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I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage, giving the impression that Apple phones were high

I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage, giving the impression that Apple phones were high technology, and interacting with peasant androids is what made group chats fragment and pictures and videos look like trash. Few things are more enraging than people being left out of chats with friends and family because they didn't bend over for Apple. Even worse being a teenager and having to endure social shaming for it. It wasn't until the EU signaled it was going to bring down then axe that Apple capitulated to RCS. - Yes, I know you are part of the domestic US long tail that use signal/telegram with all your friends. - Yes, I know no one outside the US uses iMessage. ETA: A note because people are pretty incredulous about "most evil". Tech companies do a lot of evil stuff, no doubt. But there is something special about putting social connection behind an expensive hardware purchase and walled garden lock in. Every other messaging app I know of is open to anyone on most platforms for little or no cost. Apple on the other hand purposely leveraged social connections in your life to force you into their garden and keep you there. Lets not pretend that Apple couldn't open up iMessage or even charge a nominal fee for outsiders. Instead you get an iphone and just seemlessly slide into iMessage. So seemless that most users don't even know that it is a separate service than sms/mms/rcs. Apple muddies that too. But they would never do that, because using people's closest social connections to force them into the ecosystem and lock them there is just too juicy. "Oh you don't want an iPhone anymore? Well looks like you have to leave your social circles main discussion hub to do so..." It's just evil on another level.

