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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)

#31

Post by teruakohatu »

ponker wrote: post #20
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.

> Why would or should they open it?

They said they would make it an open standard. People took them on their word.

https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/06/make-facetime-an-open-standar...

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

#32

Post by mmglr »

gkoberger wrote: post #19

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 mes…

Are you implying that a closed ecosystem eliminates spam?

> I've never gotten a single unwanted blue message.

This has not been my experience. While rare I have gotten a few spam messages.

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

#33

Post by gkoberger »

mmglr wrote: post #32
gkoberger wrote: post #19

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 mes…

Are you implying that a closed ecosystem eliminates spam? > I've never gotten a single unwanted blue message. This has not been my experience. While rare I have gotten a few spam messages.

I didn't mean to imply that; I meant to explicitly say that.

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

#34

Post by randomdata »

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…

Facetime was announced as an open standard to be. It is speculated that it never came to light because of a patent dispute[1].

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/06/make-facetime-an-open-standar...

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

#35

Post by halostatue »

teruakohatu wrote: post #31
ponker wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Why would or should they open it? They said they would make it an open standard. People took them on their word. https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/06/make-facetime-an-open-standar...

Then they got hit with by a patent troll.

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

#36

Post by neximo64 »

mulmen wrote: post #26
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.

SMS is colored differently (green) than iMessage (blue), regardless of the device on the receiving end. I'm not sure how they would even know the recipient is on Android. If I send an iMessage to a friend's iPhone when they do not have service it automatically downgrades to SMS from iMessage. My brother didn't run iMessage for years so group chats that include his iPhone were still SMS based. In a group chat with non…

The only thing we can conclude from this is your brother is a techie.

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

#38

Post by spideymans »

ceocoder wrote: post #16

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…

Vendor lock is real, but would that not be rendered moot of other players could offer a superior user experience? Especially when you consider that Facebook, Google and others have a far larger base of potential users than iMessage. As far as I understand, the only iMessage feature that competitors couldn't emulate due to first-party entitlements is the SMS fallback functionality, which while nice, is definitely a feature that people could live without.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, every other messaging app I've used just has't lived up to the UX provided by iMessage. Spam is a major issue on all non-iMessage messaging platforms I've used. No messaging app I've used on any platform has performance as fast and fluid as iMessage on iOS. Competing products are often full with ads and useless features that clutter the user interface and degrade performance. And these platforms often have annoying restrictions on media quality. Facebook Messenger, for instance, has garbage quality images and video compression, while iMessage appears to apply no further compression on media files. Using any other messaging app, either on iOS or Android, has consistently been way more of a headache than its worth for me.

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

#39

Post by supernova87a »

Much as I applaud the effort and ideal to make something open, I guess you acknowledge that it's crazy to think Apple will ever cooperate.

iMessage, plus pressure on your friends to not break the text thread with green non-Apple bubbles, Facetime, tie-ins to the Apple hardware, Find my Friends, etc. are among the most important loyalty factors and moats against people leaving the Apple ecosystem.

Especially with people getting (as you admit) less satisfied with the hardware, they would be fools to open this up and let people leave.

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

#40

Post by kelnos »

est31 wrote: post #11
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…

> iMessage motivates people to people buy iPhones instead of Android

Why, though? Does your average iPhone user actually care if the bubbles they see in their chats are blue or green? If so, why?

Note that I'm talking about average users. Sure, there are likely a bunch of privacy-conscious users who believe in Apple's commitment to security and privacy and prefer iMessage on those grounds. But otherwise, why?

> 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.

If that's truly the case, I don't think I'd want to be friends with people who place importance on such superficial, trivial things.

Full disclosure: I've been an Android user for 10 years and the closest I ever got to owning an iPhone was an iPod Touch I stopped using in 2012 or so. SMS is fine for my needs most of the time, though MMS for group texting is ridiculously unreliable so I try to funnel people to Signal or WhatsApp for those use-cases.

I guess I just don't see a closed iMessage as that huge of a competitive advantage for Apple. But presumably they know better as to what drives sales.

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