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iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

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Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#11

Post by est31 »

monadic2 wrote: post #3

If ever Apple needed to open source server and client code for a public good it is with imessages. Yes it has clear limits with a centralized server, but it is realistically how a lot of “secure” messaging happens and it’s very difficult to endorse being tied to expensive hardware. You can say the same about facetime: it is clearly higher quality than competitors in every experiment I’ve tried, but their refusal to i…

iMessage motivates people to people buy iPhones instead of Android when everyone else in a social circle has it. Why should Apple give up on that? What will Apple gain from making it ubiquitous? It would in fact disappoint many people as now they can't use their phone to distance themselves from the people who don't have that blue circle.

Note that I'm arguing from Apple's perspective here. From my own I believe they should absolutely open it up.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#12

Post by slivanes »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #8
JanSolo wrote: post #2

Anyone know the reason why there's no iMessage for windows? Is it supposed to act as some kind of gateway drug into the Mac ecosystem? Apple seems to have quite a few of these 'unspoken unfeatures'. Perhaps someone can tell me why there are no web browsers allowed on AppleTV devices?

Its because they use peer pressure to get you to buy an apple device. You can invite an android user to an imessage group but it apparently downgrades the feature set of the group for everyone, they also color messages from android users differently. Its all designed to discourage talking to android users so they eventually buy an iphone.

Liked "Its all designed to discourage talking to android users so they eventually buy an iphone."

If you own an Android you will understand the above. Very annoying!

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#13

Post by cridenour »

hellotomyrars wrote: post #5
rrdharan wrote: post #4

Meanwhile, https://airmessage.org/ seems to have existed for quite some time now...?

This software requires a server component to be run on a mac. It's not self-contained.

So does the one in the article.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#14

Post by iphone_elegance »

monadic2 wrote: post #3

If ever Apple needed to open source server and client code for a public good it is with imessages. Yes it has clear limits with a centralized server, but it is realistically how a lot of “secure” messaging happens and it’s very difficult to endorse being tied to expensive hardware. You can say the same about facetime: it is clearly higher quality than competitors in every experiment I’ve tried, but their refusal to i…

Is't facetime pretty must a standard softphone (eg: sip/srtp) using h264? i wonder if it's only "closed" due to authentication concerns there's not much else to "open up" that's not already

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#16

Post by ceocoder »

I came across this article[1] and this thread quoted[0] in article some time ago. I don't think of iMessage as a walled garden, it is almost like a low fence you can see across with a sign that "you must be this cool to participate".

iMessage is literally the only reason I have not tried an android phone because I don't want to deal with the fallout of all of my chat threads going back to 2011(?) getting disrupted. I don’t think I can come up with a better example of vendor lock-in.

[0] https://twitter.com/BenBajarin/status/1162048581299163136

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90391587/why-we-dont-want-you-an...

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#17

Post by Polylactic_acid »

slivanes wrote: post #12
Polylactic_acid wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its because they use peer pressure to get you to buy an apple device. You can invite an android user to an imessage group but it apparently downgrades the feature set of the group for everyone, they also color messages from android users differently. Its all designed to discourage talking to android users so they eventually buy an iphone.

Liked "Its all designed to discourage talking to android users so they eventually buy an iphone." If you own an Android you will understand the above. Very annoying!

I think its only a US android user issue. Here in Australia there are more android users so everyone uses 3rd party apps that work everywhere.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#18

Post by ComputerGuru »

JanSolo wrote: post #2

Anyone know the reason why there's no iMessage for windows? Is it supposed to act as some kind of gateway drug into the Mac ecosystem? Apple seems to have quite a few of these 'unspoken unfeatures'. Perhaps someone can tell me why there are no web browsers allowed on AppleTV devices?

It's the same reason BlackBerry refused to make BBM available on other platforms (although I believe they actually did just that a couple of years ago when no one even remembered what BlackBerry was, perhaps after the company name was sold to a different manufacturer).

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#19

Post by gkoberger »

As an iMessage user, I'm happy with a closed ecosystem. I know that's a controversial opinion.

I have dozens of channels of communication, and iMessage is the only one I don't get spam on. I really, really like that. Anyone without iMessage can still contact me the same way, via SMS, and they're all grouped in the same place. But I love that in 10+ years of using iMessage, I've never gotten a single unwanted blue message.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#20

Post by ponker »

monadic2 wrote: post #3

If ever Apple needed to open source server and client code for a public good it is with imessages. Yes it has clear limits with a centralized server, but it is realistically how a lot of “secure” messaging happens and it’s very difficult to endorse being tied to expensive hardware. You can say the same about facetime: it is clearly higher quality than competitors in every experiment I’ve tried, but their refusal to i…

Apple built iMessage and FaceTime to move Apple devices. Why would or should they open it? Not to mention, it is probably tied into the hardware at a deep level — it clearly works much better on more modern phones, and better on iOS than MacOS.
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