APNS can't be that much magic.
  - mikeash 14y ago
    I think the power consumption advantages of APNS come from the fact that it's built into the OS and it's multiplexed, meaning that you only ever need one persistent connection/monitoring/etc. no matter what needs to listen. If you did XMPP directly, you'd need a separate background process and connection just for that, in addition to APNS. If you had two different apps doing this, then you'd need two processes and connections, etc.
  - LaGrange 14y ago
    You need only one process, and, furthermore it being push means it's possible to handle it with way more resources (you don't really have to maintain anything on the client, excluding the relatively rare situations when something important changes and you have to tell about that to the server).
- Zash 14y ago

howardr 14y ago

Protocol aside is there anything significantly different in the way blackberry handles BBM messages and Apple handles iMessage messages?

JCB_K 14y ago
from the article: It's built into the normal iPhone texting application and turned on by default. When my Mom texts another Apple user, iMessage will automatically route her message over the Internet. She doesn't have to approve this, and honestly, probably won't even know the difference.
- howardr 14y ago
  I see. Do you know if messages are encrypted from device-to-device on BBM or if they are just encrypted to the hub like I message seems to be
  - HorizonXP 14y ago
    BBM messages are encrypted end-to-end. However, BBM messages sent through the BlackBerry Internet Services (BIS) network (i.e. via your carrier) are encrypted using a RIM possessed by RIM. That means, that if/when required, they can be subpoenaed and asked for those messages. The same is not true for BBM messages sent via the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). Those are also encrypted, but using a key possessed only by your company's IT department. That means that if someone wants to read you messages, they have to subpoena your company. RIM can't help them, at all. I'm not sure what happens when a BlackBerry connected via BES sends a BBM to a person using BIS, or even another BES network. Either decryption and re-encryption occur, or it reverts back to using RIM's private key. But it would be safe to assume that BBM messages sent within your own company's BES network are safe and secure.
- dave1010uk 14y ago
  How does your phone know that another phone has iMessage? Is it set up manually by the user or do phones lookup the phone number on Apple's servers? If the latter then would it be possible to reverse engineer this to test if any number was an iOS device?

Nerdfest 14y ago

As someone else has pointed out, it's an irrelevant protocol until it's made an open protocol. This will join the pile with FaceTime, iBooks, etc, that exist merely to lock people into Apples 'garden'. People should want to use your platform, not be forced to remain there cause they have to. Provide an open protocol, and make people want to use your products because you have the best implementation of it.

Shenglong 14y ago
I understand the technical issues at hand, and I don't want to dismiss them as being unimportant--because they are important. However, the majority (who are non-technical end users) simply don't care. Security is great, and everyone wants to know that their text messages are as secure as possible. When it comes to iMessage, however, I've yet to meet a single regular user who counts improved security as a reason to use iMessage. Heck, none of them even think iMessage is more secure than a regular text message. What do they use iMessage for? It tells you when someone read your text. It tells you when someone is responding. It sends faster than regular text messages and confirms that it's actually been sent. Even more importantly, it allows us to send international text messages for free. As a Canadian being charged $.35 per text to the US (even though US and Canadian numbers formats are identical), this means I don't need to reroute a Google Voice number through 3 numbers just to keep in touch with my US friends. The selling point of iMessage has never been technical; it's been functional.
- mikeash 14y ago
  A lot of the people out there using iMessage don't even know it. Because it hooks in so transparently with text messaging, people who used to SMS between iPhones now iMessage between them and many don't even realize that anything has changed. Among those who do know the difference, my experience is that by far the most common reason to use it is to avoid paying for text messages. (I'm in the US here, so it's common.) A secondary reason, but really secondary compared to that, is the fact that it works on other iDevices, not just iPhones. Until I read these comments, it didn't even occur to me that security might be an advantage of iMessage. I think the number of people who use iMessage because of that is roughly zero.

tptacek 14y ago

Bear in mind that your telco can absolutely read your SMS messages, and does not need to play games with a CA to do so.

matthewdgreen 14y ago
And this isn't good. But two points: 1. Your Telco doesn't advertise secure end-to-end encryption. 2. Cellular protocols are (relatively) hard to intercept /and/ interception is prevented by a whole bunch of FCC regulations. iMessage will happily use an insecure Wi-Fi access point.
- sillysaurus 14y ago
  Worrying about evesdropping is derailing your otherwise fine train of arguments. Security against evesdropping comes down to one and only one factor: The evesdropper cannot distinguish the bytes transmitted by iMessage from a stream of random bytes. This is a solved problem, and getting it right in practice comes down to the simple rule, "Don't try to implement a crypto scheme. Use an existing library." That's so easy to do nowadays that Apple would have to be breathtakingly incompetent to get that aspect of the security equation wrong.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    That's so easy to do nowadays that Apple would have to be breathtakingly incompetent to get that aspect of the security equation wrong. No.
    - Someone 14y ago
      Do you mean "no, they do not have to be incompetent to get it wrong" or "I agree, but incompetency is the norm, so it would not surprise me if they erred there"?
      - sillysaurus 14y ago
        Just to be absolutely clear: if Thomas Ptacek says this is a problem, then it's absolutely a serious concern and I was a complete idiot for saying it wasn't.

chmike 14y ago

I'm interrested to develop a new messaging system that truly provides end to end encryption and is as secure as possible. All that with an open source protocol. I would be glad to share the work with people sharing the same interest.

biafra 14y ago
The protocol and several implementations (at least in C and in Java) are already there. It's called OTR (Off The Record) http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/ http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/ Not to confuse with a GTalk feature that has the same name.