ronsor 1y ago
> - Yes, I know no one outside the US uses iMessage. Yes, people in the EU use WhatsApp, by Meta & Zuckerberg, and from what I've seen, often act as if that is some sort of mark of superiority.
- rwyinuse 1y ago
  I don't think most of US in the EU really mind, or even know what messaging app people in America use. The privacy conscious folk around here do tend to prefer Signal over Whatsapp though.
- elliotec 1y ago
  A lot of people, in Austria at least, have moved to signal in my experience. My communities in the US and Austria have trended toward adoption of Signal with very few holdovers between messages and WhatsApp, some partly due to my pressure but overall it’s just getting away from the BS of the alts
- palata 1y ago
  > and from what I've seen, often act as if that is some sort of mark of superiority. Feels like you weren't able to have a proper discussion with those people. In many EU countries, using SMS made/makes no sense because SMS was/is super expensive as compared to WhatsApp. And using iMessage makes no sense because most people don't have an iPhone. From their point of view, it actually makes no sense. Now if you tell them "well, where I come from everybody has an iPhone" or "SMS have always been free", probably they won't say "still, I'm better than you for no apparent reason". I don't think that it is actually seen as a mark of superiority anywhere in the EU to use WhatsApp. Unlike apparently in some places it is seen as a mark of superiority to have an iPhone vs an Android phone. If you go in a EU country where SMS were not prohibitively expensive in the beginning of WhatsApp (e.g. France), you'll see that WhatsApp has been less successful (at least in the beginning). WhatsApp was a killer app because it was free SMS, really.
  - ribosometronome 1y ago
    >because it was free SMS, really. Since when can WhatsApp interact with SMS users? They're so evil and predatory that they have entirely walled themselves off from that method of communication entirely.
    - 6510 1y ago
      I like how they (just like imessage) allow you to message someone who cant possibly read the message because they have no whatsapp. Then again, I think they cant even deliver the message over sms on iphone? SMS is only available in the apple app if you first force it to send SMS?
    - microtonal 1y ago
      WhatsApp gained popularity in Europe when non-early adopters started switching to smartphones (2010-2012 ish). The difference was that, in contrast to iMessage, you could install it on pretty much any smartphone. In the pre-Meta days they even supported many then dying ecosystems like Symbian, Nokia S40, etc. They had a yearly subscription fee, but most people never got the request to pay it. Nobody cared that it was incompatible with SMS, because everybody hated SMS because of the insane prices. In 2009 I got an iPhone 3G with an unlimited data plan, but I was still paying something like 0.20 or 0.25 Euro per SMS.
- spookie 1y ago
  I never had problems telling people: "oh I use this other one" and they probably have it alongside whatsapp.
- PeterStuer 1y ago
  There's always that one Facebook mom that refuses to use anything but FB Messenger, then get's upset why nobody reads her messenges.
- whyoh 1y ago
  >often act as if that is some sort of mark of superiority Well, you could argue that it's morally superior to be reachable by everyone, regardless of what brand of phone they use. The ability to install a 3rd party messaging app also shows some technical skill.
BowBun 1y ago
> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory Don't you think this is _maybe_ an overstatement? I was annoyed about this for years but reading your take is borderline satirical.
- bitpush 1y ago
  From the lawsuit > For example, when a user purchases an iPhone, the user is steered to use Apple’s default email product, Apple Mail. It is only through a complex labyrinth of settings that a user can change her default email application away from the Apple “Mail” application towards an alternative like Gmail (Google) or Proton Mail. > At least for mail a user can in theory modify the default setting. On the calendar front the situation is even worse. A user’s default calendar is Apple Calendar, and the default cannot be modified That's pretty evil & predatory to me. The fact that it is by design (someone decided it needed to this awful) is why Apple is being evil here. And this is just one example. There's more > For example, Apple banned apps from its App Store that supported Google Voice because Apple sought to advantage its own services over Google’s
  - energywut 1y ago
    > That's pretty evil & predatory to me. That's not what the parent is asking. The OP said it was the most evil ever done. Big Tech does predatory and evil stuff all the time. That's not what's being claimed. The OP is claiming that this specific thing is the worst, the singular event that is above and beyond all others.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    I mean, does Settings > Apps > Gmail (or whichever other app) > Default Mail App really qualify as “a complex labyrinth”? Sure, it’d be a good thing to add a “Default Apps” section under Settings > General or something, but calling the current route complex almost sounds like an insult to users. EDIT: Actually, there already is a “Default Apps” section right at the top of the page of Settings > Apps. Yeah, if that’s a “labyrinth” then the assumed level of user intelligence is quite low.
buran77 1y ago
> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage Is that really the worst thing you've seen big-tech do? That's very fortunate. What about Blackberry Messenger which was the mobile instant-messaging golden standard for years and BB exclusive for as long as it mattered in the market? Was that too long ago to remember?
- spongebobstoes 1y ago
  my understanding is that BBM was different because there was nothing to interoperate with at the time Apple refusing RCS integration is a very clear example of hurting everyone in pursuit of profit it's likely not the most evil, but I do think it qualifies as evil. it stands out by being inarguably willful, and having a very broad impact I find harming hundreds of millions (probably billions) of friendships to be quite evil
  - jki275 1y ago
    Windows Mobile? iOS absolutely existed alongside BBM as well. Apple didn't integrate with RCS because RCS was a fragmented pile of garbage. It still is, but it's I suppose less fragmented now. None of that "harmed" friendships, certainly not any real ones.
  - fastball 1y ago
    Android didn't introduce RCS support until 2019, 8 years after the introduction of iMessage.
m463 1y ago
Actually, iMessage happily harms apple customers all the time. I know many MANY people who have lost chats with their loved ones (especially deceased ones) because there is no way to export and save their conversations. I think this should be as easy as saving photos, which apple makes (somewhat) easier to export. Back to email, it is pretty horrible to set up my local email server on an apple device. You have to go through these dialogs, apple servers have to be contacted (for "redirection"), and I usually barely get it working.
- msgodel 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - bgnn 1y ago
