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Comment by thephyber | Hacker News Reader

iMessage is backwards compatible with SMS.

Are you talking about the unwillingness of users to migrate their chats to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc? That’s not a walled garden - that’s the natural hesitance to leave any comfortable/familiar system that any social media / network effect site/app has. It’s more like a psychological moat. And even the app you want Apple users to migrate to has it.

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He's talking about the fact that iMessage only runs on Apple hardware. That's what a walled garden is.

iMessage with macOS works fine on non-Apple hardware. Perhaps you intended to write iOS and the iOS version of iMessage only runs on Apple hardware? Or was it more a point of legality? Or end-user acceptance? Or availability to the general public?

Is there an iMessage app my mom can install on her Android phone? It feels like you're intentionally acting obtuse at this point.

No, I'm just stating facts. iMessage runs on multiple Apple operating systems, and while you can't run the iOS family reliably on anything but Apple hardware, you can run macOS on non-Apple hardware.

I'm intentionally trying to point out that the generalised statement was wrong without context, while at the same time providing wording that would probably match the intended message instead of the one that ended up getting posted.

No, the statement was plenty right, I just wasn't expecting someone to read it in bad faith and then waste a bunch of time by nitpicking. If you're a mobile app manufacturer who owns a large platform, and your app doesn't run on the other large platform, you're a walled garden.

no it’s wrong and given your precious posts you’re obviously an apple hater. i hope you realize you’re not special and anytime an apple story comes out, your type crawls outta the woodwork to express their jealousy or whatever is the driving force behind your valueless comments. please go back to your android / windows / linux / haiku / whatever world and leave the rest of us in peace

Sure, you can climb in and out of a walled garden with a grappling hook, but that's not really the point.

ok? and googles messaging app only runs on android. the app doesn’t require the recipient to have imessage, however if they do you get benefits (like increased message size) over sms due to limitations in sms.

Which one? Hangouts runs on iOS. The one for SMS and MMS does not but does Apple even allow that?

hangouts is dead, so again can i run googles sms app on an iphone? further google killed xmpp support which would’ve allowed 3rd party clients to use their message services

I admit I haven't checked what Google's messaging offerings are this month.

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