I'll echo the other top-level threads and say it's the same technology as what happens in your car and it reads/replies to your messages. Sidenote: Can someone school me and tell me how Apple got this iMessage thing "right" when Blackberry/BBM didn't? Or is iMessage eventually going to go the way of BBM? I suspect it's more than just iMessage, like Apps (pre-BBM days) and tighter integration, but I'd like to start a…
iMessage succeeded because the iPhone maintained market share. BBM failed because people stopped buying Blackberries.
I don't think any of iMessage's unique features materialy contributed to it's success.
I agree that proprietary protocols suck and users are harmed long term, iMessage due to reasons described is by far the worst : it doesn't even bother to tell senders reliably if recipients received it, not even going into read status. Due to Apple's desperate need to keep all their inventions to themselves only regardless of long term effects (lightning port say hi and bye in quick succession), its worse than useles…
https://support.apple.com/guide/messages/change-imessage-set... > Send read receipts > Turn on read receipts so that people who send you messages see when you’ve read them. > You can also send read receipts for a conversation only. The per-conversation setting overrides the global setting. --- Note that some people don't enable this. One member of my family has read receipts off and I don't see anything on that one.…
Even if the other person in the conversation has read receipts turned off you will still get a delivery receipt that shows it made it to their phone. I turn off read receipts because it's nobody's damn business if I read their message or not.
Seen from my window, Whatsapp gained traction as free international messages and voice - which are only attractive for usage across international boundaries, which is uncommon in the USA... Maybe that partly explains why SMS lasted longer in the USA.
SMS are not always free, even locally. They are not convenient for a group chat. Apps allow group communication and is "free" over wifi.
The US has had stupidly overpriced cellular data, while unlimited texts have been a standard thing since like 2005 on even the cheapest plans.
I'll echo the other top-level threads and say it's the same technology as what happens in your car and it reads/replies to your messages. Sidenote: Can someone school me and tell me how Apple got this iMessage thing "right" when Blackberry/BBM didn't? Or is iMessage eventually going to go the way of BBM? I suspect it's more than just iMessage, like Apps (pre-BBM days) and tighter integration, but I'd like to start a…
I don't think it was so much a Apple getting it right in a technical sense, rather that when it debuted US carriers were still charging real money for texting and Apple stopped tip-toeing around the issue when they had enough partners. Recall the iPhone was originally exclusive to AT&T, then AT&T + Verizon, then Sprint, T-Mobile, etc. Sure, many people were on omnibus family plans for $X00s/month, but those people grew up to get their own plans, actual fast data was becoming a thing, and priorities just shifted. Why would you pay $$ just to text, if it's just text? I'm having a hard time looking up what the average costs were for Blackberry, but by the time they were in the hands of the masses, kids to adults, the iPhone and iMessage had too much momentum.
My biggest gripe is when iPhone users share video or images, they are grainy nonsense. If Apple just moved to RCS this would be solved, but they refuse simply because they know it handicaps their competitor. The react thing has largely been fixed by Google on newer versions of messenger. It's impossible to fix the video stuff. People outside the US don't get it. They say everyone should switch to Whatsapp, etc, but g…
It's equally frustrating for iPhone users. iMessage sends and receives and full, beautiful quality. Meanwhile an Android user will send a photo and it comes through with about 10 pixels total. Don't even bother with video it's not worth trying, impossible to watch.
To be fair, received videos from iPhone are extremely low resolution and blocky. Pictures are better, but still downscaled.
Google Messages has worked around this issue a bit by allowing links to videos in Google Photos to be sent instead of some sort of pixelated MMS garble.
It will be interesting to see if the day eventually comes when legislation is introduced to mandate an open messaging standard. They did it for USB-C chargers.
Having switched back to Android, it can be infuriating dealing with iPhone users. I get slammed with "messages" when someone reacts to a message and oftentimes, messages just don't show up or messages go to my iPad and not my phone. Apple makes this extremely confusing. The iPhone users never know of their message goes through or what they're actually sending to (my iCloud account or my phone number).
From what I recall when you switch to Android best practice is to disable Imessage. You shouldn't ever get messages on your IPAD after doing that.
Wouldn't be the first time that Microsoft has tried to integrate with a third party chat service against said chat service's wishes: https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/21/5635488/msn-messenger-vs-... And Microsoft has been on the other side of this with third party skype users, too.
Did you guys read the article? It just transmits messages the same way your car would when connected to Bluetooth.
Sure, Windows is using an API designed for cars rather than reverse engineering the protocol.
It's still true that Apple do not want iMessage on competitor platforms. There's a non-zero chance they lock down this API further in response.
I think the real reason is that in the early 2000s, pre-iPhone, texting was ridiculously expensive in the US and much cheaper in the rest of the world. Also, Americans were using awful phones while the RoW was using much better phones like Nokias thst even in their non-communicator series made texting far easier thanks to stuff like T9. So the rest of the world used SMS and texting far more than Americans Pre-smartph…
> Also, Americans were using awful phones while the RoW was using much better phones like Nokias thst even in their non-communicator series made texting far easier thanks to stuff like T9. Worth mentioning the unique phones sold in the Japanese market by domestic manufacturers prior to smartphones, which were some of the most advanced in existence at that point and had been for many years. People in Japan were doing…
Eh, my mid 2000s cell phone was pretty cheap and could do live streaming video, internet, email, "apps" including facebook etc, it's just that nobody used any of these features in the US because it was at least 100$ a month to do ANYTHING that used the internet.
I think text massages (SMS) are much more popular in US than in some other countries (obviously there are a lot of places where people still use SMS besides US). Not sure how accurate is the data but this seems interesting: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1263720/mobile-messaging...
Seen from my window, Whatsapp gained traction as free international messages and voice - which are only attractive for usage across international boundaries, which is uncommon in the USA... Maybe that partly explains why SMS lasted longer in the USA.
Did it? My recollection was that it was more due to the wider usage of prepay, at least in my country. With more prepay, there were more people paying per message for SMS so once data got low enough people first went to IM clients (MSN, Facebook Messenger), then to the new wave of phone apps (Viber, Line, Whatsapp) of which Whatsapp was the eventual winner in the local market.
> Lots of iPhones in the US because of high incomes, and high iPhone availability The US is not the only country with a wealthy populace which tends to use mostly iPhones. The UK, Germany, Switzerland, the Baltics, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan are all roughly equally as wealthy (if not more so) per capita. However, in literally everywhere else but the US , people almost exclusively use third-party apps l…
One of reasons WeChat and WhatsApp became popular in low income countries first, was that in those countries SMS were/are charged PER MESSAGE
This was the case in the US as well until the early 2000s. Texting before then could be as much as a quarter per 160 characters!