Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Invites

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

771–780 of 956 posts

Re: Apple Invites

#771

Post by TheDong »

Aloisius wrote: post #547
TheDong wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The error tells me to turn on MMS, which is already on. RCS isn’t an obvious option anywhere

Settings > Apps > Messages > RCS Messaging If it isn't there, About > Settings > General > About and tap the Carrier row. If it doesn't say RCS, the carrier doesn't support it. Also one should note, MMS also requires carrier support and a few carriers don't support it in some countries. There's a list of supported features for carriers worldwide at https://support.apple.com/en-gb/108048

Got it, I'll move to a country that supports RCS at my earliest convenience, and also not message anyone while I'm roaming to another carrier on vacation.

My carrier should support MMS, but I haven't yet had it work (and inbound messages to my number, like the picture of a family-member's wedding invite sent to my phone number, just silently vanish into the void)... I just kinda assumed it was working as expected since I'd heard so much about the green bubble issues.

Re: Apple Invites

#772

Post by earthnail »

happyopossum wrote: post #222

My wife is in a position (board chair for a co-op) that results in her sending out a lot of invites to events. Evite has kinda been the go-to in her social/co-op group for ages, but man it suuuuuuucks these days. Ads everywhere, annoying patterns, and lacks a bunch of nice features that this seems to have. Very happy to see this

I can highly recommend https://confetti.events/ for this.

Profitable small company (not affiliated but know the founders), won’t go downhill like evite.

Re: Apple Invites

#774

Post by TheDong »

dwaite wrote: post #770
ascorbic wrote: post #763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is the same one used by every other messaging app: allow iMessage on Android. There is no technical thing stopping them. Instead they actively take measures to prevent it from working.

So your solution is to reject people from participating in a group chat until they install an Apple product on their Android phone?

That's better than the current option.

If people want to group SMS they should open their phone's SMS app. If people want to group iMessage they should all open iMessage. If people want to chat on signal, they should all open signal.

Unfortunately, iMessage is bizarrely both iOS's SMS app and a custom signal-like chat protocol, but the user can't pick between the protocols easily and it switches between them in an opaque way.

It's just a bizarrely bad UX by a company that supposedly is good at UX, and the only purpose it seems to serve is to provide this broken green-bubble experience.

I'd much rather if iOS just had "iMessage" as an app without SMS, had "SMS" as an app for only SMS/MMS/RCS, and then allowed android users to make an apple account and install iMessage (possible with an optional 1-time fee to prevent spam, like having to buy a $700 iPhone and throw it away as a sorta "proof of work" in order to make a iMessage-for-android account. This isn't too different from how some of my friends do this now, with a mac mini in their closet for iMessage which they remote desktop into if they want to chat to iPhone using friends, and use for nothing else).

Re: Apple Invites

#775

Post by dwaite »

satvikpendem wrote: post #751
sbuk wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only implementation of E2E RCS is Google's Jibe, which is a proprietary, non-standard version. There is no mention of encryption in the spec other than to say that it's up to carriers to determine. Apple, in contrast to Google's proprietary approach, has offered to work with carriers and the GSMA to define a common set of standards for encryption.

I never said it wasn't proprietary, just that Apple doesn't use it currently. It's fine to offer to work with carriers, but for people right now, it's non-viable to use RCS with iMessage.

While there is no public documentation on Google's approach that I know of, there is also nothing to make me think Apple _can_ currently use it.

There is no authoritative mapping from an account to a single service (e.g. my email address as an Apple account vs a Google accounts vs a WhatsApp account), which also means that if all three of these services say they have an account for me and advertise a public key, there is no way to know that account or public key are authoritative. Google's implementation requires you to use both their client and their hosted service, meaning it almost certainly assumes that all E2E keys can be resolved authoritatively from a single source (Google's table).

You instead need a way to look up accounts in a secure and auditable way across multiple authoritative services, like the IETF Key Transparency work (that isn't complete yet).

It is also important to realize that Apple's support for alternative messaging systems besides iMessage is to meet carrier requirements, not user requirements. Apple's slow uptake on RCS AFAIK was because carriers themselves didn't care, until governments began to regulate it needed to be supported on handsets. The carrier RCS support almost universally is because Google wanted it for Android, which is also why Google's RCS hosted service is by far the most deployed by carriers.

The GSMA needs to define those carrier requirements for E2E RCS, and Apple has stated publicly they are working with them on that.

