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Beeper Mini is back

blog.beeper.com

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Re: Beeper Mini is back

#591

Post by robertlagrant »

Nextgrid wrote: post #219
madeofpalk wrote: post #98

> Messages App is the default chat app for all iPhone customers. Not only is it the default, iOS makes it impossible to change the default chat app. In the US, where the majority of people have iPhones, this means that the easiest way to chat is by tapping on your friend’s name in your contact list and hitting the ‘message’ button. This is not true. On iOS - iOS has APIs for third party messaging and voip apps to int…

Default option is still usual phone call/iMessage in a lot of places - in some you can long press and select another option, but not all. Also, merely opening a separate app doesn't really help. How about instead of having 5 different apps (that the system one sometimes generously allows you to open), you had one app that can seamlessly speak all protocols? You can add multiple e-mail or contacts accounts (even from…

> why can't we have the same for messages?

I wonder if e2ee makes this difficult.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#592

Post by dwaite »

Nextgrid wrote: post #219
madeofpalk wrote: post #98

> Messages App is the default chat app for all iPhone customers. Not only is it the default, iOS makes it impossible to change the default chat app. In the US, where the majority of people have iPhones, this means that the easiest way to chat is by tapping on your friend’s name in your contact list and hitting the ‘message’ button. This is not true. On iOS - iOS has APIs for third party messaging and voip apps to int…

Default option is still usual phone call/iMessage in a lot of places - in some you can long press and select another option, but not all. Also, merely opening a separate app doesn't really help. How about instead of having 5 different apps (that the system one sometimes generously allows you to open), you had one app that can seamlessly speak all protocols? You can add multiple e-mail or contacts accounts (even from…

> You can add multiple e-mail or contacts accounts (even from different providers) and it'll seamlessly merge them in the system Mail/Contacts apps - why can't we have the same for messages?

Because there are standards there - SMTP and MIME and HTML for email, vCard for contacts.

For the contacts app, whatever fun graph or RDF or whatever format you use for contacts, your extension has to provide contacts via the surface of the SDK, which luckily had vCard to influence it. That may mean that the contacts app cannot support round-trip edits of those contacts, and you need to go back to whatever source to change things.

Same with calendar events - applications can expose a calendar, but this is typically not editable and you need to go back into the application to change things (e.g. to remove a session from your calendar, go into the conference app and say you no longer intend to attend it).

The message apps typically have none of this. They don't have commonalities in terms of identifiers (and may all claim authoritative use of say a phone number, with no approval of the carrier). They have no consistency in formatting. They have a varying set of additional features, none of which are designed to be compatible (e.g. person-to-person payments in Facebook Messenger vs in iMessage). They may also support extensions by third parties, business accounts with custom routing and workflow, etc.

XMPP and later Matrix tried to create standards around this, and for XMPP there was a brief time we thought there'd be buy in by larger parties like Google and Facebook. I'm very curious to see if we see uptake in ActivityPub, or if the same product/market forces make its popularity transient as well.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#593

Post by rewgs »

Man, what an absolute waste of engineering talent.

I don't understand those in this thread celebrating the "hacker spirit." The real "hacker spirit" would be something like, I don't know, building a better alternative to iMessage. This is just a game of whack-a-mole, destined to lose.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#594

Post by mschuster91 »

chipgap98 wrote: post #430
misnome wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US? When has that ever happened in the last 30 years? I’d buy the EU stepping in to mandate interoperability though. I’d welcome that! But… shouldn’t mostly everyone here view needing the EU to force the behaviour of a US company kind of against the entire supposed benefit of the US system and the purpose of the domain this forum is hosted on?

How would interoperability and end to end encryption work together?

The same way HTTP+SSL/TLS or OpenPGP/SMIME work: by standardization. No matter if you run Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, cURL or your own client, you can connect with end-to-end encryption to any HTTP server with any kind of SSL frontend. For email, it's just the same - any client communicating with any other client implementing the respective standard can do so with e2e encryption.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#595

Post by wharvle »

bee_rider wrote: post #571
unshavedyak wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it free? I have it bundled as part of my hardware purchases. Is there somewhere to get it without paying?

