Google says iMessage is too powerful
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?
Their shotgun approach works financially, but it means that only a few of their projects really stick (win). The rest just trundle along until they get discontinued.
The hypocricy is tiresome. When there's a regulation that threatens them, they make a lot of noise about "free market", and "let the market decide". But when the market decides against them, they want some government intervention.
I'm pretty sure this is taught as a 200-level concept in business administration right?
Only after you manage to recite "short-term profit over long-term success" 500 times in an hour.
Consider Peter Thiel. Musk. Bezos. These people think honesty is a weakness.
In academia, you get kudos for starting something, while there are zero incentives for maintaining something - same at Google with just a tiny bit less hyperbole.
At a large company, you can coast like that playing politics for many years — in Google's case that's especially easy because Ad Words means they have little fear of running out of money and Gmail was big enough to ensure that any new messaging service which integrated with it would immediately “have” millions of users even if many of them had been trained not to use it by that point.
I personally think the current situation with iMessage is garbage. Even if Apple doesn't care about Android users, they are hurting their own users: every time an iPhone user has to send a text to an Android user, they degrade the security and privacy of their own users.
(It's telling to see where Apple draws the line: being anti-competitive around messaging is more important to them than their customers' privacy and security.)
Even if Google had their shit together when it comes to messaging, there's always the "default install" problem: iMessage is on every iPhone, from the factory. That creates a barrier for any competitor to gain market share with an alternative messenger. Sure, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. have been pretty successful, but they're not the default install. (Remember when Microsoft got in trouble in the 90s for bundling IE, at the expense of Netscape?)
As an Android user, all I really want is a secure way to communicate with others by default, without having to figure out which secure messaging app I have in common with each of my peers. Apple has made that impossible, and should be required to allow Google to integrate iMessage support into the stock Android Messages app. Or they should be required to support RCS (with E2E encryption compatible with Google's extension) on iPhones. I'll accept either option, though I'd probably prefer RCS rather than an Apple-proprietary protocol.
People are advocating for the opposite. Make apple stop using their anti-competitive market to harm alternative messaging apps.
> If iMessage was cross platform, it’s just another messaging app.
No, it is just as good, and better if it is forced to be cross platform.
You lose nothing, and everyone else gains, when anti-competitive markets are made to support alternatives.
> If you want secure cross platform messaging
Or, instead of that, we could use anti-trust law, against Apple to force them to be less anti-competitive, and allow other people to integrate with it. Problem solved.
I love how it's such an anti-competitive market that in many countries Apple isn't even close to being a popular service. WhatsApp, WeChat, Kakao, Line etc dominate in non-Western countries.
I'm not suggesting another competing platform. I'm suggesting an already-widely-deployed platform (RCS) that is standardized, has been around since 2008 or so (older than iMessage!), and is the actual real elevation of SMS, not an Apple-proprietary protocol.
> If iMessage was cross platform
It's not, and that's the problem! Making it cross-platform would at least partially solve the problem, though it does mean Yet Another Messaging App I have to install.
> If you want secure cross platform messaging, use any of the other platforms built around that feature.
That's a huge pain in the ass. Not all of my friends have Signal, and I'm tired of evangelizing. Not all of my friends have WhatsApp, and I'm not interested in evangelizing a Facebook property. I don't use Telegram, and very few of my friends do, and I'm also wary of evangelizing a messenger that is not secure by default, and that has what is IMO a sketchy, secretive history around its cryptography.
Looking through my Messages history, there are 27 people I communicated with over unencrypted SMS/MMS over the past month. Only one of those people has Signal (not sure why they SMS'd me, but that just further illustrates the problem of how it's difficult to remember to contact people using the "correct" means), and maybe 6 or 8 of them have WhatsApp (for whatever reason, they/I don't really use WhatsApp often).
Why is this so hard? Apple! If Apple supported RCS (with the E2EE extension), literally every single one of those 27 conversations would have been encrypted, without me (or, critically, the other party, whom I have no control over) having to do anything special. As much as I love blaming Google for many things, they cannot solve this, because iMessage is a closed protocol that they are not permitted to implement, and the messenger app that is in the default install (the iMessage-supporting Messages app on iOS, and the RCS-supporting Messages app on Android) has a huge easy-adoption advantage that third-party messengers will never be able to match.
You can argue a bunch of "shoulds" here, but I'm talking about what the reality actually is.