    This drives me crazy on iPad! Such a missed opportunity to dominate personal laptop market is given up buy horrible UX.
  - tomhow 1y ago
    > No dumb hacks to deal with some retarded Cupertino PM's idea of how computing should work You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter how right you are or think you are. It's not what HN is for and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- bobbylarrybobby 1y ago
  FWIW, on a Mac you can just query the iMessage database — it's just a plain old sqlite file sitting somewhere on disk.
energywut 1y ago
> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage I think you might be living in a bubble, if this is the "most evil" thing you have heard of a big tech company doing. Go read up on IBM's history, especially in the 30s and 40s. Or a more contemporary example, read up on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Or Amazon's mistreatment of workers in both corporate and warehouse settings. Or Meta scraping data off your devices without permission to train AI. And, though I know some folks here disagree, plenty of people around the world believe what's happening in Gaza is a genocide, and Big Tech has materially contributed to making it happen. Or, if you want another example of human cost, talk about how resources for electronics are mined, or how electronics are manufactured. Saying, "the most evil thing big tech has ever done is make some chat bubbles blue" puts a whole lot of human lives below the color of some chat bubbles. You can think Apple did a really bad thing by doing that, that's fine. No complaints. But to call it the most evil thing ever done erases an incalculable amount of human suffering.
- bitpush 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - energywut 1y ago
    > Apple walling off iMessage, giving the impression that Apple phones were high technology, and interacting with peasant androids is what made group chats fragment and pictures and videos look like trash. Which lawsuit PDF related specifically to iMessage interacting with Android was mentioned in this comment? I see a comment about RCS. Now, maybe you are right, maybe I narrowly interpreted RCS in iMessage to mean chat bubbles, and there's a wider interpretation. Even still, there's no possible way that's the singular most evil thing tech has ever done. The OP is free to be anti-Apple, more power to them, but like, let's be real about levels of evil. > Also, bringing up IBM, Microsoft or Facebook is "whataboutism". It's absolutely not whataboutism. The claim the OP made was about Big Tech broadly. Bringing in examples of Big Tech doing evil things is a direct and appropriate rebuttable to the argument that Big Tech doesn't do evil things.
danaris 1y ago
This is hopelessly exaggerated and bad-faith. First of all, when Apple created iMessage, there was no possible way for them to predict that friend groups would use it as a reason to treat members of their groups poorly due to using Android phones. Second of all, Apple did not deliberately make interacting with non-iMessage users in group chats "look like trash" in order to exclude them. Apple went out of its way to make it possible for iMessage to interoperate with the ubiquitous (in the US) SMS, with reduced features because SMS did not support the better features. If, instead, Apple had just made iMessage not interoperate with SMS at all, you'd be screaming about that instead. Third of all, if people are leaving others out of chats, that's not Apple's fault. That's something for those families and friend groups to work out amongst themselves. "Hey, guys, I don't have an iPhone, and don't really have the money to get one, so maybe we could use GroupMe/GChat/WhatsApp/Signal/IRC/email/smoke signals/meeting in person/any of the myriad other ways of communicating instead?" A) "Oh, sure, that shouldn't be a problem!" (everything is solved) B) "What? No, we're not going to change anything just because it makes it impossible to actually include you in stuff. That's a you problem!" (turns out, the problem is your friends are assholes) Apple cannot by any reasonable standard be held to blame for the way bullying, status-seeking teenagers treat each other.
- ghaff 1y ago
  I'm in a frequently-used group chat in which some people apparently have Android phones and others use iPhones. It works perfectly well. If some teenagers see green bubbles as some sort of challenge to their identities, it's probably a useful life lesson.
- yaky 1y ago
  What Apple could have done, for sake of clarity, sanity, and good practice is to handle SMS using one app, and handle iMessage using another, *separate* app. The problem is not that iMessage exists, it's that it operates in opaque and unpredictable ways, mixing SMS and iMessage (and now RCS) communication in a way where even more tech-savvy users do not understand how it works (first-hand experience - had to explain to someone why their images are super compressed when they send them to me, but OK when they send them to their friend with an iPhone). And now it's the same with RCS (Android-iOS). I send person A an image, the conversation switches to RCS. They use the "automatic reply" when I call them, conversation switches back to SMS. With person B, the switching between RCS and SMS is even more unpredictable.
zahlman 1y ago
Or you could use an actual program on a desktop computer to do it. When did everyone forget how that works?
- anonymars 1y ago
  Use a program on a desktop computer to do what exactly?
  - zahlman 1y ago
    To communicate with friends and family.
    - anonymars 1y ago
      "I don't understand why people complain about that AT&T telephone company monopoly, when they could just write each other letters. When did people forget how to do that?"
      - zahlman 1y ago
        Telephone calls allow for near-instantaneous communication using voice while letters can (and could) take days to arrive and rely on writing. There is no comparison with using a computer vs. a cell phone to send messages over the Internet. It's even generally using all the same network protocols.
        anonymars 1y ago
        > There is no comparison with using a computer vs. a cell phone to send messages over the Internet. "Communicate outside the home" is a pretty vast difference > It's even generally using all the same network protocols. This whole thread was about proprietary iMessage
        zahlman 1y ago
        > "Communicate outside the home" is a pretty vast difference It's genuinely baffling to me that people actually see things this way. When there is a social reason to be outside the house, I take that as a reason not to be staring at a glowing rectangle.
tolerance 1y ago
Really? https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
DesiLurker 1y ago
google with their android anti-fragmentation-agreement is pretty predatory. basically release any/all android devices with google services and pay us cut or release none and use pure aosp. it is some next level shit.
- bitpush 1y ago
  huh. Isnt that what business deals are supposed to be? Two businesses entering into a business relationship, where both parties get something. OEMs get Google services & operating system, or OEMs are free to use open source project. Are you saying Google should freely give away their products?
  - DesiLurker 1y ago