Re: Apple Invites

#776

Post by dwaite »

TheDong wrote: post #766
JohnBooty wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor technical understanding. It's not "degradation." They will use the iMessage protocol if supported by all clients. If not, they fall back to the next best thing supported by all clients whether RCS or SMS/MMS. In your case (possibly before iPhones supported RCS) the "next best thing" was apparently SMS/MMS. This is the correct behavior. I think you're also falling into the common trap of automatically thinking wh…

All the other messenger apps you can use on iOS, like whatsapp, telegram, signal, etc, have no degradation with android users present. Why can't apple publish an iMessage app for linux, windows, and android? Telegram and signal have no trouble maintaining applications for this, and they've got far less money than apple does. RCS and SMS have been a total mess, yes, but every other chat protocol I've used has been bet…

> All the other messenger apps you can use on iOS, like whatsapp, telegram, signal, etc, have no degradation with android users present

Yes, those all work and each require that you download and install their app, go through setup, potentially some identity verification steps, etc.

If you want that functionality, all of them are available as options.

What would make an Apple iMessage app for Android better than any of them? Unlike today, Android users would have the same experience for any of these other apps - completely excluded from conversations until everyone agrees upon an app, downloads it, creates an account and exchanges whatever addresses, nicknames or QR codes necessary to join a group.

The only thing that an Apple iMessage app buys the group is a better experience for the _Apple_ users. It actually increases lock-in to Apple's services, both because now Android users are signing up for Apple services to to communicate with their groups, and because Apple users know they can just reject other options because the Android people can "make iMessage work".

Re: Apple Invites

#777

Post by [deleted] »

JimDabell wrote: post #581
lmm wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook you can access through any browser, on any hardware, and without having to pay for it. Not remotely comparable to Apple-only stuff. $1000 or whatever an iPhone costs these days is a lot of money for some people.

> $1000 or whatever an iPhone costs these days Why do people always make up iPhone prices when the truth is readily available? You can buy a brand-new, unsubsidised iPhone for less than half that, and that’s not counting second-hand devices or phones on a contract, which are both incredibly common ways of getting a phone.

[deleted]

Re: Apple Invites

#778

Post by abenga »

pinoy420 wrote: post #733
esolyt wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no indication they haven't read the article. This product, much like iMessage and others, provides an inferior experience to non-Apple users. It aims to make other devices and operating systems look less capable and cheap. iMessage also partially works with other phones. This doesn't change the fact that its intention is to create a lock-in effect, as evidenced by internal Apple emails.

Why is this a problem? Typical HN downvoting because of “muh vendor lockin” without giving an answer as to why exactly this matters for the general population. It is a fantastic business model.

Because we want to interact with our friends and family without being forced to switch platforms. I don't care about Apple's business model.

Re: Apple Invites

#779

Post by dwaite »

thayne wrote: post #713
JohnBooty wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so I understand: it's bad for Apple to have a proprietary E2EE solution, but it's good for Google to have one, and additionally it's Apple's fault for not using Google's?

Standardized interoperable E2EE > Proprietary E2EE > client-to-server encryption > no encryption It isn't as simple as "apple bad, google good". Apple/iOS having E2EE is good. Apple refusing to cooperate at all in making E2EE interoperable with non apple products is bad. Google/Android having E2EE is good, and better than the claim above that RCS doesn't have E2EE by default. The fact that it is a proprietary extensi…

Google is not cooperating with anyone when it comes to their existing proprietary E2EE implementation. E2EE is available in Google's client only, able to be run on the Android devices Google certifies, when talking through Google's RCS server.

That is because the core of their security model is a centralized key server, outside of the rest of RCS, that acts as the source of truth for an account and its associated public keys.

That fails once you have accounts which are not being authoritatively managed by Google, e.g. an email address with multiple messaging services attached, or a phone number which may be managed by any number of third party RCS installations. That is a problem which is still being actively solved.

Re: Apple Invites

#780

Post by jrowen »

lilyball wrote: post #765
TeMPOraL wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a big problem though. They're targeting a class of use cases currently covered by iCalendar family of open protocols[0] and handled by every calendar and e-mail app there is. Because of their narrowed focus on features most relevant to individuals, families and groups of friends, they'll be able to deliver a superior experience there for people on their platform - and they have both enough users and the correc…

I can't say I've ever received an event invitation via iCalendar. Getting an .ics download for an event to put it on my calendar, sure, but that's not an invite, it's just a read-only event.

Yeah I think this is targeting Facebook Events (which they seem like they've been trying to kill off anyway) and Partiful more than calendar meetings/appointments.
Post reply on HN