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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

#251

Post by GeekyBear »

sottol wrote: post #202
lm411 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the equivalent. If the third party phones allowed users access to Ma Bell's network, switching systems, etc, without paying Ma Bell - then it might be equivalent. I'm pretty sure that would be considered theft of communication services.

I feel that's not right either. Apple did not physically build the phone network and nobody is piggybacking on their network, Apple isn't hosting anyone's photos or videos afaict and the user pays for bandwidth, they maybe pay for notification relay to their own users. It's more like phone manufacturer X that accesses Ma Bell's network creates phone with slightly better call quality that only works with other X phone…

Apple did build out the iMessage service and pays the bills for the servers it runs on.

Aaron Swartz was hounded to death by the Feds for unauthorized access to a website and charged with a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

He wasn't even trying to turn a profit.

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

#252

Post by freedomben »

jonhohle wrote: post #234
sottol wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that's not right either. Apple did not physically build the phone network and nobody is piggybacking on their network, Apple isn't hosting anyone's photos or videos afaict and the user pays for bandwidth, they maybe pay for notification relay to their own users. It's more like phone manufacturer X that accesses Ma Bell's network creates phone with slightly better call quality that only works with other X phone…

What type of infrastructure and operations do you think is necessary to handle 8.4B messages per day. So far, the cost of those systems and teams has come from hardware sales. The benefit is that it is effectively a paid for service and doesn't need external support from advertisers or by selling user data.

It really depends on what stack you pick and what kind of engineers you have. What's App famously used Erlang (an excellent choice for this) and was able to scale to astronomical levels with a fairly small engineering team and hundreds of instances.

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

#253

Post by irjustin »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #239
function_seven wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Ma Bell was a regulated monopoly, and iMessage is not a monopoly. People routinely use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, SMS, FB Messenger, etc. Don't get me wrong, I love that these guys are poking the bear. I wish Apple would do something to let me send high-quality photos and videos to my Android-owning friends via "text". But I don't think the government has a place to force that issue. Plenty of alternatives e…

> SMS Can you change the SMS app on Apple devices now?

This is conflating problems.

This thread is about asking the government to step in to allow 3rd party devices into iMessage, which is decidedly outside of SMS, but gov won't step in because iMessage isn't a monopoly on messaging nor SMS. It's a monopoly on... it's own protocol/service?

Android users always get a message an iPhone user sends so to claim gov intervention monopoly on the basis that the end user can't change the SMS app isn't an argument.

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

#254

Post by jonhohle »

m463 wrote: post #237
cdme wrote: post #42

I miss the days when chat wasn't fragmented across apps and platforms or could at least be unified in apps like Adium. Having to have a different app installed for myriad different contacts is, at best, irritating.

apple did the "embrace, extend, extinguish" with this. the original apple messages app did AOL messenger and others. then it gradually forced you off of them into imessage.

The main services iChat supported - AIM and Yahoo Messenger are gone. Google Chat no longer supports XMPP. I don't know anything about Facebook Messenger. Increasingly messaging services became siloed.

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

#255

Post by skeaker »

the_gastropod wrote: post #225
skeaker wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To unspin your statement, Beeper is providing Apple users with more functionality by way of giving them the ability to send iMessages to their Android-user friends. This is beneficial for Apple users, but Apple has a financial incentive to restrict their users so that the only way for other people to interact with them is to purchase an Apple device, so they are harming their own Apple device users by trying to cut o…

I disagree. Much of the value of iMessage is the high degree of confidence in its security. Apple controls, end-to-end, the delivery of iMessages from device-to-device. This includes how it handles storage of messages, attachments, app diagnostics, crash reports, etc.. Beeper is an unauthorized user of this supposed-to-be closed-system, and I think it's deteriorating the trust users have in the platform entirely.

How does accessibility hurt security? Security issues for a messaging platform manifest when messages can be intercepted. Having the option to send or receive from more users does not put a man in the middle.

If you are doing something that definitely requires E2EE that you are certain works and forces the user on the other end to comply, then maybe I could see your point. You would be in the vast minority of users and it's debatable that your use case is worth gutting the functionality for the majority of users who would benefit from being able to iMessage their Android friends, but you would still have a valid use case. I would tell you in that case to use an open source E2EE solution instead of Apple's closed source one though, given that privacy is such a concern.