    nice strawman, first google honeypotted the smartphone-os sector with their AOSP (android opensource project). now when they killed every other option except apple & effectively became a monopoly for all smartphone vendors, they are using their monopoly power to prohibit companies from using aosp piecemeal. they are explicitly telling vendors if you make any device with google services then you cannot make an ungoogled device at-all. this is exact opposite of the open source spirit and highlights that they were never interested in opensource, they were doing pretty much what MS did in 90s, release a bundled shitty version of a popular app with OS so you can kill them and maintain dominant monopoly. they just weaponized oss with AOSP to kill off any contenders. take a moment to think why amazon has no google services on their table and/or an amazon branded basic android smartphone, it would be super easy for them to do it (leave aside firephone .. for reasons). How is this not monopoly abuse? if Lina Khan had any balls this is what she would have gone after. edit: chatgpt explanation: https://chatgpt.com/share/686350ce-47dc-8008-8c30-14c6298d75ae https://chatgpt.com/share/686350ce-47dc-8008-8c30-14c6298d75...
  - like_any_other 1y ago
    > Isnt that what business deals are supposed to be? To clarify what exactly that agreement does: it prohibits companies from developing competitors. It is nakedly anti-competitive, and no, business deals are not supposed to be that - there's a large body of law, sadly rarely enforced, saying so. Not every business practice is legal just because the directly involved parties agreed.
hbn 1y ago
The most evil thing a tech company has done is make a proprietary messaging app? Apple didn't make SMS bad, it just was. Apple has since implemented RCS and it hasn't changed how I communicate with people from my iPhone at all. Google should probably take most of the blame for repeatedly fumbling messaging on non-Apple platforms for the past 2 decades. Every time they had something that was getting any amount of traction it got quickly replaced with some stupid new, worse messaging app so a PO could get a promotion.
- bitpush 1y ago
  How did you manage to shift the conversation to Google in a thread about Apple?
  - anonymars 1y ago
    I think the point was that if Google weren't so inept, iMessage wouldn't be such a monopoly And you know, maybe they have a point. I especially think about Microsoft and MSN Messenger/Skype. How do you fumble away not one but two dominant messaging apps?
    - ewoodrich 1y ago
      OP's point is about Apple intentionally fragmenting communication in social groups as an ecosystem play (trickling down to bullying starting in grade school etc) so Google's messaging marketshare would only be relevant if there was some reason to believe it would have cowed Apple into interoperating.
      - gilfoy 1y ago
        iMessage wouldn’t need to interoperate. Look at WhatsApp, works great on iOS and Android and dominates the market in a lot of the world.
  - gilfoy 1y ago
    Because there are exactly two players in the game, and we’re in a thread under a whiny hyperbolic diatribe from someone that had the former. Why didn’t Google deliver an alternative to iMessage? Did they choose not to? Is it actually hard? Are they just too incompetent at making software that isn’t for running infrastructure?
alexjplant 1y ago
> Even worse being a teenager and having to endure social shaming for it. It wasn't until the EU signaled it was going to bring down then axe that Apple capitulated to RCS. Regardless of the merits of Apple's actions as regards technical interoperability I feel compelled to point out that this in particular is a cultural problem, not technical malfeasance. RCS users still appear as green bubbles and even if the lack of functionality has been remedied the stigma has not. People at my lunch table 20 years ago were drawing artificial distinctions between "MP3s" (portable DAPs) and iPods because the latter were expensive luxury products and the former were not. The same thing is at work here because owning an iPhone is a proxy for one's socioeconomic stratum. I own an iPhone and as soon as an Android user appears in an iMessage group chat some joker immediately makes a green bubble quip - no degraded picture message required. People that define themselves by conspicuous consumption don't care about interoperability. They care about brand recognition.
- gundmc 1y ago
  Yes, but this is precisely the point isn't it? It's blatantly enabling and embracing "othering" for no technical reason as an explicit strategy to exploit social pressures to maximize profit.
- ewoodrich 1y ago
  But that's what so insidious about it - by also actively degrading the chat experience it makes excluding non-Apple users not merely social signalling but also a rational decision even if you don't care about conspicuous consumption whatsoever. So pick your poison, either you exclude them because of in-group signalling/conspicious consumption or exclude them because you want non-potato resolution, with Android users getting the blame for Apple's UX. Either way Tim Cook says the solution is to buy an iPhone.
amazingman 1y ago
This reads like public affairs copy from Meta/Alphabet/et al looking to distract from the real, measurable harm produced against teens by social media and AI products that are either directly (Instagram) or indirectly (character ai) owned.
freetinker 1y ago
Apple does not owe Android users a superior non-Apple experience. Android a pretty damn huge platform, right? Way bigger than Apple, I hear? Blame Google. Google failed to compete.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
Apple users had/have plenty of other options - WhatsApp Signal Skype (back in the day) Line WeChat etc etc. So not really a big deal
esskay 1y ago
> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage What a ridiculous statement. Even with your edit it's still an utterly stupid conclusion to come to. Off the top of my head I can think of way worse things tech companies have done. Cambridge Analytica scandal, Gmail scanning, the Google Shopping lawsuit, Amazon's product clone hijack, Facebooks mood manipulation experiment, Ring doorbell viewing, Uber spying, to name just a few FAR worse things tech companies have done.
RataNova 1y ago
There's something uniquely dystopian about tying emotional/social exclusion to a hardware upgrade
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  The evil is (so-called) social media in all of its forms. Human connections of all kinds have been comprehensively distorted and enshitified by unchecked corporate opportunism and manipulation.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
whyoh 1y ago
I don't really agree with this framing. The fundamental issue is user ignorance, full stop. The fact is that our collective tech education is in a terrible state. Apple exploiting this to sell iPhones is just natural behavior for a profit-driven enterprise. Instead of shaming Apple (which won't be very effective IMO), we should aim to improve education. Teach users how SMS/MMS/iMessage work. Tell them that they can install universal messaging apps and so on.
- AndyMcConachie 1y ago
  Perhaps the fundamental issue is your ignorance? Don't you know that users require tools that just work and that they should not be required to understand all of this technical nuance?