They put free in quotes because it is bundled in, I’m pretty sure. It is, from a user point of view, free if you are already buying an iPhone anyway. I have no idea how to compute the actual price. It really isn’t any better than SMS anyway, so I put the value at $0.

> It really isn’t any better than SMS anyway, so I put the value at $0.

Depends on what you do with it. You can send much higher-quality photos and videos over iMessage than SMS/MMS. You can also do things like play games (chess, for example) entirely inside iMessage.

If you're just sending short messages of plain text, yeah, it's not much of an improvement.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#596

Post by nine_k »

grishka wrote: post #529
kevinsync wrote: post #528

Maybe this came up in the earlier threads (announcement, outage) so I apologize if it's been discussed ... This project is fantastic. The hacker spirit is in full force, and I love a good David and Goliath story. However, all the comments about demanding interoperability and protocols keep confusing me -- I don't consider APNS a protocol (like TCP anyways), it's also not incidental, extra header space to stuff data i…

> Why does everybody feel entitled to use it if they're not using Apple products? Network effects.

This would be "enticed", not "entitled". What a user is entitled for is listed in the ToS; who did not accept them, is not entitled. Not necessarily forbidden or blocked, but any bets and guarantees are off.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#597

Post by progval »

snakeyjake wrote: post #290
lacker wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best case outcome is to get publicity leading to US and EU antitrust regulators to file a lawsuit against Apple, both of which Apple loses. The conclusion of this lawsuit is that not only must Apple allow access to iMessage, they also must allow changing the default for every component of iOS - messaging app, browser, app store, let you replace Siri with other voice assistants - and to lower the 30% app store fee…

How is this an actionable anti-trust issue? iMessage doesn't even register as a messaging platform in the minds of most users globally. In the US is it dwarfed by at least three other platforms. Globally, do any of the other top ten (Apple is nowhere near the top ten) messaging apps allow third parties to spoof their service? The purpose of anti-trust is to increase competition and prevent unlawful monopolies. Apple…

> iMessage doesn't even register as a messaging platform in the minds of most users globally.

It doesn't matter what the users think. However, the EU Commission agrees with you here, as it explicitly decided that iMessage doesn't fall under the DMA: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_... ("gateway" is one of the three conditions to be a gatekeeper, see https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... )

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#598

Post by phonon »

kevinsync wrote: post #528

Maybe this came up in the earlier threads (announcement, outage) so I apologize if it's been discussed ... This project is fantastic. The hacker spirit is in full force, and I love a good David and Goliath story. However, all the comments about demanding interoperability and protocols keep confusing me -- I don't consider APNS a protocol (like TCP anyways), it's also not incidental, extra header space to stuff data i…

You could say the same thing about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_(software)

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#599

Post by 98codes »

bdavbdav wrote: post #525
js2 wrote: post #471

> Messages will be sent and received via your email address rather than phone number. [...] Even worse, when iPhone customers added an Android phone number to an existing iMessage secure encrypted group chat, the Messages app would by default switch the entire group chat to using unencrypted, unsecure SMS. These two Messages features combine to create a terrible UX. When someone starts a group chat in Messages and in…

I almost forgot that you could MMS to email addresses. Crazy times of old.

Spammers haven't, that's for damn sure

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#600

Post by bongodongobob »

mmastrac wrote: post #552
seanp2k2 wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All Apple needs to do is send a few scary C&D letters from their army of lawyers and this will be done. If they run the infrastructure for imessage, I'm sure there's something in a ToS somewhere that talks about spoofing device IDs and unauthorized use of their services blah blah Apple's sole discretion. In theory I love it but in reality it'll be dead soon as Apple has too much to gain from the walled garden they've…

A $3T monopolist sending scary C&D letters tends to get the attention of the government.

Since when? What country?
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