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I don’t see how you’re not suggesting yet another competing platform (insert xkcd here). SMS is the default, and iMessage is an elevation of SMS; in the same wa

by ddek 5y ago

I don’t see how you’re not suggesting yet another competing platform (insert xkcd here). SMS is the default, and iMessage is an elevation of SMS; in the same way FaceTime elevates it’s respective default (phone calls). If iMessage was cross platform, it’s just another messaging app. We have that. If you want secure cross platform messaging, use any of the other platforms built around that feature.

stale2002 5y ago
> yet another competing platform People are advocating for the opposite. Make apple stop using their anti-competitive market to harm alternative messaging apps. > If iMessage was cross platform, it’s just another messaging app. No, it is just as good, and better if it is forced to be cross platform. You lose nothing, and everyone else gains, when anti-competitive markets are made to support alternatives. > If you want secure cross platform messaging Or, instead of that, we could use anti-trust law, against Apple to force them to be less anti-competitive, and allow other people to integrate with it. Problem solved.
- threeseed 5y ago
  > messaging anti-competitive market I love how it's such an anti-competitive market that in many countries Apple isn't even close to being a popular service. WhatsApp, WeChat, Kakao, Line etc dominate in non-Western countries.
  - lxgr 5y ago
    Even in all of Western Europe, WhatsApp clearly dominates, with iMessage coming in third or fourth in popularity in my practical experience (after Signal and lately, unfortunately, Telegram).
kelnos 5y ago
> I don’t see how you’re not suggesting yet another competing platform I'm not suggesting another competing platform. I'm suggesting an already-widely-deployed platform (RCS) that is standardized, has been around since 2008 or so (older than iMessage!), and is the actual real elevation of SMS, not an Apple-proprietary protocol. > If iMessage was cross platform It's not, and that's the problem! Making it cross-platform would at least partially solve the problem, though it does mean Yet Another Messaging App I have to install. > If you want secure cross platform messaging, use any of the other platforms built around that feature. That's a huge pain in the ass. Not all of my friends have Signal, and I'm tired of evangelizing. Not all of my friends have WhatsApp, and I'm not interested in evangelizing a Facebook property. I don't use Telegram, and very few of my friends do, and I'm also wary of evangelizing a messenger that is not secure by default, and that has what is IMO a sketchy, secretive history around its cryptography. Looking through my Messages history, there are 27 people I communicated with over unencrypted SMS/MMS over the past month. Only one of those people has Signal (not sure why they SMS'd me, but that just further illustrates the problem of how it's difficult to remember to contact people using the "correct" means), and maybe 6 or 8 of them have WhatsApp (for whatever reason, they/I don't really use WhatsApp often). Why is this so hard? Apple! If Apple supported RCS (with the E2EE extension), literally every single one of those 27 conversations would have been encrypted, without me (or, critically, the other party, whom I have no control over) having to do anything special. As much as I love blaming Google for many things, they cannot solve this, because iMessage is a closed protocol that they are not permitted to implement, and the messenger app that is in the default install (the iMessage-supporting Messages app on iOS, and the RCS-supporting Messages app on Android) has a huge easy-adoption advantage that third-party messengers will never be able to match. You can argue a bunch of "shoulds" here, but I'm talking about what the reality actually is.
- aspenmayer 5y ago
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    ...so the onus of standardization falls on Apple's shoulders then? If they want more features they can file an RFC, they're not "too good" for any of that stuff. If they think they're better at it, then they can open the iMessage protocol in some capacity. If Apple wants to present "the future" of messaging, then they're going to have to stop segregating between their own devices and third-party clients. There's no point in arguing about the technical aspect of this anyways. It's purely a social manipulation campaign by their marketing department, they as much as admit to it in their advertising.
    - aspenmayer 5y ago
      Apple originally planned to open source iMessage, and Steve Jobs has said as much onstage before he passed. However, Apple decided not to in the end, and that is their prerogative. It’s their product. If they don’t want to interoperate, why should they? Calling Apple users bullies by proxy as was done recently a Google engineer is just lowering the intellectual level of the discourse to appeal to the uninformed public.
      - kelnos 5y ago
        > If they don’t want to interoperate, why should they? Because it's the right thing to do. They are intentionally degrading the privacy and security of their own users every time an iPhone user opens the Messages app and sends a message to an Android user. They do this because they want a competitive edge, and value that over the privacy and security of their users. They're contributing to the problem of proliferation of various messaging apps, which makes it harder to contact people, and harder to evaluate what method of contact gives the most security and privacy. I'm not claiming Google is any kind of saint here. They are the definition of message app proliferation (and message app graveyarding). But at least Google, with RCS, is finally trying to do messaging in a way that's open to interoperability. I'm also not claiming that Apple "must" open things up. As you say, it's their prerogative not to. But I am also free to judge that decision as a net negative for society, and demonize them for it.
fomine3 5y ago
Messaging platform for specific hardware platform is nonsense. Theoretically it shouldn't be widely used.
- blunte 5y ago
  BlackBerry made a very success business doing exactly this for years.

