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Beeper Mini is back

blog.beeper.com

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Re: Beeper Mini is back

#741

Post by hifreq »

threeseed wrote: post #491
acaloiar wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a lawyer. But I do believe there's reason to consider Apple's policy relative to iMessage clients monopolistic. Apple's behavior is not significantly different from Microsoft's, which instigated US v. Microsoft [1]. That case largely took issue with Microsoft's mandatory bundling of IE with Windows and the extent to which Microsoft created an inorganic monopoly. In addition to how Microsoft's monopoly came to…

> I'm not a lawyer. This is very obvious because you have a poor grasp of the facts. a) The issue with Microsoft was that it had a monopoly in operating systems. At the time it was about ~95% market share. Gates woke up one morning, decided web apps were a threat to this, saw Netscape as their major competitor and decided to eliminate them. It didn't try to compete with them. It went straight for elimination by bundl…

Agreed. Every single platform/device has apps that are exclusive to it. It's mind-boggling to me that people are so obsessed with Messages. I can't play thousands of Steam games on my Mac. My friends who have PCs play those games together, have fun, chat online. Should Steam be forced to "open their protocol" whatever that means?..

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#742

Post by mthoms »

hornban wrote: post #694
judge2020 wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> how do they solve it? Release iMessage on Android. If there is a concern that it wouldn't be secure with Google controlling it, then they could put it out on F-Droid, which would simultaneously prove that they're serious and also undermine Google's own efforts at controlling the culture war.

But then they wouldn’t be able to claim that alternative app stores are bad for consumers.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#743

Post by nelox »

judge2020 wrote: post #666
hornban wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved. They want the experience to suffer when somebody outside of the ecosystem is involved so as to create social pressure for the outsider to change. The ironic part of all of this is that while the EU may be forcing Apple i…

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?

Apple would prefer you buy an iPhone.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#744

Post by [deleted] »

judge2020 wrote: post #666
hornban wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved. They want the experience to suffer when somebody outside of the ecosystem is involved so as to create social pressure for the outsider to change. The ironic part of all of this is that while the EU may be forcing Apple i…

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?

[deleted]

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#745

Post by dbbk »

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 live in the UK and have not seen an MMS conversation in about 15 years. This is crazy.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#746

Post by vips7L »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #254
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #220

Beeper has caught a ton of media attention in recent weeks but I truly do not understand it. The SMS protocol has been around for decades and works perfectly fine with iPhones. If you want rich media and other bells and whistles, use WhatsApp. How often does someone whine so loudly about insisting on using the closed, Apple-proprietary protocol that their friends need to pay a monthly subscription for a third party i…

> The SMS protocol has been around for decades and works perfectly fine with iPhones. It's not that simple, you get discriminated against for having a different color bubble and using up people's SMS allocation. We should whine about (communication) interoperability, it's critically important for everyone. Purposefully or negligently creating incompatibilities is anticompetitive and generally toxic.

> you get discriminated against for having a different color bubble and using up people's SMS allocation

It's really not about either. It's about UX. SMS and MMS message UX is terrible.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#747

Post by borski »

rezonant wrote: post #576
borski wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because then SMS would never progress, and we’d all be stuck with 140 characters under the hood along with optional subjects and zero security. There was no push for RCS until iMessage came along.

Internet Explorer introduced a lot of new capabilities to the web platform. Those features were highly innovative and we take them for granted today. But for many of those features they did not do the work to get them standardized, or under-standardized them. They did not work with other vendors to get them implemented. Apple's automatic replacement of SMS is similar and had the same result: vendor lock in. Also it's…

RCS existed as a concept, but was extremely flawed and underfunded. Carriers had zero interest in changing from SMS at the time. Apple tried, and gave up, instead choosing to build iMessage. You may recall that when it was announced, it was actually touted by Steve Jobs as an open protocol; that never materialized, largely because Apple realized how massive of a lead they had on every other handset maker because they weren't beholden to the whims of the carriers, who had decided not to move on RCS for many years.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#748

Post by chankstein38 »

jorvi wrote: post #723
NelsonMinar wrote: post #447

Some useful history, the AOL/MSN chat wars: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/ AOL finally "won" that one by making a buffer exploit in their own client part of the required protocol. Later a court required them to allow messaging interop (as part of the Time Warner merger). They never implemented it.

Did AOL really win in the end though? My youth was in the late 90s and 2000s and I don’t know a single soul that used AOL, ICQ, or Yahoo. I imagine all of them must have been hoping for the reverse at that point, access to MSN.

Yeah, what? I grew up (in the same era) using AIM and Yahoo, ICQ was a little before my prime. Everyone I talk to about those days used them as well. MSN was fine but AIM and Yahoo were where it was at for the bulk of my early years of instant messaging with friends. At one point a friend even made me an AIM account because I was using MSN and they wanted to chat with me but didn't want to do it through MSN.

Obviously just 1 anecdote but I just wanted to share that my experience and your experience were dramatically different.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#749

Post by upon_drumhead »

skeaker wrote: post #296
upon_drumhead wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why stop there? Why not force every iOS app to support running on android?

There is an obvious technical difference between a protocol like iMessage and the software stack required to run apps. Beeper Mini has shown with tangible proof that an iMessage client on Android exists. Nobody to my knowledge has been able to emulate arbitrary iPhone apps on Android (if they have then let me know, that sounds like an incredible project and I would be fascinated to see how it works).

There have been attempts

https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/IEmu

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#750

Post by manmal »

jorvi wrote: post #723
NelsonMinar wrote: post #447

Some useful history, the AOL/MSN chat wars: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/ AOL finally "won" that one by making a buffer exploit in their own client part of the required protocol. Later a court required them to allow messaging interop (as part of the Time Warner merger). They never implemented it.

Did AOL really win in the end though? My youth was in the late 90s and 2000s and I don’t know a single soul that used AOL, ICQ, or Yahoo. I imagine all of them must have been hoping for the reverse at that point, access to MSN.

My friends were all on ICQ and MSN, ca 2001-2007 was when I heavily used those.
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