“It’s time for Apple to fix texting”

First, Apple shaming Microsoft. Then, Microsoft shaming Google. Now, Google shaming Apple.

> missing read receipts and typing indicators

Life is better without both of these.

> no texting over Wi-Fi

This claim was odd. I visited Europe a few months ago and definitely sent/received SMS over wifi using my iPhone.

> When people with iPhones and Android phones text each other, Apple relies on SMS and MMS, outdated systems which do not always support texting over wi-fi. That means if you don’t have a cellular network connection, depending on your carrier and situation, you may not be able to send and receive texts.

Oh, so the claim was deliberately misleading. That's not a good way to build trust.

I understand that there are huge interoperability and legacy requirements on the phone network. But for the sake of solving the biggest problem of Android to iPhone communication I think we can and should demand something which is actually modern (ie platform and carrier agnostic).

The problem with RCS is that the solution has been stuck in GSM consortium hell for over a decade.

It affects them in that everytime an iPhone users text me a video I have to ask them to post it somewhere else so I can view it. The videos are so small and blurry I can never see what's happening in them. I[hone users are have unsent messages to android users without cell service which happens all the time and is confusing why some texts send and some don't and it's a function of the type of phone the receiving party has (?!)

Do we really need a single standard? I and many others use multiple messaging services and it’s fine. Each has their pros and cons. I can also contact people in multiple ways if one service fails.

Most businesses, consumers, and developers universally continue to ignore the primary reason that iMessage is a closed platform, rather than an app on every platform as iTunes is:

Apple is using device serial numbers for anti-spam, supported by a fully-authenticated hardware and software stack that does not allow user modification. This permits Apple to simply “console ban” any Apple device that spams on iMessage. This makes it prohibitively expensive to send spam over iMessage. They have been doing so since iMessage was launched.

Android offers no such attestation that I’m aware of. Windows, on Pluton, could offer this attestation securely — and that is a key deliverable of Pluton.

It’s easy, then, to predict what Apple’s first non-Apple platform will be: Microsoft Windows 12, only if secure-booted, with Pluton-signed attestation that the kernel is unmodified. And it’s easy to predict how Apple will implement anti-spam: by applying “console” bans to specific Pluton chips by their serial number.

If Android wants to join the party, then Android phone builders need to implement secure boot with hardware-signed attestation of non-rooted-ness, in the style of Apple T2 + macOS or Microsoft Pluton + Secure Boot. Until then, Apple iMessage will remain single platform.

(I recognize that this is extremely unpalatable to device hackers, but the same freedom to modify an OS kernel that hackers desire is also the freedom to spam all users, as we have seen repeatedly with all messaging software platforms operated without hardware-backed attestation for the past thirty years — including email, Jabber, and HN itself.)

(No, I do not work at Apple.)