by ddek 5y ago

stale2002 5y ago

> yet another competing platform People are advocating for the opposite. Make apple stop using their anti-competitive market to harm alternative messaging apps. > If iMessage was cross platform, it’s just another messaging app. No, it is just as good, and better if it is forced to be cross platform. You lose nothing, and everyone else gains, when anti-competitive markets are made to support alternatives. > If you want secure cross platform messaging Or, instead of that, we could use anti-trust law, against Apple to force them to be less anti-competitive, and allow other people to integrate with it. Problem solved.

threeseed 5y ago
> messaging anti-competitive market I love how it's such an anti-competitive market that in many countries Apple isn't even close to being a popular service. WhatsApp, WeChat, Kakao, Line etc dominate in non-Western countries.
- lxgr 5y ago
  Even in all of Western Europe, WhatsApp clearly dominates, with iMessage coming in third or fourth in popularity in my practical experience (after Signal and lately, unfortunately, Telegram).

kelnos 5y ago

> I don’t see how you’re not suggesting yet another competing platform I'm not suggesting another competing platform. I'm suggesting an already-widely-deployed platform (RCS) that is standardized, has been around since 2008 or so (older than iMessage!), and is the actual real elevation of SMS, not an Apple-proprietary protocol. > If iMessage was cross platform It's not, and that's the problem! Making it cross-platform would at least partially solve the problem, though it does mean Yet Another Messaging App I have to install. > If you want secure cross platform messaging, use any of the other platforms built around that feature. That's a huge pain in the ass. Not all of my friends have Signal, and I'm tired of evangelizing. Not all of my friends have WhatsApp, and I'm not interested in evangelizing a Facebook property. I don't use Telegram, and very few of my friends do, and I'm also wary of evangelizing a messenger that is not secure by default, and that has what is IMO a sketchy, secretive history around its cryptography. Looking through my Messages history, there are 27 people I communicated with over unencrypted SMS/MMS over the past month. Only one of those people has Signal (not sure why they SMS'd me, but that just further illustrates the problem of how it's difficult to remember to contact people using the "correct" means), and maybe 6 or 8 of them have WhatsApp (for whatever reason, they/I don't really use WhatsApp often). Why is this so hard? Apple! If Apple supported RCS (with the E2EE extension), literally every single one of those 27 conversations would have been encrypted, without me (or, critically, the other party, whom I have no control over) having to do anything special. As much as I love blaming Google for many things, they cannot solve this, because iMessage is a closed protocol that they are not permitted to implement, and the messenger app that is in the default install (the iMessage-supporting Messages app on iOS, and the RCS-supporting Messages app on Android) has a huge easy-adoption advantage that third-party messengers will never be able to match. You can argue a bunch of "shoulds" here, but I'm talking about what the reality actually is.

aspenmayer 5y ago
- smoldesu 5y ago
  ...so the onus of standardization falls on Apple's shoulders then? If they want more features they can file an RFC, they're not "too good" for any of that stuff. If they think they're better at it, then they can open the iMessage protocol in some capacity. If Apple wants to present "the future" of messaging, then they're going to have to stop segregating between their own devices and third-party clients. There's no point in arguing about the technical aspect of this anyways. It's purely a social manipulation campaign by their marketing department, they as much as admit to it in their advertising.
  - aspenmayer 5y ago
    Apple originally planned to open source iMessage, and Steve Jobs has said as much onstage before he passed. However, Apple decided not to in the end, and that is their prerogative. It’s their product. If they don’t want to interoperate, why should they? Calling Apple users bullies by proxy as was done recently a Google engineer is just lowering the intellectual level of the discourse to appeal to the uninformed public.
    - kelnos 5y ago
      > If they don’t want to interoperate, why should they? Because it's the right thing to do. They are intentionally degrading the privacy and security of their own users every time an iPhone user opens the Messages app and sends a message to an Android user. They do this because they want a competitive edge, and value that over the privacy and security of their users. They're contributing to the problem of proliferation of various messaging apps, which makes it harder to contact people, and harder to evaluate what method of contact gives the most security and privacy. I'm not claiming Google is any kind of saint here. They are the definition of message app proliferation (and message app graveyarding). But at least Google, with RCS, is finally trying to do messaging in a way that's open to interoperability. I'm also not claiming that Apple "must" open things up. As you say, it's their prerogative not to. But I am also free to judge that decision as a net negative for society, and demonize them for it.

fomine3 5y ago

Messaging platform for specific hardware platform is nonsense. Theoretically it shouldn't be widely used.

blunte 5y ago
BlackBerry made a very success business doing exactly this for years.