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

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

#51

Post by spideymans » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 3:13 AM UTC

harpratap wrote: post #50

kelnos wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They care because the green bubbles indicate a severely impaired user experience. For example, multimedia may not work, and even if it does, its typically very poor quality.

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

#52

Post by kccqzy » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 3:14 AM UTC

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…

I, unfortunately, have sent spam messages via iMessage a long time ago. I did it by faking a Bluetooth keyboard that connects to an iPhone and starts typing out phone numbers and addresses fed from a computer. I did it to mass-send a message to about a couple hundred people.

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

#53

Post by philistine » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 3:14 AM UTC

harpratap wrote: post #50

kelnos wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You know, for a tech site, people sure do love to forget that iMessage is preferred because it brings features instead of mere social status.

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

#54

Post by njovin » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 3:16 AM UTC

spideymans wrote: post #49

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.

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…

I thought Facebook Messenger was very strict about assigning page-specific user IDs to avoid this. Last I checked there was no way to send a message to a Facebook user using their profile ID.

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

#55

Post by internet2000 » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 3:16 AM UTC

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…

iMessage is a much better user experience. Users associate the blue bubbles with that.

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

#56

Post by stirlo » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 3:16 AM UTC

rrdharan wrote: post #4

Meanwhile, https://airmessage.org/ seems to have existed for quite some time now...?

Android only.

I don't give a f#%k about the color of my messages but being able to see them from a website/windows desktop would be useful. This doesn't achieve that.

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

#57

Post by slivanes » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 3:16 AM UTC

ceocoder wrote: post #41

spideymans wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How about all the iMessage created "Liked", "Loved", "Emoji" messages? Each and every one of those creates a message alert on non-iPhones. It is by far the most spammy type of message one receives on an Android device (in the USA at least).

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

#58

Post by harpratap » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 3:16 AM UTC

halostatue wrote: post #35

teruakohatu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would or should they open it? They said they would make it an open standard. People took them on their word. https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/06/make-facetime-an-open-standar...

Then they got hit with by a patent troll.

Dealing with patent trolls is the rite of passage. It shouldn't be a deterrent if you really cared about open sourcing your software

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

#59

Post by kelnos » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 3:16 AM UTC

mulmen wrote: post #26

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SMS is colored differently (green) than iMessage (blue), regardless of the device on the receiving end. I'm not sure how they would even know the recipient is on Android. If I send an iMessage to a friend's iPhone when they do not have service it automatically downgrades to SMS from iMessage. My brother didn't run iMessage for years so group chats that include his iPhone were still SMS based. In a group chat with non…

> In a group chat with non-iMessage users everyone gets downgraded to SMS. I'm not sure how else it would even work?

I was thinking that there might be a way around it: send iMessages to people who are iMessage capable, and send MMS to people who aren't. The people who have to send MMS will just send their replies to everyone in the group over MMS, and the messages app on the iPhone would just figure out that the messages belong to the correct group.

But then I realized that I don't think there's an analog to the "reply-to" header for MMS. So there might not be a way to send that group message to the single MMS recipient without sending it to all recipients over MMS. In order to get replies to go to the entire group, each group member has to be in the "to" field for the MMS-using phone to know all the group members.

It's a shame, because my understanding is that the MMS protocol is actually pretty similar to email in some ways... and yet they apparently left out "reply-to".

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

#60

Post by chrischen » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 3:17 AM UTC

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…

Is there a chance you publicly reveal your other IM contacts? Because as it stands I pretty much never get spam on Instagram, Whatsapp, Line, nor Messenger (FB). I don't even get spam in the "Message Requests" of FB messenger.