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Comment by meetingthrower | Hacker News Reader

Teenagers will be cruel no matter what. Finding non-shitty friends in Highschool is an important skill, that is pretty much independent of what phone you have.

Oh the kids were cool about it, they just started new chats with sms messages from the beginning.

But why should they be forced to compensate for that dark pattern? User unfriendliness for sake of selling phones.

Finding non-shitty friends in <location/time> is an important skill.

This whole thing is really about the people. Teens (really, everyone) could change their behavior towarss Apple for how it treats people who use other phones too.

Even though I have an iPhone, I don’t care about the green. So what? Apple made their phone do an ugly thing, didn’t make my friends do anything ugly.

> iMessage will literally prevent adding non Apple IDs to group chats if the initial start of the chat is in iMessage and included non SMS apple ids.

WhatsApp also doesn’t let you randomly include SMS recipients, because that’s technically infeasible.

This doesn’t seem at all surprising. “Messages” is essentially a client that supports two unrelated protocols. MMS and iMessage. If you create an iMessage conversation, there is no way to involve SMS without moving the entire conversation to that protocol, which gives up all the iMessage features.

Yes, but I can run Whatsapp on Android.

Sure. For the sake of not being dicks, I think Apple should ship iMessage for Android. But that’s different from Messages happily shoving everyone into MMS and giving up all the iMessage features Apple users want.

Of course I think YouTube should have allowed on Windows Phone, too. Corporations are often very dickish in their search for dominance.

edit: I think I misunderstood the scenario here. I thought you were saying it was not possible to add a non-iMessage recipient to a group chat. It sounds like that actually does work? (I’ve never actually done this.)

What you’re asking for it’s for Apple to violate privacy by reversing an Apple ID and revealing a phone number. Honestly that sounds pretty iffy to me.

Correct - depending how the chat is started, a non-imessage number cannot be added. I think it has to do with having one number of the group that is apple id based and not phone number based.

So it is not about the color, but literally about being locked out of the conversation unless you are on an apple device.

Edit: yes agreed that an Android app for iMessage would be perfect. And I'm fine with requiring an apple id. And I'm even fine with the color! But the sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't is ridiculous.

Right. I think the fix is to ship iMessage for Android rather than support the privacy violation, though. If they shipped iMessage for Android, they would probably be more aggressive about refusing to revert back to SMS/MMS.

> I think Apple should ship iMessage for Android.

I kinda do and don't want this.

I think the ideal would be that Apple just support RCS on iPhones (and work with the people who define RCS to fix any perceived deficiencies, if any) and allow iMessage to fade away.

Second would hold their noses and work with Google to add iMessage support to the Android Messages app. I really don't want yet another chat app on my phone.

But yeah, at the absolute very least, Apple should release a version of iMessage for Android. I get why they don't, but screw that. They claim to be champions of security and privacy, but intentionally degrade the security and privacy of their own customers any time they want to converse with an Android user.

> I think the ideal would be that Apple just support RCS on iPhones (and work with the people who define RCS to fix any perceived deficiencies, if any) and allow iMessage to fade away.

I assume RCS is the latest message protocol for phones? Does this support non-phone devices?

If not, I’m doubtful Apple will ever do this unless it’s mandated or iMessage use collapses for some reason. Lots of people use iMessage on their Apple laptops or iPads. Apple isn’t going to drop that support to make Android users happy.

I find it interesting how often the industry refuses to change until Apple eventually says “fuck it, we can do better” and ships what the industry should have done already. MMS is extremely limited and I never heard anyone seriously discuss improving it until iMessage appeared. Ditto for USB vs lightning.

I have to wonder why Android simply didn't create their own iMessage clone.

They did. Well, sorta. Google adopted RCS[0] for Android (and even added end-to-end encryption to it), and despite mostly only being pushed by Google, is an open-access protocol that any carrier (or company) could implement themselves.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

Because Apple would sue them. It’s generally not kosher to make a custom client for someone else’s proprietary system. Little players sometimes get away with this, but when large corporations do it, they get sued.

Microsoft tried this with YouTube in Windows Phone. They got shut down by Google. If they had persisted with shipping it anyway (bypassing the block somehow ), they doubtless would have been sued.

My bad, I meant rolling out their alternate protocol.

If I use an iPhone with other iPhone users, the default messaging app simply just works. Why not replicate the same experience for Android users? Competing by creating their ecosystem where the green bubbles are the premium experience and the blue ones (for iPhone users) is the fallback to legacy SMS?

Google has built (and abandoned) like a dozen different SMS replacement apps at this point.

Google doesn’t want to build that. They have publicly stated as much in the past. At the time at least they are pushing for improvements to the MMS infrastructure/protocol to support iMessage-type features.

But also just because they build an equivalent system doesn’t mean anyone would move to it. They tried that with Google+.

If this is what’s truly evil to you, you must live an extremely sheltered and privileged life. Wishing someone misery on top of that, what’s wrong with you?

There is more under the hood than just adding a non-iMessage recipient. The pure threads and mixed threads are not the same at all except visually. One would be expected to recognize this on a technical forum…

The evil and hell comment is over the top I would agree. But, per the executive in the article, it (not porting iMessage to Android) is purely a decision made for ecosystem lock-in which "[wouldn't] cost [them] a lot to run”, not a technical one. Linking an Apple ID to a phone number for allowing non-iPhone to communicate wouldn't be black magic, nor would an iMessage Android App be - it's already messaging over the Internet.

> Linking an Apple ID to a phone number for allowing non-iPhone to communicate wouldn't be black magic

What does this mean? It kind of sounds like black magic.

So an iMessage group that was initiated with 5 iPhones using their phone numbers can add an Android in it no problem, but if one of them was added through Apple ID it's suddenly black magic? How about a notification asking the Apple ID user if they authorize the group to use their phone number instead so that "green user X can be included"?

Sure, if the Apple ID person actually has no phone number associated, it becomes black magic to send them an SMS/MMS. But how many iPhone users do you know have no phone number?

I misunderstood the scenario. I thought you were asking for Apple to somehow maintain an iMessage conversation but add an SMS/MMS recipient. What you’re asking is for them to reveal someone’s phone number when they choose to only share their Apple ID. This seems like a real privacy issue and I’m not surprised that Apple does not do this.

The idea that Apple should synchronously hold a conversation waiting for someone to approve this sharing also seems infeasible.

>you're asking for them to reveal someone’s phone number

You're putting words in my mouth (hands?), I clearly said notify said user to get it's consent. It doesn't have to "synchronously hold a conversation waiting" for anything, the group can keep chatting between themselves and not add the latest recipient before they accept.

Maybe/probably my napkin solution wouldn't be the right one, but if you think it is too technically challenging for Apple to adapt iMessage for Android rather than purely a marketing tactic, I'd invite you to read the article on which we are commenting.

> You're putting words in my mouth (hands?), I clearly said notify said user to get it's consent. It doesn't have to "synchronously hold a conversation waiting" for anything, the group can keep chatting between themselves and not add the latest recipient before they accept.

This sounds like a very complex flow. I can’t imagine that this is valuable enough to add. Asynchronous acceptance but the conversation keeps going and the new recipient can’t see any of the new history that was presumably intended for them. This sounds like a mess.

Apple could of course ship iMessage for android. That’s totally different from this ugly flow.

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