They are likely using an Apple device, so they can't use Signal as the default SMS/messenger app and have to remember to use it for the right contracts.
Android allows you to choose the default messenger app, and setting up Signal this way gives you an experience very similar to the iMessage one on Apple devices - messages to non-Signal-using contacts go over SMS/MMS, messages to contacts with Signal go over the Signal protocol.
Signal supports SMS on Android because Android has API for apps to actually interact with the underlying phone SMS capability (because Android is a platform customized by OEMs).
Apple does not have public API to interact with the hardware to send/receive SMS, although there's no limitation on using SMS in other apps.
There are two messaging limitations in the platform:
1. The sms: url scheme can only go to the built-in app. Since this does not let you pre-compose messages, I've actually never seen it used in production.
2. The MFMessageComposeViewController is used to overlay iMessage with your application to send a chat message. Generally I've only seen this used in lousy applications (admittedly including Twitter and various Google applications in that list) - the modern approach is to use the Share and Action sheet functionality, which presents first and third party apps via equal heuristics.
The RCS Universal Profile is the first standardized version by the GSMA and came out in late 2016.
Google's RCS usage has primarily been via Google's own hosted implementations because of poor carrier adoption. Verizon AFAIK is planning to have RCS deployed this year.
Also AFAICT the e2e extension is not a standard but is Google-specific and currently exclusive to their Messages app. It also has several inferior technological, privacy, and UX impacts to other systems (such as only working for 1-to-1 chat, or requiring out-of-band verification code comparisons to guarantee the encryption isn't compromised).
It also is not a protocol evolution of SMS - its similarity is mostly that it like SMS was standardized through the GSMA. I also do not believe that the GSMA mandates its usage "instead of" SMS - it is meant to sit alongside SMS.
> That's a huge pain in the ass. Not all of my friends have Signal, and I'm tired of evangelizing. Not all of my friends have WhatsApp, and I'm not interested in evangelizing a Facebook property.
There's zero chance that RCS will replace Signal or WhatsApp or Telegram. It also won't replace SMS, at least this decade. It's just going to be Yet Another Option.
So for me it seems like a far worse solution than the status quo.
Any other features that are missing or sub-par in the RCS vs. iMessage equation is IMO trivial compared to the harm we have now of the lack of interoperability.
That is by every definition worse than what we have today.
This is a pretty literal description of how iMessage interfaces with non-iPhones today though, so not worse.
Look, I'm not asking for the perfect messaging system here. Because we're never going to get that. I just want something secure and private, and that works by default. Agreed that other client implementors don't have to support E2EE, but Google does, and Apple certainly would, and that covers enough cases right now to make me happy.
I'd grudgingly accept an iMessage app for Android, or (better) iMessage integration with the stock Android app. But I'd much prefer a standard that isn't controlled by a single company's goodwill... goodwill that they have already shown is in short supply.
And you want instead to move the world towards a single, insecure standard, dictated by carriers who have decades long history of (a) supplying data to governments, (b) selling data to random third parties, (c) intercepting messages for their own nefarious purposes e.g. advertising and (d) doing very little to secure and protect their platforms from abuse.
No thanks.
There already is a standard, one which Apple falls-back to when messaging Android: SMS.
The would-be-dystopia you describe well in your second paragraph is not a hypothetical: that is the world as it is today with SMS; Apple could change that by switching to RCS + encryption extension and protect their users' privacy, but they won't because they view it as a competitive wedge (we know this due to the Epic lawsuit, as mentioned in TFA)
Group RCS isn’t e2e, unlike iMessage. That’s the main point.
iMessage is tied to your Apple ID, not your phone number or IMEI.
There is a publicly-facing Google site to enter an RCS enabled cellphone number, in order to disable Chat features… including end-to-end encryption.[0] This feature should only be configurable on-device, ideally, or at least be behind a login and 2fa. It’s just there on a public site. This is basically asking for sim-swapping attacks. And you’d never notice, only wonder why your RCS e2e keeps turning itself off. I wonder which individuals and agencies may benefit from that…
Even with the Chat features enabled, RCS doesn’t not support e2e on group texts[1], unlike iMessage, which does[2]. Google is just playing dirty pool and calling Apple users bullies by proxy, and I’m calling them on it.
Edit: Apple has a similar site to disable iMessage. This setting should only be available on-device, or if it has to have an online workaround, behind a login with 2fa. If you no longer have access to your phone, you should have to contact Apple support or go to an Apple store. The status quo benefits bad actors and intelligence agencies more than it improves the experience for end users IMO.
