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Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead
481–490 of 665 posts
Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What is this referencing Spotify launched on iOS. Apple saw them competing with iTunes and basically stole their idea to compete with them. That, alone, would be okay. But Apple Music is privileged within iOS and Apple's marketing in a way Spotify cannot be.
Oh, I would apply that to any number of things Apple integrated, for example dropbox/icloud drive. Google does the same thing. Unfortunately, with the near zero marginal cost of software, I do not see any way around vertical integration unless the law started arbitrarily segregating businesses. Also, Apple Music came out 5 years after Spotify, so it had a pretty healthy lead. But regardless, any non Apple vendor comp…
iDisk came out in 2000 and functioned like iCloud Drive has, with local caching, since 2003
It predates Dropbox by almost half a decade
Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you want Apple to tell iPhone users whether their messages to someone are being recorded by that person's telco and made available to other plan holders on that phone plan? How do you want Apple to indicate if this chat participant is costing you money by the message or free? Everyone's concerned about teens. Presumably teens know that T-Mobile and the other carriers give the family plan adults the ability to…
I have recent experience talking to non-techie younger people recently about this very issue and none of them were aware of the security differences of SMS vs. iMessage. Teenagers know that blue = iPhone and green = non-iPhone/SMS and that blue offers significantly more features and functionality vs SMS (delivered/read receipts, group chats, stickers, rich media, memojis, etc), which is the overwhelming reason why bl…
Plus the cost. Over here in the EU, back in 2010 (?) SMS was an expensive thing, you would pay dearly for each or have to buy a "50/100/500 SMS package" or similar.
So lowering the cost of 3G made it more economical if your friends had iPhones as now you could spend €20/month for '1GB' (which was mostly iMessage & web browsing at the time) and avoid spending that simply on SMS. (excuse the price inaccuracies if any, it's been a while since I had that iPhone 3GS)
Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not commenting about the ethics of all this, just wondering why technically Apple can only block ~5% of Beeper Mini users instead of all of them? Could this potentially be tied to the use of an email id as the iMessage handle? Apple could block 100% of the people using Beeper and throw Hackintosh users into that as a bonus as well. The reason they’re not doing that is because it could have unintended consequences a…
>Apple could also push out an update tomorrow that would end this once and for all by utilizing device attestation and leveraging Secure Enclave, but this would potentially lock out older devices, something they were willing to do when they upgraded the FaceTime protocol a couple of years ago, but they might not want to do that this time around. Just give it a couple more hardware generations to ensure the largest %…
Are you talking about the iOS 6 to 7 transition where the security certificates expired and Apple wouldn't issue a new one and said you needed to switch to iOS 7 if you wanted Facetime to work again? That was my last iOS device.
Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this really a problem? I seriously doubt many people are going to leave someone out because they use an Android phone. I certainly won't because I like communicating with people and people are far more important than technology.
That's nice of you, but by all accounts from the US (where iphone is dominant): Yes, it's a problem. The visual marking and decreased integration/service towards users of non-iphones is pretty obviously part of why Apple has such a big phone market share in the US - if not, they wouldn't fight tooth and nail to keep those anti-features. There's plenty of examples of Apple being quite open and friendly to integration…
Well in Europe Android is dominating the market (but with a very fragmented experience depending on Android version).
The result is that as an iPhone users I feel sometimes feel left out because different friends circles on Android turn to different secured messaging services (WhatsApp, FB messenger, Telegram, Signal, etc...).
I firmly refuse to give my personal ID to all theses companies just to keep in touch so I often default to sms/mail (or I get left out of group chat).
iMessage is not perfect but they did get the sms fallback right and with upcoming RCS support maybe it'll be easier to bypass theses competing closed and incompatible walled gardens.
So from my point of view, the whole "blue bubble" tyranny look like a joke. Apple kept conformance with SMS/MMS standards from the beginning and added a secure layer on top. I wish others services just did the same.
Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead
#486I think this is kinda technically a win for Beeper. I would've expected another 100% lockout to be Apple's priority. They were instead only able to block 5%, which sounds like a heuristic being applied, and possibly not even an intentional block of Beeper (in the sense that some anti-spam service may be identifying some Beeper users). They can certainly escalate with protocol changes, but they still have to contend w…
Honestly they could just choose to disable iMessages on older devices. For the vast majority of people using those old devices, it would just change the bubble color and Apple wouldn’t fear any backlash.
I’m not saying they should, but knowing Apple, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they decided to do it.
Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Wild SMS pricing in Europe? Unlimited SMS has been the default in Denmark for at least 15 years.
In the Netherlands WhatsApp became popular because they offered free SMS.
Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's nice of you, but by all accounts from the US (where iphone is dominant): Yes, it's a problem. The visual marking and decreased integration/service towards users of non-iphones is pretty obviously part of why Apple has such a big phone market share in the US - if not, they wouldn't fight tooth and nail to keep those anti-features. There's plenty of examples of Apple being quite open and friendly to integration…
Well in Europe Android is dominating the market (but with a very fragmented experience depending on Android version). The result is that as an iPhone users I feel sometimes feel left out because different friends circles on Android turn to different secured messaging services (WhatsApp, FB messenger, Telegram, Signal, etc...). I firmly refuse to give my personal ID to all theses companies just to keep in touch so I o…
> iMessage is not perfect but they did get the sms fallback right
Did they though? It’s unreliable.
Other than this point, I very much share your position.
Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead
#489I think this is kinda technically a win for Beeper. I would've expected another 100% lockout to be Apple's priority. They were instead only able to block 5%, which sounds like a heuristic being applied, and possibly not even an intentional block of Beeper (in the sense that some anti-spam service may be identifying some Beeper users). They can certainly escalate with protocol changes, but they still have to contend w…
My father has an iPhone 8 which did not receive the latest iOS update. I can iMessage him just fine. There are millions of people out there running old iPhones like that. If Apple just decided to cut them all off iMessage they would do far more damage to their brand than Beeper could possibly manage.
I’m not talking about your father but I really doubt that the millions of people running 6+yo phones would care a lot about this. They could still send SMS, it’s not like they would became suddenly unreachable.
Apple could even be generous and still allow group chats or whitelist existing accounts.
Also, you have to take into consideration that iMessage is pretty US centric, the rest of the world wouldn’t really care about this.
Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the product is so great why doesn't Apple make it available on more platforms? The answer is because it's not a product, it's a marketing tool. And a very successful one based on the widespread bullying it has caused.
If Zelda is so great why doesn’t Nintendo make it available on more platforms? Being able to run Nintendo games is a prime feature of the Switch product, and being able to run Apple software and services is a prime feature of an iPhone product. By your definition anything useful about an item is simply a marketing tool? It’d be a very different world if nothing was allowed to have unique access to anything. It might…
The answer is the same: because their platform is not very good. So if buyers had the chance they'd instead buy Zelda games for the PC for instance.
It would be a real problem if Nintendo had a monopoly on good games on the US.