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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

#441

Post by frumper »

tshirthoodie wrote: post #310
rgbrenner wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iMessage is routed through apple's servers over TCP. So this is like saying: sometimes I go to google.com but it randomly loads bing.com... must be related to my group carrier plan What data made you make that association? Seems unlikely. If that happens, then apple would have to be routing messages incorrectly, but that would be a massive bug/security issue... especially considering how E2EE works.

Yeah, who knows? I am only brainstorming. Ever since I discovered the abysmal state of Apple's customer service after having my iphone stolen last year, I feel confident we will never know.

I’m just curious what you think Apple should do for a stolen phone?

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

#442

Post by rtpg »

huevosabio wrote: post #406

Completely uninformed question, doesn't this fight just push people to WhatsApp? I never use SMS, and no one in Mexico does either. My friends in Europe seem to largely use WhatsApp as well. So it really seems like Americans are outliers in their choice for iMessage / SMS. So, wouldn't this push Americans to WhatsApp?

I think what happened is that Americans got unlimited SMS plans meaning they got used to just communicating by SMS. Europe got WhatsApp to deal with wild SMS pricing. So Europeans moved over to WhatsApp etc. Americans continued using SMS. Apple took advantage of this with iMessage silently upgrading stuff to their protocol. On top of this iPhone penetration in many places in the US is much higher I think.

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

#443

Post by kbenson »

freedomben wrote: post #245
kbenson wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because usually precedents are not so narrow as to apply towards trillion dollar companies only, and even if they are they can be expanded upon. If you would be against a trillion dollar company forcing a small competitor to open up, you should rightly be worried about allowing the reverse, because the principles by which they justify it are unlikely to discern based on company size.

I (mostly) do favor government intervention with Apple, but you make a good point. Originally the income tax was only to apply to the uber mega rich. It didn't take long for it to apply to all the middle class too.

The trick is finding justifiable, reasonable reasons that don't cause havoc with our economic system, which IMO necessitates they they not target an arbitrary employee size or specific market percentage, or revenue. What is "large" is very relative, and not just by individual opinion, but temporally. What was a large company just 70 years years ago is nothing compared to those of today.

As much as I would like to see Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and the like not have so much power (socially, economically, most likely at the government level as well), I think the only way we'll actually make any progress towards the problems that allow large companies like that and allow their negative consequences is to attack some of the specific aspects of our current system they abuse to their benefit, and not them specifically.

For example, very strict privacy laws and control over tracking to curtail the biggest problems of the data companies, laws about control over your own devices and what you do on them (software) and with them (repair) for the hardware companies, etc. Otherwise we'll just see some other company take up the same practice and have all the same problems.

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

#444

Post by vlozko »

paxys wrote: post #426
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…

Entitled behavior is Apple dictating what code I can run on my non-Apple servers and devices. They can keep blocking it, and people will keep finding workarounds. That's the nature of DRM. It's not a battle they can win.

They don’t dictate that at all. What they do dictate is what devices are able to connect to their network and utilize their push notification service.

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

#445

Post by frumper »

standardUser wrote: post #291
averageRoyalty wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I doubt anyone is shocked that Apple execs want to sell more Apple products. They are paid very well to do that.

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

#446

Post by tenacious_tuna »

paxys wrote: post #427
theshackleford wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of people don’t understand the absolutely insane (and totally stupid) power of “blue text” in social settings In America. The rest of the world doesnt give a shit. > Break that and the phone market gets competitive again. See above.

Most of America also doesn't give a shit. This whole blue/green bubble thing is a story only among nerds and some tech elitists.

I was at a company holiday setting with some coworkers and one of them mentioned how the green/blue text thing genuinely factored into their dating decisions, on the basis that texting with someone without iMessage made the conversation clunkier and harder to build rapport.

So... I don't think this is just among nerds and tech elitists.

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

#447

Post by rezonant »

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…

Interestingly, if you break your iPhone on vacation and buy a phone that is not an iPhone so that you can still be contacted until you get home to your favorite Apple Store, you are also losing messages, assuming you forget to go through Apple's iMessage deregistration system. Really the design of iMessage is the problem.

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

#448

Post by denkmoon »

rezonant wrote: post #337
unstatusthequo wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple owns the delivery mechanism. I don’t believe that a third party using their ecosystem will last long. Nor do I want it. There are plenty of cross-platform things out there. Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp. Why does everyone care so much? Google can paint their Android robot blue. Then maybe all this silliness will end?

Because Apple embraced texting by supporting SMS, then extended it by forcing all the text conversations that they could into their own proprietary infrastructure, and is extinguishing it by using punitive product design to create pressure on communities of people to all use their products so that everything goes over their proprietary network. I don't want an over the top chat app, I just want to text people.

>Because Apple embraced texting by supporting SMS

what? sms is a basic phone function, how is supporting sms "embracing" anything?

If you, as an iOS user, don't want to use iMessage you simply go flip the toggle. If you "just want to text people", it's just that easy. Really.

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

#449

Post by JimDabell »

kmeisthax wrote: post #432
mngdtt wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a user, I am very well served by remote attestation when it is used to stop cheaters in videogames or spammers in messaging platforms.

I know of no messaging platform using remote attestation for antispam - and, as far as those platforms continue to support web registration, they can't use remote attestation[0]. Even if they could, it wouldn't help. Remote attestation verifies that your client code is running without modification. What you care about with spam is keeping the spammers from registering large numbers of unrelated accounts, which doesn'…

> as far as those platforms continue to support web registration, they can't use remote attestation

They can; Apple (and others) have implemented Private Access Tokens (PATs) for this.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-captchas-on-iphones-...

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

#450

Post by thethimble »

rezonant wrote: post #447
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…

Interestingly, if you break your iPhone on vacation and buy a phone that is not an iPhone so that you can still be contacted until you get home to your favorite Apple Store, you are also losing messages, assuming you forget to go through Apple's iMessage deregistration system. Really the design of iMessage is the problem.

Really? Doesn’t iMessage fall back to sms if the receiver doesn’t ack? At least that’s what the UX feels like.
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