[0] https://messages.google.com/disable-chat
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202724
[2] https://support.google.com/messages/answer/10262381?hl=en
It's interesting that both sites are very similar. Maybe Google copied Apple's site.
I would guess that your devices will notify you if someone maliciously disables iMessage for you phone#, and maybe google does the same?
Regardless, I don't see this as a big deal. The site will send a verification code to the phone before allowing anyone to disable it. If someone has cloned/swapped/stolen my SIM card and can intercept and use that verification code, then I have many many many more things to worry about before I worry about someone disabling RCS for my number.
But, as you point out in your edit, iMessage has the same issue. Potato, potahto.
This is _really_ misleadingly worded. The website asks for a confirmation code, which you presumably need access to the device in order to obtain, right?
Requiring users to visit an Apple store to leave Apple's messaging ecosystem doesn't seem like an ideal solution, to put it lightly.
I think the status quo is actually not terrible, and with a simple modification (making any externally-triggered deactivation very visible on the logged-out device) it could be secure as well as being usable.
You copied this one 4 times—that's egregious! No more, please.
> "Even if Google could magically roll out RCS everywhere, it's a poor standard to build a messaging platform on because it is dependent on a carrier phone bill. It's anti-Internet and can't natively work on webpages, PCs, smartwatches, and tablets, because those things don't have SIM cards. The carriers designed RCS, so RCS puts your carrier bill at the center of your online identity, even when free identification methods like email exist and work on more devices. Google is just promoting carrier lock-in as a solution to Apple lock-in."
On the flip side, most people using RCS would otherwise be using an @gmail.com address as their identity if that was how it worked. I'd say that's probably better than the carrier owning the identity, but it's still not ideal.
But, there is no "carrier lock-in" (at least not in the USA). In the USA, carriers are legally required to allow users to port numbers to and from any carrier thus creating competition rather than lock-in.
There's no carrier required at all with iMessage. With RCS you HAVE to have a carrier.
But security is besides the point: Google doesn't want RCS support for security, it wants people not to know they're communicating with a non-apple device because they're afraid of the peer pressure.
Given that android has a huge marketshare lead, and google definitely knows how to make chat apps, they just never made one and stuck with it. Instead they kept continuously shipping new, incompatible, disconnected, chat apps and services. Because of that no one really trusts Google when it says "use this chat app, this time we'll keep it around". Meanwhile a person with a first gen iPhone or iPad (or a Mac from that era) can still use iMessage to talk to someone using the latest generation software. I would guess there's a loss of feature set, but it should theoretically still work.
Google could have avoided this by not continuously releasing and killing chat services. If they’d stuck to one they would have a much bigger number of users - people complain about iOS, but lets be real: android is a much bigger market. Google allowing both the hardware and software to fragment in basic functionality is a questionable decision.
And now we are back to Google Chat again!
What you want is for everyone to support whatever messaging protocol Google is pushing today. There have been a lot over the years and it seems like RCS won’t be the last (it has its flaws — serious, fatal ones, IMO).
Nearly a decade and a dozen failed messaging products later, now they are shaming others for not being interoperable with their preferred spec?
I don't think that's the way the world is.
RCS wouldnt change that one bit.
I'd prefer the opposite: an OS with _no_ messaging app, and let users pick their own (both for Android and iOS). Expecting OS vendors to ship one out of the box is asking for a new IE-like scenario where whatever big tech companies pick becomes the standard, no matter how good or bad it may be.
Messaging is easily a more competitive market than search.
About 20: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...
Is it still a powerhouse if no one uses it?
The 'internet chat' they introduced a different service called 'Chat' which runs in some consumer version of Google Workspaces.
I also really hate XML based chat, but the OG standard failed because the federated clients had a poor required minimum standard for interoperability and other stacks E.G. Microsoft's whatever version of it ... I actually forget offhand but it was something anti-competitive that also broke how useful it was outside of their particular implementation.
We were also supposed to get chat with Google Allo but they practically killed it before launch.
> Before launch, Google touted strong privacy in the app, with particular emphasis on messages stored "transiently and in non-identifiable form". However, at launch, privacy was significantly rolled back, with Google keeping logs of messages indefinitely (or until the user deletes messages) in an effort to improve the app's "smart reply" feature.