ronsor 1y ago

> - Yes, I know no one outside the US uses iMessage. Yes, people in the EU use WhatsApp, by Meta & Zuckerberg, and from what I've seen, often act as if that is some sort of mark of superiority.

rwyinuse 1y ago
I don't think most of US in the EU really mind, or even know what messaging app people in America use. The privacy conscious folk around here do tend to prefer Signal over Whatsapp though.
elliotec 1y ago
A lot of people, in Austria at least, have moved to signal in my experience. My communities in the US and Austria have trended toward adoption of Signal with very few holdovers between messages and WhatsApp, some partly due to my pressure but overall it’s just getting away from the BS of the alts
palata 1y ago
> and from what I've seen, often act as if that is some sort of mark of superiority. Feels like you weren't able to have a proper discussion with those people. In many EU countries, using SMS made/makes no sense because SMS was/is super expensive as compared to WhatsApp. And using iMessage makes no sense because most people don't have an iPhone. From their point of view, it actually makes no sense. Now if you tell them "well, where I come from everybody has an iPhone" or "SMS have always been free", probably they won't say "still, I'm better than you for no apparent reason". I don't think that it is actually seen as a mark of superiority anywhere in the EU to use WhatsApp. Unlike apparently in some places it is seen as a mark of superiority to have an iPhone vs an Android phone. If you go in a EU country where SMS were not prohibitively expensive in the beginning of WhatsApp (e.g. France), you'll see that WhatsApp has been less successful (at least in the beginning). WhatsApp was a killer app because it was free SMS, really.
- ribosometronome 1y ago
  >because it was free SMS, really. Since when can WhatsApp interact with SMS users? They're so evil and predatory that they have entirely walled themselves off from that method of communication entirely.
  - 6510 1y ago
    I like how they (just like imessage) allow you to message someone who cant possibly read the message because they have no whatsapp. Then again, I think they cant even deliver the message over sms on iphone? SMS is only available in the apple app if you first force it to send SMS?
  - microtonal 1y ago
    WhatsApp gained popularity in Europe when non-early adopters started switching to smartphones (2010-2012 ish). The difference was that, in contrast to iMessage, you could install it on pretty much any smartphone. In the pre-Meta days they even supported many then dying ecosystems like Symbian, Nokia S40, etc. They had a yearly subscription fee, but most people never got the request to pay it. Nobody cared that it was incompatible with SMS, because everybody hated SMS because of the insane prices. In 2009 I got an iPhone 3G with an unlimited data plan, but I was still paying something like 0.20 or 0.25 Euro per SMS.
spookie 1y ago
I never had problems telling people: "oh I use this other one" and they probably have it alongside whatsapp.
PeterStuer 1y ago
There's always that one Facebook mom that refuses to use anything but FB Messenger, then get's upset why nobody reads her messenges.
whyoh 1y ago
>often act as if that is some sort of mark of superiority Well, you could argue that it's morally superior to be reachable by everyone, regardless of what brand of phone they use. The ability to install a 3rd party messaging app also shows some technical skill.

BowBun 1y ago

> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory Don't you think this is _maybe_ an overstatement? I was annoyed about this for years but reading your take is borderline satirical.

bitpush 1y ago
From the lawsuit > For example, when a user purchases an iPhone, the user is steered to use Apple’s default email product, Apple Mail. It is only through a complex labyrinth of settings that a user can change her default email application away from the Apple “Mail” application towards an alternative like Gmail (Google) or Proton Mail. > At least for mail a user can in theory modify the default setting. On the calendar front the situation is even worse. A user’s default calendar is Apple Calendar, and the default cannot be modified That's pretty evil & predatory to me. The fact that it is by design (someone decided it needed to this awful) is why Apple is being evil here. And this is just one example. There's more > For example, Apple banned apps from its App Store that supported Google Voice because Apple sought to advantage its own services over Google’s
- energywut 1y ago
  > That's pretty evil & predatory to me. That's not what the parent is asking. The OP said it was the most evil ever done. Big Tech does predatory and evil stuff all the time. That's not what's being claimed. The OP is claiming that this specific thing is the worst, the singular event that is above and beyond all others.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  I mean, does Settings > Apps > Gmail (or whichever other app) > Default Mail App really qualify as “a complex labyrinth”? Sure, it’d be a good thing to add a “Default Apps” section under Settings > General or something, but calling the current route complex almost sounds like an insult to users. EDIT: Actually, there already is a “Default Apps” section right at the top of the page of Settings > Apps. Yeah, if that’s a “labyrinth” then the assumed level of user intelligence is quite low.