aw3c2 14y ago

Maybe porting TextSecure would be an alternative? https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure

stickystone22 14y ago

There is a simply way to answer one part of this problem (Can Apple read iMessages?): court records. If Apple can read these things, then so can divorce attorneys and criminal lawyers via subpoena. There would be records of that. Anyone have knowledge of iMessage subpoena results?

awakeasleep 14y ago
I've always wondered if there are multiple levels of this. We know of at least two: one reaches public court records. The other level we know about, for sure, is NSA level stuff, which remains secret forever as a matter of national security. Do others exist? For example it's possible an agency could use the information to gather internal investigation evidence, and keep that evidence dark only using it for further gathering of more traditional evidence. That way their techniques would remain secret. Anyway, the technique of discovering government agency abilities through court records seems to be a vital part of our civilian rights that I don't see enough information about. If anyone knows anything about it and reads this, please share some info!

whalesalad 14y ago

I want to direct this towards the folks commenting here who might be in the anti-Apple camp. Yes, a walled garden is no fun for anyone once it reaches a critical mass. We're sort of starting to see this with Twitter, with their recent API adjustments. Decentralized and open platforms are also really tough, just look at OpenID. The adoption is not there. Apple saw that the current SMS implementation was flawed in many ways and sought out to improve/replace it. For example, all of the carriers (at least in the US, with the exception of the underdog Sprint) charge an exorbitant amount of money just to send/receive text messages. I pay $20 per month for that ability. SMS also has a limit of 160 characters. It also only works via cellular, whereas iMessage works via data connection. This is awesome for me, as I live in the boonies where I don't always have a cell connection (but do have excellent wifi). Being able to reply from multiple devices is also nice. Let's not forget all of the little 'nice-to-haves' like knowing when a message has been delivered and/or read, knowing when the other party is replying, etc... Alas, they did this because the carriers wouldn't. Prior to Apple releasing the iPhone, you couldn't buy a phone that didn't have some one-off UI, preloaded with garbage apps, etc... Apple forced the hand of the mobile industry with their iPhone (this is obvious to many, but concrete evidence exists inside of the Samsung vs. Apple court documents recently released) Apple is now doing this again with iMessage. They took something that really needed revolutionizing, and did it. It began as something great for members of the Apple ecosystem. They used their users and platform to prove it, and it's been successful. I can communicate via my Mac, iPhone, and iPad in a (mostly) unified experience. So, I do agree and hope that this expands to a wider audience. That being said, it will be tough. An open consortium leads to all sorts of issues (ahem, Android) and sometimes having one chef in the kitchen yields the best overall experience for everyone (Apple).

angryasian 14y ago
for people that are pro apple - apple didn't revolutionize anything, there were plenty of third party apps and companies prior to imessage that were providing the same service along with being cross platform. Apple is actually cannibalizing those services that were providing a valuable service to their customers and now are cutting them out. This is nothing more than further attempt to lock in users into their ecosystem.

biafra 14y ago

iMessage fails on the security front. I have received more than one message (via wifi) after I removed the SIM card from an iPhone. This would not have happened with SMS.

Someone 14y ago
With iMessage, your account isn't (solely) linked to your SIM card. It cannot be, because iMessage also works on devices without SIM cards (iPod Touch, Mac). I do not think you can claim it fails because it still works after removing the SIM card. You cannot claim that SMS fails on the security front because you can receive SMSes without logging in to iCloud, either.
- biafra 14y ago
  I did not login into his iCloud account. How would I? I did not have his apple id credentials.
taligent 14y ago
How is the fact that it works over WiFi a security issue ?
- biafra 14y ago
  Because I received messages that were not meant for me. I got this iPhone from someone who removed his SIM card from it. And then I received messages for him that should have been delivered to his phone (the phone he put his SIM-card in).
  - swhitt 14y ago
    Under settings on the iPhone there's the option to completely wipe the phone. Before you give your phone to someone else you should do this. Otherwise you were still logged in to his iMessage account.
    - 14y ago

absolute-ly 14y ago

1. It's just a guess but I don't think many users care about iMessage's encryption. Cryptographers are the exception. 2. XMPP is not true peer-to-peer. If you are a fan of XMPP as a p2p "solution", and you're not the XMPP provider trying to make a buck offering this "service", then I would say you don't know enough about p2p. 3. If you really care about end-to-end cryptography the solutions exist. Working with the nacl library is not rocket science. It's a lot simpler than SSL/TLS. And I don't see any cryptographers cracking nacl anytime soon. 4. Decentralised and open platforms are not really tough if you keep things simple. But for most (but not all) designers of these systems that seems just about impossible. If it's not complex it's not worth their time. The biggest challenge I see with good, easy cryptography and a decent, simple peer-to-peer platform for the general public is that you will have a huge PR problem from day 1. Because the only folks who will want to use the system will be troublemakers who attract the wrong kind of attention, and a handful of smart people, like cryptographers, who no one pays attention to.

josteink 14y ago

Rather, consider this post as a plea for help. iMessage is important. People use it. If you have a problem with a closed service working only within a walled garden, maybe you should look at an actual open standard instead, like XMPP. It may not have "end to end" encryption, but at least you get to know how it works and how secure it really is. Nobody is forcing you to use Imessage. Apple may encourage you, by permissive defaults, yes. But nobody is forcing you to use it. It can be disabled. You can even buy a phone not made by Apple and avoid the problem all together.