I remember my Nexus 5 came with at least two Google messaging apps at the same time.
The problem isn't just churn, it's lack of focus. I wonder how many different teams have been tasked with solving messaging, some at the same time, over the years.
One of the apps they broke off, Allo, literally used phone numbers as IM identifiers but didn't support Google Voice integration and they simultaneously launched a second app, Duo, for video calls instead of just putting it in Allo. How could someone higher up not say "this is the dumbest thing ever, merge the teams or reassign one to something else"???
I was farther in the future of converged communication in 2015 than now.
I still have a soft spot for Google Talk, that was such a simple name.
Which is pretty ironic now that I think about it because were talking about apps they likely used internally for COMMUNICATION
Seriously! Executives at Google surely must be aware of the memes by now. Are they so delusional they don't believe them? They don't care? When they chat with each other, which app do they use? Steve Yegg's platform rant still rings true: Google's dogfood is all snouts and hooves.
They tried that. The person who was put in charge of the merged teams picked one and killed off all the other services without a migration path.
many, but also, Gmail
Apple tends to have user data encrypted in their cloud and to encourage more on-device processing. They are more likely to support data sharing between people via exchanged cryptographic keys than have access within their cloud. Unfortunately, user-initiated sharing delegated access out is not a flow OAuth really supports.
Google's previous social network aspirations caused them to chain access to lots of data through user authorization to APIs. They use API access as one of the attractions to sites supporting "Sign in with Google". AFAIK even API which do not necessarily need any user delegated authorization (such as reading a publicly accessible google doc via API) still require a user authorization.
Apple's APIs typically are not about delegated access to user data, but about access to user's application data (e.g. CloudKit app data access via REST api).
Apple does have a OpenID Connect implementation for Sign In with Apple and have left the option open for it to also be used for OAuth delegated access. So far, there aren't any access token scopes or API publicly documented.
Messaging services are sticky and have network effect so there will typically be clear winners - within a particular geographic area or demographic. Other areas/demographics will have other winners.
So perhaps a huge number of American teens use iMessage, while people 30+ use Facebook Messenger. Perhaps a huge number of people in China use WeChat, while Japanese people use Line.
Google is really complaining that very few demographics, not even the masochists, are using Google's chat offerings anymore.
Google Talk
Google Voice
Google Wave
Google Buzz
Google Hangouts
Allo / Duo
Hangouts Meet / Hangouts Chat
Google Meet / Google Chat
+----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+
| | Audio Calls | Messaging | Video Calls |
+----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+
| Consumer | Duo | Messages (SMS/RCS), | Duo |
| | | Hangouts | |
+----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+
| Business | Voice | Chat (Formerly | Meet |
| | | Hangouts Chat), Voice | |
+----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+
Hangouts is almost gone, starting a video call just makes a Meet and sends the link as a message, the messaging still works but has been folded into Chat (They interop for now at least.) so there's no reason to keep Hangouts on anymore really. Meet is for larger meetings, Duo is mostly for one-on-one calls but has group support now too. Chat is basically a Slack clone. Messages is Google's SMS/MMS/RCS app for Android and it requires an Android phone with an active phone plan but it has a web interface for composing messages on your computer. Voice does phone calls, voicemail, and SMS and MMS with a number from Google, and is separate from Messages. I don't think Voice can do RCS which is odd considering how their pushing it on Android.
My previous employer was UPS, a top to bottom Microsoft shop, and they were in the process of switching from Skype for Business (Lync) to Microsoft Teams when I left. Even Microsoft has done a better job with their messaging option.
I don’t have a choice anyway since my company disables IMAP/Exchange for security reasons.
Around 2008, Microsoft had a huge advantage in messaging compared to whoever came next. MSN was widely used in much of the world, on every continent, and the product was far ahead of its time. Maybe not as dominant in the US, but the US has always been weird about messaging and still is. Video calls, group chats, chatbots for companies, they had everything. They were set up for success.
> In June 2009, Microsoft reported the service attracted over 330 million active users each month, placing it among the most widely used instant-messaging clients in the world
330 million, now that was a big number in 2009. Competition? Blackberry Messenger for a while, but that was never going to last with the lock-in. Facebook Messaging was getting popular but that too was (and is) very barebones.