buran77 1y ago

> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage Is that really the worst thing you've seen big-tech do? That's very fortunate. What about Blackberry Messenger which was the mobile instant-messaging golden standard for years and BB exclusive for as long as it mattered in the market? Was that too long ago to remember?

spongebobstoes 1y ago
my understanding is that BBM was different because there was nothing to interoperate with at the time Apple refusing RCS integration is a very clear example of hurting everyone in pursuit of profit it's likely not the most evil, but I do think it qualifies as evil. it stands out by being inarguably willful, and having a very broad impact I find harming hundreds of millions (probably billions) of friendships to be quite evil
- jki275 1y ago
  Windows Mobile? iOS absolutely existed alongside BBM as well. Apple didn't integrate with RCS because RCS was a fragmented pile of garbage. It still is, but it's I suppose less fragmented now. None of that "harmed" friendships, certainly not any real ones.
- fastball 1y ago
  Android didn't introduce RCS support until 2019, 8 years after the introduction of iMessage.

m463 1y ago

Actually, iMessage happily harms apple customers all the time. I know many MANY people who have lost chats with their loved ones (especially deceased ones) because there is no way to export and save their conversations. I think this should be as easy as saving photos, which apple makes (somewhat) easier to export. Back to email, it is pretty horrible to set up my local email server on an apple device. You have to go through these dialogs, apple servers have to be contacted (for "redirection"), and I usually barely get it working.

msgodel 1y ago
[flagged]
- bgnn 1y ago
  This drives me crazy on iPad! Such a missed opportunity to dominate personal laptop market is given up buy horrible UX.
- tomhow 1y ago
  > No dumb hacks to deal with some retarded Cupertino PM's idea of how computing should work You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter how right you are or think you are. It's not what HN is for and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
bobbylarrybobby 1y ago
FWIW, on a Mac you can just query the iMessage database — it's just a plain old sqlite file sitting somewhere on disk.

energywut 1y ago

> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage I think you might be living in a bubble, if this is the "most evil" thing you have heard of a big tech company doing. Go read up on IBM's history, especially in the 30s and 40s. Or a more contemporary example, read up on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Or Amazon's mistreatment of workers in both corporate and warehouse settings. Or Meta scraping data off your devices without permission to train AI. And, though I know some folks here disagree, plenty of people around the world believe what's happening in Gaza is a genocide, and Big Tech has materially contributed to making it happen. Or, if you want another example of human cost, talk about how resources for electronics are mined, or how electronics are manufactured. Saying, "the most evil thing big tech has ever done is make some chat bubbles blue" puts a whole lot of human lives below the color of some chat bubbles. You can think Apple did a really bad thing by doing that, that's fine. No complaints. But to call it the most evil thing ever done erases an incalculable amount of human suffering.

bitpush 1y ago
[flagged]
- energywut 1y ago
  > Apple walling off iMessage, giving the impression that Apple phones were high technology, and interacting with peasant androids is what made group chats fragment and pictures and videos look like trash. Which lawsuit PDF related specifically to iMessage interacting with Android was mentioned in this comment? I see a comment about RCS. Now, maybe you are right, maybe I narrowly interpreted RCS in iMessage to mean chat bubbles, and there's a wider interpretation. Even still, there's no possible way that's the singular most evil thing tech has ever done. The OP is free to be anti-Apple, more power to them, but like, let's be real about levels of evil. > Also, bringing up IBM, Microsoft or Facebook is "whataboutism". It's absolutely not whataboutism. The claim the OP made was about Big Tech broadly. Bringing in examples of Big Tech doing evil things is a direct and appropriate rebuttable to the argument that Big Tech doesn't do evil things.

