Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Beeper Mini is back

blog.beeper.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

751–760 of 1001 posts

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#751

Post by bongobingo1 »

rezonant wrote: post #718
bushbaba wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t entire thread need to be light green. Wouldn’t android users not see the Tapbacks/threads in same visual UX. It makes sense to turn it off entirely than to deliver a subpar and confusing UX

Actually both tapbacks (for a long time) and reply threads (since the latest iOS release) are both supported in MMS group conversations. The iPhone will send a tapback as an SMS message such as "Liked 'contents of message that was liked'" and other iPhones convert that back into a tapback. Google Messages also does this (and in fact did it before Apple did). iOS does not convert Google Messages style tapback messages…

I hate all of this. How depressing. As always, the actual people in the system wear all the cost.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#752

Post by unshavedyak »

MissTake wrote: post #575
unshavedyak wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it free? I have it bundled as part of my hardware purchases. Is there somewhere to get it without paying?

It’s free. The fact it’s only available on Apple devices doesn’t change that fact. You can only get Apple Fitness on Apple devices, but you also have to pay for it.

Seems a silly distinction. So you're saying Beeper could make paper clips, sell them to you for $2/m, and then give you Beeper Mini for free and you'd consider it free?

Imo the only thing that should be done here is only valid Apple IDs should be able to use this service. Then paying customers are the ones using it. Problem solved, right?

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#753

Post by lxgr »

dontlaugh wrote: post #715
js2 wrote: post #471

> Messages will be sent and received via your email address rather than phone number. [...] Even worse, when iPhone customers added an Android phone number to an existing iMessage secure encrypted group chat, the Messages app would by default switch the entire group chat to using unencrypted, unsecure SMS. These two Messages features combine to create a terrible UX. When someone starts a group chat in Messages and in…

It hardly matters, almost everyone on earth uses WhatsApp for group chats.

Well, the most and third most populous countries on Earth don't.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#754

Post by kergonath »

hornban wrote: post #640
js2 wrote: post #471

> Messages will be sent and received via your email address rather than phone number. [...] Even worse, when iPhone customers added an Android phone number to an existing iMessage secure encrypted group chat, the Messages app would by default switch the entire group chat to using unencrypted, unsecure SMS. These two Messages features combine to create a terrible UX. When someone starts a group chat in Messages and in…

From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved. They want the experience to suffer when somebody outside of the ecosystem is involved so as to create social pressure for the outsider to change. The ironic part of all of this is that while the EU may be forcing Apple i…

> From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved. They want the experience to suffer when somebody outside of the ecosystem is involved so as to create social pressure for the outsider to change.

This makes no sense. What’s the point in degrading the UX without telling the user 1) why the UX is degraded, 2) what they can do about it? If the point is to steer people towards iDevices, why is it degrading the UX specifically for these people? Honestly, this sounds like a knee jerk reaction where you are convinced that Apple is bad and are looking for confirmation instead of trying to actually think rationally.

> It's really a shame that Microsoft gave up on mobile, because they really could be a real middle ground for the rest of us that just want interoperability.

They could not. They were neither here nor there in terms of platform use and applications availability and poured tons of money into it for no result. Nothing in their behaviour at the time showed that they even understood the problem they were trying to solve.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#755

Post by quantumsequoia »

sbuk wrote: post #676
Miner49er wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What dwarfs iMessage in the US? I would assume that it is the most used messaging platform in the country.

Facebook Messenger - approx 140 million users, then WhatsApp at approx 75 million. iOS has approx 136 million users (not sure if that includes iPad). So "dwarfs" might be a bit extreme. However, its extremely unlikely that all the iOS users use iMessage and none use either Facebook or WhatsApp. Statista has the figures, but I'm not going to pay $149 per month to find out more! Source: Googling around, so take it for…

Many Americans have Facebook/WhatsApp accounts they haven't used in years. I'd be skeptical they surpass iMessage in terms of volume of messages

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#756

Post by wharvle »

hornban wrote: post #640
js2 wrote: post #471

> Messages will be sent and received via your email address rather than phone number. [...] Even worse, when iPhone customers added an Android phone number to an existing iMessage secure encrypted group chat, the Messages app would by default switch the entire group chat to using unencrypted, unsecure SMS. These two Messages features combine to create a terrible UX. When someone starts a group chat in Messages and in…

From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved. They want the experience to suffer when somebody outside of the ecosystem is involved so as to create social pressure for the outsider to change. The ironic part of all of this is that while the EU may be forcing Apple i…

> From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved.

I'd be sure this was why, if Google hadn't once tried to get me to use a combo SMS/MMS + some-other-Google-messaging-service app on my phone (by replacing the normal SMS app on OS upgrade—this was on a Nexus phone) that was so broken and janky it was unusable.

Like, it is for-sure the case that a rich, huge, "smart" company can fuck this up a lot worse than Apple has. iMessage is easily good enough that I haven't had to go find some alternative SMS app, at least.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#757

Post by lxgr »

dontlaugh wrote: post #738
javawizard wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? Of the many group chats I'm involved in, exactly one of them uses WhatsApp. (I'm American, for context.)

In the US, sure. Very few of the people in Earth live there.

Quite a few people commenting here live there.

You also seem to be forgetting the most-populous country in the world – no WhatsApp there either.

Between China and the US, that's already 20% of the global population unlikely to be using WhatsApp for most of their messaging.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#758

Post by lazycouchpotato »

sneak wrote: post #690
sircastor wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and to lower the 30% app store fee to 10%. In danger of being an Apple apologist, the app store fee for the vast majority of sellers is 15%.

...which is still more than 5x the normal rate for payment processing. Reducing your price gouging from 10x to 5x isn’t exactly a kindness.

15% seems reasonable. They're not only charging to cover payment processing, there are salaries to pay for those developing the app stores, the human app reviewers (virtually non-existent in case of Google Play), storage, bandwidth, etc.

Granted, both Apple and Google also earn money from ads (shame on Apple's part). In that case I can sort of see the justification to lower their cut to below 15%.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#759

Post by shados »

kergonath wrote: post #754
hornban wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved. They want the experience to suffer when somebody outside of the ecosystem is involved so as to create social pressure for the outsider to change. The ironic part of all of this is that while the EU may be forcing Apple i…

> From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved. They want the experience to suffer when somebody outside of the ecosystem is involved so as to create social pressure for the outsider to change. This makes no sense. What’s the point in degrading the UX without tellin…

> What’s the point in degrading the UX without telling the user 1) why the UX is degraded, 2) what they can do about it? I

Because 1) everyone in the Apple world knows, and 2) they want the answer to "What can be done about it" to be "Shame your peers into switching to an iPhone".

And it works. A little too well, especially with younger folks.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#760

Post by colordrops »

knd775 wrote: post #703
colordrops wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want privacy a de-googled android phone is far better than apple.

Yes, but a truly de-googled Android phone is a huge pain. Many apps rely on play services, and the open source alternatives still don't fully work.

I've been using LineageOS with microg for over 2 years without much pain, other than initial setup.
Post reply on HN