What do they do with this golden egg? They kill it and force people over to.. Skype, an (especially at the time) poor piece of software with maybe 10% of the functionality that MSN had (which did audio/video calls just fine) and they wasted billions on acquiring. If they'd have kept developing it and made quality messaging apps for all mobile platforms, I don't see how Whatsapp would've stood a chance.
Google at least never was in that position. They were late to the game, only needing to start caring about messaging after buying Android and it becoming a success. Microsoft had 330 million people actively messaging in 2009! Did Hangouts even have 330 million active(!) users in 2020?
Teams is still stunningly poor. We use it at work and the Windows (hah, how's that for integration) version is so poor that a lot of us run it in the browser, where it runs marginally better. Images not loading, pasting a file or image not properly working, slow as molasses, far too limited settings to filter notifications.
As suggested by this crazy headline, a lot.
“Google to simplify messaging strategy, will support only five messaging apps”
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/google-promises-to-s...
However, at some point there are executives deciding strategy, and almost by definition they are out of touch. From my observation, the most reliable strategy is to let a start-up with passion build something great that people want, and then buy that start-up. This is what companies older than Google have been doing for decades. (Google does it too, but they were more in-house-first in the past.)
The problem is that open standards just can't compete with closed ones when it comes to giving users what they want (for a nice discussion of this, see the classic https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/)
True though that open standards are slower and harder to work with because they involve too many people and too much discussion. Apple is almost exactly the opposite example of this, and clearly their approach works quite well most of the time.
The article answers that:
"Google's messaging history is one of constant product startups and shutdowns. Thanks to a lack of product focus or any kind of top-down mandate from Google's CEO, no division is really "in charge" of messaging. As a consequence, the company has released 13 half-hearted messaging products since iMessage launched in 2011."
I'll hazard a guess that most of those products were left to wither and die due to an inability to significantly advance Google's "eyeballs monetisation" strategy.
There is no lock-in for the consumer on Google products. If you have a Google device you can use whatever apps you want. If you use Google services you can use whatever apps or OS you want.
The problem is that Google has been too open. They could have made a Google messenging app the default a decade ago and forced all SMS on Android to go through that.
As it stands now, any messenging app can be the default on Android. Some OEMs roll their own, FB Messenger can be turned into default SMS app, etc...
RCS isn't a replacement for Signal or iMessage, not really, but it's a hell of a lot better than the current least-common-denominator, cross-platform approach of SMS/MMS.
Apple, with its desire for vendor lock-in, has every incentive to keep the "least-common-denominator" messaging standard as crappy as possible, to make iMessage's own experience between Apple users more compelling. They have no incentive to improve this and of course will drag their feet as long as possible.
Whatever you think of Google, and whatever you think of Apple, I hope you can agree that the carriers dragging their feet on RCS does nobody any good. There's no reason that RCS cannot co-exist with iMessage on IOS, except that Apple wants you in its walled garden.
Especially being Apple, they would not pick an external pre-standard and run with it when they built their success on in-house design and control. It would also be a huge gamble to build around someone else's young standard.
Do you remember phones in 2011? The Android-based phones were wildly different from each other (often flawed in unique ways). There were still popular Nokia based phones. Apple almost certainly did not target "lock in" as their priority when building their phone software. They targeted "stuff we can control which won't blow up in ways we cannot understand or prevent".
(I do admit their focus shifted after Steve Jobs died, but that was later.)
But also realize the carriers were in heavy competition for decades. I've worked with/for telecom companies off and on for a very long time, and the only coordination really happens when one big company buys another and has to try to integrate things.
At rough count, around a dozen in ~15 years.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo...
Similarly, Microsoft would likely be a dominant player in the chat space today if they hadn't rebranded and renamed MSN Messenger several times and then abandoned it altogether.
MSN Messenger was frickin awesome. You could draw pictures into the chat window. You could play a game of checkers while you chatted. It had a thriving ecosystem of apps and plugins. Everyone I knew used MSN Messenger... and then one day, Microsoft just said screw it, everyone can move to slow and clunky Skype... and that was the end of it.
Hell, ICQ might still be around if AOL had put more development resources into it.
The chat space is so bloody fragmented now, but it has nothing to do with Apple. Any one of the above mentioned companies could be killing it in this space if they hadn't pissed away what they had.