danaris 1y ago

This is hopelessly exaggerated and bad-faith. First of all, when Apple created iMessage, there was no possible way for them to predict that friend groups would use it as a reason to treat members of their groups poorly due to using Android phones. Second of all, Apple did not deliberately make interacting with non-iMessage users in group chats "look like trash" in order to exclude them. Apple went out of its way to make it possible for iMessage to interoperate with the ubiquitous (in the US) SMS, with reduced features because SMS did not support the better features. If, instead, Apple had just made iMessage not interoperate with SMS at all, you'd be screaming about that instead. Third of all, if people are leaving others out of chats, that's not Apple's fault. That's something for those families and friend groups to work out amongst themselves. "Hey, guys, I don't have an iPhone, and don't really have the money to get one, so maybe we could use GroupMe/GChat/WhatsApp/Signal/IRC/email/smoke signals/meeting in person/any of the myriad other ways of communicating instead?" A) "Oh, sure, that shouldn't be a problem!" (everything is solved) B) "What? No, we're not going to change anything just because it makes it impossible to actually include you in stuff. That's a you problem!" (turns out, the problem is your friends are assholes) Apple cannot by any reasonable standard be held to blame for the way bullying, status-seeking teenagers treat each other.

ghaff 1y ago
I'm in a frequently-used group chat in which some people apparently have Android phones and others use iPhones. It works perfectly well. If some teenagers see green bubbles as some sort of challenge to their identities, it's probably a useful life lesson.
yaky 1y ago
What Apple could have done, for sake of clarity, sanity, and good practice is to handle SMS using one app, and handle iMessage using another, *separate* app. The problem is not that iMessage exists, it's that it operates in opaque and unpredictable ways, mixing SMS and iMessage (and now RCS) communication in a way where even more tech-savvy users do not understand how it works (first-hand experience - had to explain to someone why their images are super compressed when they send them to me, but OK when they send them to their friend with an iPhone). And now it's the same with RCS (Android-iOS). I send person A an image, the conversation switches to RCS. They use the "automatic reply" when I call them, conversation switches back to SMS. With person B, the switching between RCS and SMS is even more unpredictable.

zahlman 1y ago

Or you could use an actual program on a desktop computer to do it. When did everyone forget how that works?

anonymars 1y ago
Use a program on a desktop computer to do what exactly?
- zahlman 1y ago
  To communicate with friends and family.
  - anonymars 1y ago
    "I don't understand why people complain about that AT&T telephone company monopoly, when they could just write each other letters. When did people forget how to do that?"
    - zahlman 1y ago
      Telephone calls allow for near-instantaneous communication using voice while letters can (and could) take days to arrive and rely on writing. There is no comparison with using a computer vs. a cell phone to send messages over the Internet. It's even generally using all the same network protocols.
      - anonymars 1y ago
        > There is no comparison with using a computer vs. a cell phone to send messages over the Internet. "Communicate outside the home" is a pretty vast difference > It's even generally using all the same network protocols. This whole thread was about proprietary iMessage
        zahlman 1y ago
        > "Communicate outside the home" is a pretty vast difference It's genuinely baffling to me that people actually see things this way. When there is a social reason to be outside the house, I take that as a reason not to be staring at a glowing rectangle.

tolerance 1y ago

Really? https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

DesiLurker 1y ago

google with their android anti-fragmentation-agreement is pretty predatory. basically release any/all android devices with google services and pay us cut or release none and use pure aosp. it is some next level shit.

bitpush 1y ago
huh. Isnt that what business deals are supposed to be? Two businesses entering into a business relationship, where both parties get something. OEMs get Google services & operating system, or OEMs are free to use open source project. Are you saying Google should freely give away their products?
- DesiLurker 1y ago
  nice strawman, first google honeypotted the smartphone-os sector with their AOSP (android opensource project). now when they killed every other option except apple & effectively became a monopoly for all smartphone vendors, they are using their monopoly power to prohibit companies from using aosp piecemeal. they are explicitly telling vendors if you make any device with google services then you cannot make an ungoogled device at-all. this is exact opposite of the open source spirit and highlights that they were never interested in opensource, they were doing pretty much what MS did in 90s, release a bundled shitty version of a popular app with OS so you can kill them and maintain dominant monopoly. they just weaponized oss with AOSP to kill off any contenders. take a moment to think why amazon has no google services on their table and/or an amazon branded basic android smartphone, it would be super easy for them to do it (leave aside firephone .. for reasons). How is this not monopoly abuse? if Lina Khan had any balls this is what she would have gone after. edit: chatgpt explanation: https://chatgpt.com/share/686350ce-47dc-8008-8c30-14c6298d75ae https://chatgpt.com/share/686350ce-47dc-8008-8c30-14c6298d75...
- like_any_other 1y ago
  > Isnt that what business deals are supposed to be? To clarify what exactly that agreement does: it prohibits companies from developing competitors. It is nakedly anti-competitive, and no, business deals are not supposed to be that - there's a large body of law, sadly rarely enforced, saying so. Not every business practice is legal just because the directly involved parties agreed.

