671–680 of 1001 posts
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Unlimited SMS plans have been a thing in western europe for the past 15 years, at least. People switched to whatsapp because you can send pictures, not only text.
MMS existed long before phones that had chat apps.
I'm amazed it's still a thing in some port of the world.
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The only reason (from my POV) to stop using SMS, is that it is a security nightmare (no integrity or authentication, can be MITM) and for some crazy reason everyone has decided it is a splendid idea to use it for 2FA. That is like using wolves to protect your sheep -- sure if you keep them well-fed it might work... Otherwise, Google is complaining because iMessage is a moat Apple has, that Google can not break on its…
How exactly does RCS fix the security issue? The texts are only E2E when both users are using the Google messaging app, plus group messages are just plain text
RCS is dead. The Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative (CCMI) has given up. Google is the one still pushing for it. iMessage is simply a big Apple moat. Why would Apple give it up to enhance Google's business position? Google wants us to pick theirs over Apple's. Also note that to my knowledge, RCS is not available in all countries. The other funny thing is that Google complains about SMS being insecure -- all while RCS…
A lot has happened with RCS since that random article. * All of the major US carriers announced that they'd ship Google Messages by default on android phones (including RCS). I believe Verizon was the last one [1]. * Google enabled end-to-end encryption by default for 1:1 chats [2]. They've said that e2e for group chats is coming later this year [3]. * Samsung replaced their own messaging client with a tweaked versio…
Edit: I am not sure I understand why the downvote. Also disagreement should not be expressed with downvote. I was stressing that my point (and Apple's I guess) is it doesn't make business sense what Google is asking.
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You don't need an Apple ID to use iMessage. Just an Apple device.
Using iMessage requires an Apple ID. The Messages app on iPhones supports both SMS/MMS and iMessage because it’s a phone and needs to support SMS. But without being signed into an Apple ID on the device the Messages app only handles SMS/MMS, i.e., green chat bubbles.
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I run a phone business in Australia which is, as far as I'm aware, the only product that supports voice, txt and picture messaging on a virtual number outside of North America. Ever since I built the product, people have been telling me SMS is obsolete and RCS is coming (4 years now). Google bought Jibe Mobile in 2015, if you go to the Jibe website and try to submit their "Get Started" form there is an error. I have…
IIRC with RCS, carriers don't run the infrastructure, Google does.
Why does it work today? After years of begging Google gave up and put all their users without carrier support (basically everyone) onto a Google RCS instance.
Despite how the article tries to portray things in many ways it’s iMessage but worse. With Google running everything it might as well be proprietary. And it lacks full E2E encryption.
Things probably would’ve been better off if Google had just stuck to their own private protocol and used that instead, perhaps opening it.
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You say this like it is a bad thing. I used Signal, which is an open-source messaging app. If Apple were censoring messaging apps I would agree with your seemingly negative sentiment, however, as someone who has pushed out apps to the Apple and Mac app stores, I can say they absolutely do not do that. There are many reasons many IT folks actually prefer an iPhone over Android. The two biggest ones are privacy and sec…
Apple also collects timestamps for app usage (iOS and MacOS), tracks Spotlight usage and tracks your iPhone with Find My by default. This insidious behavior is widespread, and saying it's only Google's issue is comically hypocritical. Malware is a rampant issue on both operating systems, both iOS 16 and Android 12 have zero-click exploits that allow completely rooted control of the device. I'd argue Google competes j…
Hmm, as I understand it:
"Timestamps for app usage": notarization checks happen the first time you start a new app, basically like OCSP to enable certificate revocation: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/gatekeeper-and-runt... I dislike online validation and would prefer a revocation list. I also dislike syspolicyd's perpetual, repeated, and CPU-hungry anti-malware scanning. Installing Xcode or enabling developer mode allows pointless online checks to be turned off for scripts in Terminal at least.
"tracks spotlight usage": Siri suggestions https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/siri-suggestions... I usually turn this off.
"Find My": a feature that allows you to go to icloud.com and locate your iPhone if it is lost, and also creates its own ad hoc network for finding iPhones. Probably that involves location information. I usually turn this off.
What I'd like to know is: Is there any evidence that Apple is retaining this information and using it for other purposes, for example to build user-specific profiles for advertising the way Google or Facebook might?
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That can be built trivially using this API. The app stores an identifier, which it knows has not been tampered with because of attestation. Giving apps access to a unique device identifier shared across apps is a privacy leak but can be obtained with the proper scary permission.
> Giving apps access to a unique device identifier shared across apps is a privacy leak Correct: 'Non-heuristic antispam' and 'Private device identifiers' are incompatible requirements, unless you introduce another expensive obstacle to overcome. Spamming depends on cheap/free sock puppet accounts. The cost per account is inversely proportional to the value it holds to spammers. That cost can be in Apple's iMessage t…
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A lot has happened with RCS since that random article. * All of the major US carriers announced that they'd ship Google Messages by default on android phones (including RCS). I believe Verizon was the last one [1]. * Google enabled end-to-end encryption by default for 1:1 chats [2]. They've said that e2e for group chats is coming later this year [3]. * Samsung replaced their own messaging client with a tweaked versio…
And as you can see in my comment "what is Apple's motive for giving up their moat?" Edit: I am not sure I understand why the downvote. Also disagreement should not be expressed with downvote. I was stressing that my point (and Apple's I guess) is it doesn't make business sense what Google is asking.
Supporting RCS (again, in addition to iMessage) would make their product better: it would allow higher quality media to be sent to and received from non-Apple users; it would allow for typing indicators and read receipts with non-Apple users; and (perhaps most importantly) it would allow - if Apple adopted Google's extensions - e2e encryption with non-Apple users. Apple loves privacy, after all.
I setup a BlueBubbles server on a spare Mac and I installed the BlueBubbles App. Boom. iMessages on Android. Done. Messaging is already extremely fragmented. BB is only the eighth messaging app on my phone. Considering getting on Beeper to consolodate this madness. Matrix/Element was too rough to utilize as is. Almost everyone I text with is on iMessage in the US. 95% or more of my regular contacts. Many are often ou…
> The look on their face when I send them an iMessage from my Galaxy is priceless. Well, technically it was relayed through your Mac. Not sure how many Galaxy users have Macs to send message through, so I’m not sure it’s a workable solution for most.
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The problem with moving groups over to iMessage is that you'll always leave some Android users out. Here in Spain Apple has a minority marketshare so that makes iMessage a total non-starter. But even in the US not everyone has an iPhone. And really iMessage is not so much better than the cross-platform alternatives that it's worth leaving some friends out.
> The problem with moving groups over to iMessage is that you'll always leave some Android users out. I'm on several text chains with a mix of iOS and Android users. It works fine.