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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)

#171

Post by cannaceo »

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…

I have an iPhone. I have a MacBook. I have AirPods. I have the watch. I use a PC for work and am considering moving away from the iPhone because I miss texting on my desktop.

They could bind a windows iMessage install to your iPhone the same way Signal/whatsapp do.

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

#172

Post by 0xCMP »

jamescostian wrote: post #79
harpratap wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm 22 and live in a mid-sized city, and I've seen people trying to get into a relationship (or even something more casual, but not a platonic friendship) get rejected because of the dreaded "green bubbles" - and really, I'm not exaggerating. And not from rich people who have the latest iPhone either. In addition, I have been in friend groups that would exclude Android users because if you have even 1 Android user in…

There are two reasons which together make it all make sense:

tldr; It's pre-installed and way better than SMS

1. iMessage is leagues more reliable and faster than SMS/MMS on even horrible connections allowing a real-time cadence to conversation with indications if messages were actually received and possibly if they've already been seen. Its features are also not crippled so simple things like sending photos between $1k+ phones does not end up with MySpace quality photos that are otherwise supposed to be 12MP Live HDR photos. Let alone sending longish videos (3 min+)

2. iMessage is already installed and integrated in iOS unlike WhatsApp which literally has all the most important features and MORE, but, for reasons I do not fully understand, I simply like using iMessage more. And so do most of my friends.

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

#173

Post by Nextgrid »

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…

> Unfortunately, for whatever reason, every other messaging app I've used just has't lived up to the UX provided by iMessage.

It’s as if there was at least some justification behind the “overpriced” nature of iPhones, despite what many Android enthusiasts want us to believe.

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

#174

Post by MAGZine »

jamescostian wrote: post #79
harpratap wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm 22 and live in a mid-sized city, and I've seen people trying to get into a relationship (or even something more casual, but not a platonic friendship) get rejected because of the dreaded "green bubbles" - and really, I'm not exaggerating. And not from rich people who have the latest iPhone either. In addition, I have been in friend groups that would exclude Android users because if you have even 1 Android user in…

I've seen this exact behaviour with non-tech friends in 20s-30s people. You have it exactly right. There's a stigma to being a green bubble.

It's stupid, but whatever. If you're going to be my friend, first things first: no tech prejudice :-) Apple might be more willing to interop if it had less of a network effect. Hell, I'd sub to iMessage if I could get it on Android.

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

#175

Post by harpratap »

quantummkv wrote: post #153
harpratap wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has nothing to do with the software. I use Whatsapp as my main IM and never had this issue. Pretty sure the same would happen on iMessage too if it targetted the same demographic. So your parent comment wasn't really a fair comparison because you left out the biggest IM service which does actually compete really well with iMessage without the vendor lock-in.

In my experience, it has. I use both iMessages and Whatsapp in India. I have never dealt with fake news and all the low signal forwarded memes and garbage on iMessages. Whatsapp, on the other hand, is filled with it. The only solace in whatsapp is that I can disable auto media downloading to escape it to some extent.

This has more to do with people who use whatsapp vs people who use iMessage. If all the people who use whastapp migrated to iMessage, the same problem will happen there.

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

#176

Post by pvg »

paulie_a wrote: post #73
internet2000 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Like pretty much every other messaging app on every phone platform currently existence?

End-to-end encryption by default and seamless multi-device support. It's a combination of features that's currently limited to iMessage.

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

#177

Post by saagarjha »

joshspankit wrote: post #138
randomdata wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facetime was announced as an open standard to be. It is speculated that it never came to light because of a patent dispute[1]. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/06/make-facetime-an-open-standar...

Apple set up colocated servers across the world and changed the Facetime protocol significantly to work around a single patent (a patent for direct device to device communication of all things). I can’t imagine a patent dispute actually stopping them if they were firm on making FT an open standard.

A lawsuit that they paid out $400 million for, even after rearchitecting how FaceTime worked to avoid the patent?

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

#178

Post by jtbayly »

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…

You literally answered your own question.

“... though MMS for group texting is ridiculously unreliable so I try to funnel people to Signal.”

Group texting between iPhones just works. Add an Android user to the group and all of the sudden it doesn’t work. Ergo, don’t add them.

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

#179

Post by saagarjha »

fao_ wrote: post #159
jamescostian wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 22 and live in a mid-sized city, and I've seen people trying to get into a relationship (or even something more casual, but not a platonic friendship) get rejected because of the dreaded "green bubbles" - and really, I'm not exaggerating. And not from rich people who have the latest iPhone either. In addition, I have been in friend groups that would exclude Android users because if you have even 1 Android user in…

Honestly this seems like a feature of the social circles involved. I can't really imagine being, or even wanting to be, around people who are so shallow they won't have someone in a group because they can't change the chat name, or at least, people who wouldn't be willing to move to other types of software to accomodate people in the group. It seems like basic human decency that when someone in the group says "I can'…

The parent comment mentioned some of the reasons why it goes beyond the normal "lol you're too poor to buy an iPhone". SMS chats are majorly crippled compared to iMessage ones, and this is technical functionality, not just bubble color. You can't really change the people in an SMS chat, iMessage features don't work (in some instances hilariously: you'll get a text like "so-and-so liked this message" instead of a reaction)…people just don't want to deal with it. And yes, iMessage makes no effort to destigmatize the person who converts your iMessage chat into an SMS conversation.

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

#180

Post by ascorbic »

pottertheotter wrote: post #156
aphroz wrote: post #141

It is really interesting to see the difference between countries, I travel between Asia and Europe and I knew that iMessage existed, but I thought people dropped it like SMS, years ago. Interesting to see that in a globalized world some differences still persist. I have asked around me to Iphone owners if they used iMessage and they almost never use it. It must be something specific to the US. Please do not downvote…

So people don't use SMS outside the US? I knew WhatsApp was big in other countries, but didn't realize no one even uses SMS not iMessage. What do people use in Europe?

WhatsApp, mostly, but also FB Messenger and Telegram depending on country. I just checked my phone and I have received just one SMS from a human this year.
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