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Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

arstechnica.com

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Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#291

Post by standardUser »

averageRoyalty wrote: post #277
standardUser wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, it is beyond depressing to imagine Apple bigwigs sitting around discussing ways to make absolutely certain teens keep getting ostracized until they buy their overpriced product.

Given the majority of their users don't care about that, it seems unlikely to be an accurate portrayal of the internal discussions.

You don't think Apple brass is doing everything in their power to convince non-iPhone users to switch to an iPhone? Every excluded teen is another potential customer and to pretend they don't know that is beyond naïve.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#292

Post by dijit »

drexlspivey wrote: post #287
shreyansh_k wrote: post #31

This seems to be Beeper's insincere attempt at dressing up their grievances to appear as if they were in advantage of the [Apple's] customer. Apple has made it clear that they won't bring iMessage to Android. People who choose to invest in Android phones know they won't get access to iMessage. It seems a bit entitled behaviour for someone to feel like Apple should be forced to bring iMessage to Android for any reason…

Is Beeper’s whole purpose to satisfy people’s vanity to have blue bubbles or what’s wrong with plain ol’ SMS?

aside from the magic features not working; SMS costs money.

On some mobile contracts it's pretty close to free these days, but international SMS's are certainly not. - not sure it's a common use-case but it definitely is a common use-case for me.

Ironically, iMessage not being available on Android causes the other messenger apps to be more appealing. Whatsapp/Facebook Messenger. -- because they can be more ubiquitous across friends.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#293

Post by jkarneges »

derefr wrote: post #256
theturtletalks wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I mean a beeper alternative that uses the iMessage backend. The tricky part with beeper is that they have their own notification server that gets the notifications from Apple and turns them into what android understands. That should be self-hosted by each person because it would contain the FairPlay key.

It’s a trivial cost that people don’t want to pay. Sadly it can’t be run as some kind of ala-carte computation that can scale-to-zero like a Lambda function can, because it needs to be an active connection-oriented daemon that keeps per-connection state — i.e. something that always maintains at least one real OS thread, holding open real OS sockets, on the same machine (so that those sockets don’t break at the TCP le…

> why is there no Lambda-like serverless compute substrate that allows your function to speak a connection-oriented protocol, by externalizing the connection-hold-open and per-connection book-keeping state into the routing layer, such that your own function in the system could scale-to-zero?

Fastly Fanout + Compute?

(disclosure: Fanout tech lead)

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#294

Post by blahgeek »

tshirthoodie wrote: post #270
JoblessWonder wrote: post #122

As I mentioned in the previous discussion[1], users are going to have to put up with the system going down... and I just don't see that happening. From the article: "It was losing messages during the outage and never being entirely certain they had been sent or received. There was a gathering on Saturday, and she had to double-check with a couple people about the details after showing up inadvertently early at the wr…

Apple's iMessage implementation loses messages all the time. It happens about once every month between my girlfriend and I. I have also had iMesages be sent to the wrong recipient. In one ongoing case, my aunt and uncle frequently receive each other's iMessages, suggesting it's related to their group carrier plan but it's hard to say. The extended family all knows to use SMS instead, which reliably goes to the intend…

Are they sharing the same iCloud ID or something? That's the most likely scenario to me

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#295

Post by jmye »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #84
joshmanders wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now apply this logic to any other company product, maybe even your own or the company you work for and tell me if this sounds as ridiculous to you as it does me.

Most companies don't have network effect with lock-in, and especially those we depend to live our everyday lives: I can send money to my buddy who uses a different bank, I can send emails to gmail users from my yahoo account , I can also refuel my car at any station and not be tied to one brand. Imagine being locked in to any of those. There are of course a lot of companies with lock-in out there, but none with such…

?

You can send a text to any user, regardless of service. I don’t understand your analogy.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#296

Post by standardUser »

jiggawatts wrote: post #55

The fundamental issue is that there are no readily-available iPhone emulators that can send iMessages, and this is a good thing that people pay for. The benefit of the Apple walled garden is that the spammers are kept out, because they can't get fifty SIM cards, plug them in to a "SIM box"[1], and start sending hundreds of thousands of scam messages via iMessage. This is easy in an uncontrolled, open-source ecosystem…

[flagged]

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#297

Post by [deleted] »

skeaker wrote: post #216
dann0 wrote: post #71

[flagged]

To unspin your statement, Beeper is providing Apple users with more functionality by way of giving them the ability to send iMessages to their Android-user friends. This is beneficial for Apple users, but Apple has a financial incentive to restrict their users so that the only way for other people to interact with them is to purchase an Apple device, so they are harming their own Apple device users by trying to cut o…

[deleted]

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#298

Post by _8j50 »

You know all the drm-y attestation b.s., yeah, don't be surprised when stuff like this accelerates apple and co.'s adaption of it. They can require the cpu to cryptographically verify imessage for it to talk to other clients. I hope the reverse engineers have a lot of fun though.

I don't oppose it but I do wonder why people can't just use a different client? Same with the usb-c nonsense, walled garden lawsuits,etc... when alternatives are viable, is it right to be intolerant of what you don't like? If I want to start a closed source proprietary crappy messaging app and I don't want other clients to talk to it, why would someone have a problem with that? But again, I think beeper's work is cool, I just have a hard time understanding the whole anti-apple sentiment. I mean, why support apple at all on your messaging app if you don't like them? Does apple or do apple users owe everyone else participation in their ecosystem?

I just can't reconcile the attitude with the attitude of liberty for all.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#299

Post by danaris »

tshirthoodie wrote: post #270
JoblessWonder wrote: post #122

As I mentioned in the previous discussion[1], users are going to have to put up with the system going down... and I just don't see that happening. From the article: "It was losing messages during the outage and never being entirely certain they had been sent or received. There was a gathering on Saturday, and she had to double-check with a couple people about the details after showing up inadvertently early at the wr…

Apple's iMessage implementation loses messages all the time. It happens about once every month between my girlfriend and I. I have also had iMesages be sent to the wrong recipient. In one ongoing case, my aunt and uncle frequently receive each other's iMessages, suggesting it's related to their group carrier plan but it's hard to say. The extended family all knows to use SMS instead, which reliably goes to the intend…

I use iMessage regularly, and have done so since it was first released.

I have never, to my knowledge, had a message sent to me lost (which I would have found out because my family members, who would have been the ones to try and fail to send it to me, would have mentioned it), nor lost a message I sent (except for obvious cases where I had insufficient signal, and the app clearly notified me of it).

I have never received a misdirected message, had mine misdirected, nor heard of anyone else doing either.

In all the criticisms of iMessage I've seen recently—in this Beeper situation, and a little longer ago when Apple decided to support RCS—I have seen no one else say that they've had issues like you describe.

Obviously, this doesn't mean that these things can't happen. But it does suggest that Your Experiences Are Not Universal.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#300

Post by 8note »

joshmanders wrote: post #44
user_7832 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think calls for interoperable communication platforms is a good thing!

Sure I do too, but I'm against this ridiculous notion that Apple MUST allow others to integrate and use their services for free. My point is nobody has any problem with the myriad of other messaging platforms that are completely closed, but all of the sudden iMessage is the bad guy because you don't want to have a green bubble with iPhone users?

A proper thing is for the EU to require apple to implement an interoperabile message api and force that to be used as the default, rather than being able to use a non-interoperable messaging protocol as the default
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