931–940 of 956 posts
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Say more.
There are ways to send iMessages programmatically. Apple does check for spam, but it’s not foolproof. And of course, it won’t help you against a targeted attack.
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The color of the bubble is, at least partially, a security feature for me. When it’s blue, I am certain there is a person on the other end, not a bot, spammer, ai, etc…
Except it guarantees nothing of the sort.
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You’re welcome to think that, but it's not a dumb take — it is an aesthetic and technical take (you know, de gustibus non est disputandum ). My attention is valuable (at least to me and those around me), and I choose not to waste that attention on applications that are built with a framework that quite deliberately disrespects the platforms I choose while presenting a badly drawn version of the thinnest layer. On mac…
Well of course as any technical choice this is a compromise These are all very valid points, that we did consider, but I think the alternatives were just not as good. I feel less strongly about apps not looking like system apps; in fact, I kind of dislike apps that try too hard to look like the settings page: I like when they bring some variety, some personality, something that makes them stand out. Though I agree th…
But platform appearance is the thinnest layer (and Flutter can't even get that right because of its model). Design is about how something works (and a little about how it looks). Flutter apps don't look like iOS/macOS apps, but more than that, they don't feel like iOS/macOS apps. Flutter apps on the web will never feel like a proper web citizen, because they aren't — they're either a single canvas or a lot of canvases that have to have accessibility hacks instead of building on the platform.
If Flutter as a system decided to take the Swing approach of having its own "native" look and feel (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/java-swing-look-feel/), I would not expect Flutter apps to conform to the high standard that I’ve expressed here. But the moment that they said "we can do better than Apple with the Cupertino personality", they failed — and IMO so does everyone who uses that.
(We had someone at work try to push Flutter as a cross-platform, including web, engine a couple of years ago. It was a complete disaster because he didn't know Flutter, didn't know Dart, and wasn't actually very good at architecting anything in the end, either. His React apps were nearly as bad. It took someone less than three weeks to rewrite the demo app from Flutter — which took 2 people ~6 months to build — to React Native and it did more, more smoothly.)
Brilliant move. The transition of the major social networks over the last 10-15 years -- from being a space for friends to interact to being a space to consume content produced by "unconnected" entities like influencers -- has created a huge opening for someone to claim the friends and family network. There is no one better positioned (at least in the U.S. where iPhones are the majority handset) than Apple.
I think Apple already has claimed the "friends and family network" via iMessage. Did Facebook go to a groups/influencer algorithm by choice or is it the result of IRL friend posters all moving to private chats once everyone got iPhones?
At this point even my American groups have become largely WhatsApp because Android exists.
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This tracks so well as an indicator, with many other products. As soon as the company starts making money, their product is going to become awful and it's time to find an alternative. Why can't tech escape this cycle?
The key here is VC-backed. The enshittification rate of bootstrapped products (especially solo or small team) is magnitudes lower. Ironic thing to say while on YC's message board, but there you have it. Nowadays when I'm looking for a new software product or service with a good number of options, first thing I do is check how they're funded. Funny thing is that teams are catching on to this! Very recently I've seen t…
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It surprises me people who actually have this problem don't just switch to a different messaging app. There are many, and the effort required is minimal.
It's called a network effect for a reason. People don't want to use multiple apps so they generally will want all of their friends to be using the same app. Switching to a different app for one friend group adds significant friction. This is why we need legally mandated interopability for call communications platforms above a certain size. It's absurd that the situation today is worse than the early 2000's where you…
Before there was the pandemic and 'Zoom Fatigue' there were other applications such as Skype, Google Meet, WebEx, Go2Meeting and many more that went through a variation of Doctorow's 'enshittification cycle' although it isn't so much that these became commercially exploitative but rather the honeymoon period ended.
