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iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

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Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#41

Post by ceocoder »

spideymans wrote: post #38
ceocoder wrote: post #16

I came across this article[1] and this thread quoted[0] in article some time ago. I don't think of iMessage as a walled garden, it is almost like a low fence you can see across with a sign that "you must be this cool to participate". iMessage is literally the only reason I have not tried an android phone because I don't want to deal with the fallout of all of my chat threads going back to 2011(?) getting disrupted. I…

Vendor lock is real, but would that not be rendered moot of other players could offer a superior user experience? Especially when you consider that Facebook, Google and others have a far larger base of potential users than iMessage. As far as I understand, the only iMessage feature that competitors couldn't emulate due to first-party entitlements is the SMS fallback functionality, which while nice, is definitely a fe…

Google and Facebook may have a larger user base but it is not the in the same realm, e.g. I use iMessage to talk to my family, my close friends, parents from my daughter's preschool, co-workers, people I've only interacted with professionally - vendors etc - all it takes to connect is a phone number which is universal, and like you say it falls back to SMS. Compare that to Facebook where you have to add someone as a friend - which I don't do often because it just feels odd, or Google where messaging ecosystem is a bit fragmented with Allo, Duo, Hangout, Hangout Chat etc. Signal and WhatsApp are actually viable options but compared to iMessage feel heavy and not native, however I do use them both.

And like you mentioned - spam - I have yet to receive an iMessage spam message. That is pretty amazing.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#42

Post by zelly »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #8
JanSolo wrote: post #2

Anyone know the reason why there's no iMessage for windows? Is it supposed to act as some kind of gateway drug into the Mac ecosystem? Apple seems to have quite a few of these 'unspoken unfeatures'. Perhaps someone can tell me why there are no web browsers allowed on AppleTV devices?

Its because they use peer pressure to get you to buy an apple device. You can invite an android user to an imessage group but it apparently downgrades the feature set of the group for everyone, they also color messages from android users differently. Its all designed to discourage talking to android users so they eventually buy an iphone.

Yes, everyone knows this but you're not supposed to mention it. If you have green bubbles, you risk being a social pariah. Android use among teenagers, who are most susceptible to peer pressure, is >80%. Also I know several guys who switched to iPhones and suddenly had a much better sex life. It is what it is. Think of Apple buy-in like a tribal tattoo or rite of passage for young people.

If Apple released iMessage for Android or made it compatible with another protocol like RCS/WhatsApp/Signal/etc., then Apple would lose half of its market cap. I'm not exaggerating.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#43

Post by kelnos »

gkoberger wrote: post #33
mmglr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that a closed ecosystem eliminates spam? > I've never gotten a single unwanted blue message. This has not been my experience. While rare I have gotten a few spam messages.

I didn't mean to imply that; I meant to explicitly say that.

... which appears to be explicitly incorrect.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#45

Post by dpeck »

philwelch wrote: post #6
monadic2 wrote: post #3

If ever Apple needed to open source server and client code for a public good it is with imessages. Yes it has clear limits with a centralized server, but it is realistically how a lot of “secure” messaging happens and it’s very difficult to endorse being tied to expensive hardware. You can say the same about facetime: it is clearly higher quality than competitors in every experiment I’ve tried, but their refusal to i…

The main selling point of Zoom seems to be their handling of large group conferences though.

FT goes up to 32 participants now I think. Well before that you're into 1-many kind of mode vs a 1-few, they're very different experiences and different use cases.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#46

Post by harpratap »

est31 wrote: post #11
monadic2 wrote: post #3

If ever Apple needed to open source server and client code for a public good it is with imessages. Yes it has clear limits with a centralized server, but it is realistically how a lot of “secure” messaging happens and it’s very difficult to endorse being tied to expensive hardware. You can say the same about facetime: it is clearly higher quality than competitors in every experiment I’ve tried, but their refusal to i…

iMessage motivates people to people buy iPhones instead of Android when everyone else in a social circle has it. Why should Apple give up on that? What will Apple gain from making it ubiquitous? It would in fact disappoint many people as now they can't use their phone to distance themselves from the people who don't have that blue circle. Note that I'm arguing from Apple's perspective here. From my own I believe they…

Because tying your company to one product is an economic disaster. It's very clear that drop in iPhone sales causes a very direct impact on Apple and the reason why they started moving towards SaaS model. But their SaaS isn't big enough yet. If today China retaliates with ban on Apple, the company is pretty much dead because no other country is capable of manufacturing at the scale Apple needs it to.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#49

Post by spideymans »

mmglr wrote: post #32
gkoberger wrote: post #19

As an iMessage user, I'm happy with a closed ecosystem. I know that's a controversial opinion. I have dozens of channels of communication, and iMessage is the only one I don't get spam on. I really, really like that. Anyone without iMessage can still contact me the same way, via SMS, and they're all grouped in the same place. But I love that in 10+ years of using iMessage, I've never gotten a single unwanted blue mes…

Are you implying that a closed ecosystem eliminates spam? > I've never gotten a single unwanted blue message. This has not been my experience. While rare I have gotten a few spam messages.

It's trivial to use software to automate spam on more open web-based platforms, such as Facebook Messenger. This is a lot tricker with iMessage, where only authenticated Apple devices, with a unique identifier, can connect to the service. Buying truckloads of Apple equipment to spam iMessage is obviously uneconomical(and totally ineffective, given that Apple will swiftly ban any spamming devices), and software hacks to be exploited by spammers are either hard to come by or non-existant, and can quickly be patched by Apple

Again, not saying spam on iMessage is impossible, but it's clearly very difficult given the relative lack of spammers on the platform.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#50

Post by harpratap »

kelnos wrote: post #40
est31 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iMessage motivates people to people buy iPhones instead of Android when everyone else in a social circle has it. Why should Apple give up on that? What will Apple gain from making it ubiquitous? It would in fact disappoint many people as now they can't use their phone to distance themselves from the people who don't have that blue circle. Note that I'm arguing from Apple's perspective here. From my own I believe they…

> iMessage motivates people to people buy iPhones instead of Android Why, though? Does your average iPhone user actually care if the bubbles they see in their chats are blue or green? If so, why? Note that I'm talking about average users. Sure, there are likely a bunch of privacy-conscious users who believe in Apple's commitment to security and privacy and prefer iMessage on those grounds. But otherwise, why? > It wo…

> Why, though? Does your average iPhone user actually care if the bubbles they see in their chats are blue or green? If so, why?

They definitely do. Not sure what your age or demographic is, but young folks do care a lot about higher social status which is tied to blue bubble because of iPhone prices. It has nothing to do with privacy though.

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