711–720 of 1001 posts
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It's not the color of the message, for me. If an Apple user sends me a video it comes through as an extremely low resolution and highly compressed video. Look at the unwanted grackles at my mom's bird feeder: https://i.imgur.com/7gBt22i.png Fantastic, right?
Because it's sent as MMS. Apple implementing RCS next year will mitigate that.
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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…
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It is free even without purchase. I could give someone an old iPhone and they can use it without issue.
"Cars/TVs/insert-other-thing-here are free, because I could just give an old one to someone!" That ain't how it works bro . . . .
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> and to lower the 30% app store fee to 10%. In danger of being an Apple apologist, the app store fee for the vast majority of sellers is 15%.
...which is still more than 5x the normal rate for payment processing. Reducing your price gouging from 10x to 5x isn’t exactly a kindness.
> 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…
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I think they ignored a rarely talked about but important aspect. iMessage is free for Apple users because it comes bundled with all Apple products. The cost to run iMessage and deliver millions of messages daily must be a significant number. With beeper, they are enabling the functionality for android. That is every android user signed up with beeper will end up costing Apple some money to send messages to iphone (or…
This aspect is ignored, because it's clear that Apple blocks third-party clients to maintain its dominant position in the US (social unacceptability of green bubbles among teens). If cost was the problem, they could offer a subscription.
People do not by iPhones because of iMessage. I'll totally accept that some, even a majority, buy them as a fashion item, in a similar way that Samsung S series phones are, but iMessage will not be a significant driver for many.
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Let's imagine it is an engineering problem; how do they solve it? Give a disclaimer that "your communications are not encrypted" and turn the bubbles maybe light green?
Wouldn’t entire thread need to be light green. Wouldn’t android users not see the Tapbacks/threads in same visual UX. It makes sense to turn it off entirely than to deliver a subpar and confusing UX
As for reply threads, when it's used it creates a lot of confusion for non iPhone users and it's not clear how Google Messages and other texting clients can fix it post-hoc. I'm not even sure how iOS reconstitutes it-- perhaps Apple sends some message metadata on the side via iMessage?
As far as I understand, in order to talk to Apple iMessage services/backend (and all auth pieces) you need a "legit" Apple ID and legit Apple hardware model #s / serial #s If you don't have that, how are they able to get auth tokens / send messages around without basically "exploiting a hidden hack that might get patched"?
I wonder why Apple lawyers don't go after Beeper with the CFAA?
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Beeper Mini does not MITM messages - it's a reverse engineering of how iMessage works, and runs entirely on-device, without putting messages thru Beeper's servers. It talks directly to Apple and pretends to be an iPhone. You're thinking of Beeper Cloud, which does iMessage thru a Mac Mini in the cloud.
> Beeper Mini does not MITM messages - it's a reverse engineering of how iMessage works, and runs entirely on-device, without putting messages thru Beeper's servers. It talks directly to Apple and pretends to be an iPhone. It doesn't matter. It's closed source and not easily audited - they could easily just be doing a naive solution and piping every message back to themselves after it's decrypted by the client.
This means Apple can read the iCloud Backup contents, and Apple has the Messages in iCloud device endpoint keys, and Apple can decrypt the iMessages sent to or from the device in realtime.
iMessage is, in practical terms, not really e2ee.
It’s not fair to level these sorts of potential/speculative security concerns at Beeper Mini when iMessage’s first-party implementation has way worse problems that are actually documented.