If, for instance I want you to try a new "meeting" program your response is likely to be "this could be such a hassle" and the vendor has a strong incentive to make it work well so I can say, "Remember how well Skype used to work ten years ago? Zoom is like that now". In that early phase the vendor invests in quality, once it has an established user base it is 'competing' on the basis of dominance of a two sided market and there isn't any need to invest in quality. (In fact, investors insist on disinvestment because they want to take profits after years of losses.) Eventually it gets so bad that even the two sided market dominance can't save them anymore and a new competitor comes in.
If chat and messaging programs were interoperable, vendors would be competing on quality instead of relying on two-sided market dominance, and we'd have seen the user experience improve rapidly and dramatically over the past 20 years instead of going sideways. I mean, "remember how good ICQ was?"
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Except if you’re on Google Fi, right? https://isgooglefircsyet.com/
That is ironic, given how the whole push to get Apple to support RCS came from google in the first place. They had that website with the open letter to try and tell Apple that supporting RCS was in everyone’s best interest and would enable Apple and Android users to be on even footing, etc etc. But then oops, turns out Google’s on wireless service doesn’t even support it. Maybe google didn’t think Apple would call th…
That, plus other little slights like only buying high-quality aerial photos of upstate NY years after Microsoft did left me feeling that Google saw me as a non-person because I didn't live in the bay area, NYC, LA or DC.
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The problem is that by vendor-locking these services to Apple users, they create an environment that alienates non-Apple users. If they want to truly claim the friends & family network, they need to remember that everyone has friends & family that aren't in the Apple ecosystem. So long as Facebook remains available to everyone, even if the content feed is a mess, the event planning space is going to be more accessibl…
> So long as Facebook remains available to everyone This is not a given even today. Creating a new Facebook account involves a ton of scrutiny, you need to upload an ID, and until your account is older and established it’s likely that anything you do can get auto-scanned by some spam bot and get you banned for using some keyword, even in private chats. I don’t have a Facebook account but I needed to create one a few…
Recently I made a new Facebook account to go with my Quest 3 VR headset. I don't find too much appealing about Facebook, posted a little, haven't used it much. I wanted to make an Instagram account because I want to post flower and sports photographs, really inoffensive stuff that would do well on the platform. Whenever I try to create an Instagram account, linked to my Facebook account or not, I get a message saying there was an error and I should try again later but later never comes.
Talking to support about it gets no response. I don't know if my history of deleting my account long ago is the cause or if it is something else.
A person I know who committed a misdemeanor is now on probation and one term of his probation is that he stay off social media, though he can use ordinary web sites. I saw a poster for a board game club which is exactly the kind of community activity that his probation officer would approve of, but the only information on the sign is the title and a QR code that points to... A Facebook group. There are plenty of other people who choose not to use Facebook for various reasons who are also excluded by this.
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The world badly needs something to support community organizations because of the problems pointed out in this movie based on Robert Putnam's work:
https://www.joinordiefilm.com/
It's not difficult to approach this as a startup, but it is a devilishly hard problem to sustain it without being attached to something toxic like personalization-based advertising. There are plenty of foundations which could afford to fund this kind of effort (e.g. you could kill it at $1M a year if you weren't paying Bay Area wages and didn't have nonprofit bloat) but if anything the ability to fill out the paperwork from grants is inversely proportional to being able to execute on this sort of thing.
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On what device?
Samsung S22+, Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (aka everywhere but europe). I buy an Esim for countries I visit, usually before I go. Add it before the flight, sometimes in the country. List of countries I have worked with: Singapore (Roaming), Indonesia, Malaysia (I may have been roaming in Malaysia) I can't find the esim info, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, India (Maybe i was roaming, can't remember).
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Wow. I assumed you could use Whatsapp on the web but you literally can't. You have to have an Android or Iphone. I guess maybe there's a way to fake it with emulators on your computer but that's a lot of work that you shouldn't need to have to do.
The requirement is not exactly "iOS or Android", the requirement is "SIM card with valid phone number". Otherwise, you could use it on iPads and Android tablets, which you normally can't. WhatsApp accounts are directly tied to a single phone number, both for user discovery (that way, you can simply message everybody in your contacts who has the app - just the way user expect it to work) and for spam prevention. Creat…