hbn 1y ago

The most evil thing a tech company has done is make a proprietary messaging app? Apple didn't make SMS bad, it just was. Apple has since implemented RCS and it hasn't changed how I communicate with people from my iPhone at all. Google should probably take most of the blame for repeatedly fumbling messaging on non-Apple platforms for the past 2 decades. Every time they had something that was getting any amount of traction it got quickly replaced with some stupid new, worse messaging app so a PO could get a promotion.

bitpush 1y ago
How did you manage to shift the conversation to Google in a thread about Apple?
- anonymars 1y ago
  I think the point was that if Google weren't so inept, iMessage wouldn't be such a monopoly And you know, maybe they have a point. I especially think about Microsoft and MSN Messenger/Skype. How do you fumble away not one but two dominant messaging apps?
  - ewoodrich 1y ago
    OP's point is about Apple intentionally fragmenting communication in social groups as an ecosystem play (trickling down to bullying starting in grade school etc) so Google's messaging marketshare would only be relevant if there was some reason to believe it would have cowed Apple into interoperating.
    - gilfoy 1y ago
      iMessage wouldn’t need to interoperate. Look at WhatsApp, works great on iOS and Android and dominates the market in a lot of the world.
- gilfoy 1y ago
  Because there are exactly two players in the game, and we’re in a thread under a whiny hyperbolic diatribe from someone that had the former. Why didn’t Google deliver an alternative to iMessage? Did they choose not to? Is it actually hard? Are they just too incompetent at making software that isn’t for running infrastructure?

alexjplant 1y ago

> Even worse being a teenager and having to endure social shaming for it. It wasn't until the EU signaled it was going to bring down then axe that Apple capitulated to RCS. Regardless of the merits of Apple's actions as regards technical interoperability I feel compelled to point out that this in particular is a cultural problem, not technical malfeasance. RCS users still appear as green bubbles and even if the lack of functionality has been remedied the stigma has not. People at my lunch table 20 years ago were drawing artificial distinctions between "MP3s" (portable DAPs) and iPods because the latter were expensive luxury products and the former were not. The same thing is at work here because owning an iPhone is a proxy for one's socioeconomic stratum. I own an iPhone and as soon as an Android user appears in an iMessage group chat some joker immediately makes a green bubble quip - no degraded picture message required. People that define themselves by conspicuous consumption don't care about interoperability. They care about brand recognition.

gundmc 1y ago
Yes, but this is precisely the point isn't it? It's blatantly enabling and embracing "othering" for no technical reason as an explicit strategy to exploit social pressures to maximize profit.
ewoodrich 1y ago
But that's what so insidious about it - by also actively degrading the chat experience it makes excluding non-Apple users not merely social signalling but also a rational decision even if you don't care about conspicuous consumption whatsoever. So pick your poison, either you exclude them because of in-group signalling/conspicious consumption or exclude them because you want non-potato resolution, with Android users getting the blame for Apple's UX. Either way Tim Cook says the solution is to buy an iPhone.

amazingman 1y ago

This reads like public affairs copy from Meta/Alphabet/et al looking to distract from the real, measurable harm produced against teens by social media and AI products that are either directly (Instagram) or indirectly (character ai) owned.

freetinker 1y ago

Apple does not owe Android users a superior non-Apple experience. Android a pretty damn huge platform, right? Way bigger than Apple, I hear? Blame Google. Google failed to compete.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

Apple users had/have plenty of other options - WhatsApp Signal Skype (back in the day) Line WeChat etc etc. So not really a big deal

esskay 1y ago

> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage What a ridiculous statement. Even with your edit it's still an utterly stupid conclusion to come to. Off the top of my head I can think of way worse things tech companies have done. Cambridge Analytica scandal, Gmail scanning, the Google Shopping lawsuit, Amazon's product clone hijack, Facebooks mood manipulation experiment, Ring doorbell viewing, Uber spying, to name just a few FAR worse things tech companies have done.

RataNova 1y ago

There's something uniquely dystopian about tying emotional/social exclusion to a hardware upgrade

TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
The evil is (so-called) social media in all of its forms. Human connections of all kinds have been comprehensively distorted and enshitified by unchecked corporate opportunism and manipulation.

deleted 1y ago

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whyoh 1y ago

I don't really agree with this framing. The fundamental issue is user ignorance, full stop. The fact is that our collective tech education is in a terrible state. Apple exploiting this to sell iPhones is just natural behavior for a profit-driven enterprise. Instead of shaming Apple (which won't be very effective IMO), we should aim to improve education. Teach users how SMS/MMS/iMessage work. Tell them that they can install universal messaging apps and so on.

AndyMcConachie 1y ago
Perhaps the fundamental issue is your ignorance? Don't you know that users require tools that just work and that they should not be required to understand all of this technical nuance?