861–870 of 1001 posts
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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?
Apple would prefer you buy an iPhone.
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OK! Let's assume you've built a water delivery system, a series of pipes. You attach anyone who buys a licensed faucet, and collect a modest monthly payment, as a typical utility would do. You use these funds to cover the operation costs of the pipe system. Your pipes use a standard threaded connector. If somebody attaches to your pipes without buying your licensed faucet and without paying, just due to the interoper…
Any sane company with the goal of making money from operating a service would just meter water from a device they own and charge a reasonable fee. Most of the people complaining would be completely fine with Apple charging a reasonable fee for Android access to iMessage. A system like yours would only make sense if your goals had nothing to do with covering the costs of operating the service, and were instead growing…
If someone chooses not to rent an Orange water meter, they can't have Orange water. That seems like a choice that Orange can make. Changing Orange to Apple and water meter to smartphone messaging, I don't see any inherent reason why the rules should be different.
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> 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 top messaging services are SMS and email. Do these allow different companies to interoperate with each other? Yes, of course. And so should all messaging apps, regardless of how many other messaging apps there are, because they all have a network effect. They're segmented into the…
I dunno, fixing the market to be “company X’s own services” doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of antitrust laws. Should I be allowed to sell gasoline at Shell’s gas stations?
But why are we reaching for a car analogy? Should gmail or google.com be able to block Firefox and force you to use Chrome? Not make use of some feature Chrome has, but just purposely block Firefox even if it supports that feature or its users are content to use the service without it.
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> They are pro user - for Apple ecosystem users that is. And I’m good with that. I don’t really agree. The interoperability impact means that I’m affected as an iPhone user too. I’m only not impacted when I communicate with other iPhone users. And it matters to me that my choice of device impacts the users I interact with. Apple just knows that their lock-in is strong, and the impact is disproportionately felt by non…
>> And it matters to me that my choice of device impacts the users I interact with. Interesting. How does this impact an Android user who sends text to you? To them everyone is green (or whatever color Android uses) correct?
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.
MSN was more of mid-00s thing. The 90s were all AOL though. I knew people who used ICQ (it was definitely more of a nerd thing) and Yahoo Messenger too.
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> They are pro user - for Apple ecosystem users that is. And I’m good with that. I don’t really agree. The interoperability impact means that I’m affected as an iPhone user too. I’m only not impacted when I communicate with other iPhone users. And it matters to me that my choice of device impacts the users I interact with. Apple just knows that their lock-in is strong, and the impact is disproportionately felt by non…
Did you actually read the parent comment? They consider a worse chat experience with Android users a feature, because God forbid someone prefers Android, or shudders doesn't want to spend $1000 on a phone.
Well not really - it would be great if the sms feature set matched imessage. The main benefit to me when I see blue is that I know that person is probably at least authenticated and probably has a credit card tied to that account. That in itself seems to limit the riffraff (scammers) that want to send spam or other garbage. I see way more of that from green than I do blue.
I think one of the underlying issues is that many are now going to be hesitant to even bother with Beeper Mini anymore. I don’t think there is going to be a high tolerance for this game of cat and mouse from the end user perspective I also don’t think goading apple is going to do much here either. Regardless of the current feelings around apple’s walled garden, they are not going to suddenly keel over and give up on…
I'd be willing to put up with it if it were free, like the good ol MSN messenger / AIM days.
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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…
Beeper isn’t using Apple services (at least not in Beeper Mini, their new e2ee iMessage client), and thus is not subject to any Terms of Service from Apple. They’re publishing client software, which is protected expression provided it’s original and doesn’t infringe any trademarks or copyrights. The end users are the ones potentially violating the ToS by connecting to Apple APIs. Apple has no basis to tell Beeper to…
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