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

#256

Post by derefr »

theturtletalks wrote: post #213
solardev wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Network effect? The whole value of it is that it lets you use existing networks (iMessage and SMS). Otherwise people could just switch to WhatsApp or any of twenty Google messaging services.

No I mean a beeper alternative that uses the iMessage backend. The tricky part with beeper is that they have their own notification server that gets the notifications from Apple and turns them into what android understands. That should be self-hosted by each person because it would contain the FairPlay key.

It’s a trivial cost that people don’t want to pay. Sadly it can’t be run as some kind of ala-carte computation that can scale-to-zero like a Lambda function can, because it needs to be an active connection-oriented daemon that keeps per-connection state — i.e. something that always maintains at least one real OS thread, holding open real OS sockets, on the same machine (so that those sockets don’t break at the TCP level.) In other words, for an individual to deploy their own push daemon, it would necessarily need to live on a $5/mo VPS or something. And people don’t value iMessage at $5/mo.

(…which naturally leads to the question: why is there no Lambda-like serverless compute substrate that allows your function to speak a connection-oriented protocol, by externalizing the connection-hold-open and per-connection book-keeping state into the routing layer, such that your own function in the system could scale-to-zero? Exactly like Pusher did for websockets 15 years ago, but routing to a vertically-integrated serverless compute layer rather than a “passive” PHP/CGI-ish REST backend. Seems like an obvious extension for Cloudflare Workers…)

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

#257

Post by standardUser »

rewgs wrote: post #102
dataangel wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not entitled, it's pushing back against a gigantic company exploiting network effects to create user lock-in, because that's easier than competing on the merit of your products.

Speaking for myself, I think iMessage is a good product, and it's one of the (many) reasons I use Apple devices as daily drivers. You make it sound like people only use iMessage because of the network effect/lock-in, and clearly aren't considering that perhaps said network effect exists at least in part because iMessage is just...good.

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.

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

#258

Post by skeaker »

jonhohle wrote: post #227
skeaker wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not let the government intervene here? Typically my reason for wanting government to not do stuff is because it could affect me, but none of us will never be a trillionaire corporate entity, so anything done to Apple wouldn't apply to us as a precedent. If anything, you could argue that part of the purpose of the government is to stand up to these giant businesses that the average person can do nothing to.

Why let them intervene? The government isn't there to cure all ills, nor should we want it to be. This seems like something the market can handle. Messenging systems have come and gone (ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Blackberry, etc., etc., etc.). They've been locked to hardware, semi-open, and completely open. There will be dozens more, all with their own benefits and drawbacks. Fortunately, not one is required for…

> Why let them intervene?

Because it would be the most sure-fire way to be certain that it actually gets done, whereas "the market" is less certain and prone to manipulation tactics such as lock-in. Returning to my original question that you kind of dodged, why not let them intervene?

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

#259

Post by freedomben »

jmye wrote: post #233
josephcsible wrote: post #126

When Ma Bell didn't let people use third-party phones with their service, the government made them change their ways. Why is the government letting Apple get away with the equivalent?

Why are y’all so intent on using iMessage? I (honestly) don’t understand the serious passion behind forcing Apple to open it to everyone. SMS still gets through, and other apps still work. It seems weird to focus so much on this and not on just using something that fits your use case, but maybe I’m missing something.

This has been discussed ad nauseam. In the US, not being a "blue bubble" can have a very high social cost and get you excluded from groups and communication opportunities. People just want to be able to communicate without ridiculous walled garden vendors throwing stupid road blocks in their way and making things artificially harder to get you to "buy your mom an iphone."

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

#260

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

camkego wrote: post #249
function_seven wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Ma Bell was a regulated monopoly, and iMessage is not a monopoly. People routinely use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, SMS, FB Messenger, etc. Don't get me wrong, I love that these guys are poking the bear. I wish Apple would do something to let me send high-quality photos and videos to my Android-owning friends via "text". But I don't think the government has a place to force that issue. Plenty of alternatives e…

"Jury Rules Google App Store Operates as Monopoly" is in the headlines this week. So it seems maybe there is some risk to Apple with regards to iMessage.

Android has 70% market share.
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