Of course I'm talking about the QQ variant, which is probably so far from the original ICQ that I have no leg to stand on making the above claim. Still, a very interesting story to follow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent_QQ
Acquired did a fantastic episode on Tencent (owner of QQ/WeChat)
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/season-3-episode-10-tencent
[1] https://icq.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal
Firms that make messaging products say they need to control the system for quality, innovation, spam control, etc. Yet, nobody questions that a Verizon customer can call a T-Mobile customer and vice versa. If all chat clients interoperated than there would be real competition to create the best client. As it is we have the pernicious pseudo-competition of two-sided markets where you install client X not because you want it or because it is good but because the person you want to talk to insists you install client X.
If the European Union wanted to make the internet better they should mandate that chat clients be interoperable the same way that telephone services are interoperable.
Perhaps some of the things like Slack that make money at the enterprise level can afford to keep free around and working well enough to function for longer.
One of the subtle problems with offering a traditional IM service is that there are some scaling aspects that are super-linear with the number of users. For instance, as the average number of users on your subscription list increases, more of them have status changes per unit time, and each of those status changes must also go out to more users on average. The scaling issues aren't necessarily a full O(n^2) but they're often larger than simply O(n log n). Even after a many-times-over drop in the price of computing power it's still pretty expensive to offer something like that for free.
If you look around, you can see how current solutions often work around that. For instance, Slack shards everyone simply by the nature of how it works, there isn't just a "Slack handle" that anyone can ping me at. We're not all in one big namespace. There's many fewer status updates it does, too, it's a lot more selective about what statuses you get.
Another solution is Matrix; with how cheap computing power is, if a few hundred people bring their own to the party it's no big deal anymore to run a server like that, and no one person necessarily has to bring the big bucks. But if one entity tried to run the whole network, they'd certainly notice the bill.
For some reason, Slack got this right, and then Discord did it wrong anyway.
Even iMessage seems very much like a 1-1 messaging system.
So no, at least SMS is not a social network.
I don't like WhatsApp anymore but it was in its time my favourite social network. I had all my important groups there, used it exclusively to communicate with close friends and family.
It was the place were most images were shared and discussions were held and so on.
“Depending on your settings, you can also periodically back up your WhatsApp chats to Google Drive”
“You can use the export chat feature to export a copy of the chat history from an individual or group chat.”
I haven’t checked the full backup, but exports of individual chats are easily readable (zip with a .txt of all texts in the chat and individual images, IIRC)
The individual exports work fine, but it’s very tedious to go through every conversation individually.
Slight aside: keeping a TCP connection consomes almost nothing. In fact, that's how push notifications work today on Android: a TCP connection is kept open, and apps' server send a ping to Google to tell the mobile to wake up.
What prevents power-saving is if every app keeps a different socket open to a different server and pings the servers on different schedules. That forces the mobile to wake up constantly.
It would be interesting to see whether Facebook/WhatsApp and iMessage have made them desperate enough to reverse course on XMPP but I'm skeptical that they'd be trusted enough to be successful.
¹ https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/00... and then https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-May/001680....
Even people like me that hated MS and AOL had chat clients that could communicate with their networks and Google Talk/Hangouts and MSN Messenger were both great for what they were. At the time I felt like we had lost something important by moving to "push" networks versus e-mail but I'd take those days now in a heartbeat. Maybe by 2030, something like Matrix will have us back to what XMPP was doing and I'll be able to send a message to someone's shitty Teams from whatever Google's fifth chat replacement is by then.
It's even worse when I'm traveling in east Asia and there are like 5 different Korean and several Chinese chat networks in addition to WhatsApp trying to be the next LINE and becoming the one-stop access point for nearly everything. I'm honestly expecting to see a 7-11 integrated messaging network at some point.
There were a few brief wonderful years when I had AIM, FB Messenger, GChat, and a few lesser known protocols all in different tabs in the same window.
It's not like they all needed different interfaces; same data, different wire-noise...
I didnt realize I had trillian setup to log all my conversations to file and I found the logs recently when going through a very, very old harddrive. Middleschool me was cringey as fuck
Upsides: I no longer had to care what messenger my friends used, it was all the same to me. Extensible and theme-able which was just the way I liked my software at the time. Growl integration.
Downsides: I made the mistake of installing and using a FFVII-themed sound pack that invoked a Pavlovian response in me every time I heard certain sound effects from that game. Took the better part of a decade after I stopped using Adium to shake that off.
Despite living in the US, I actually don't know what's dominant here...is it iMessage? WhatsApp?
Korea is dominated by KakaoTalk. I believe Japan is Line. China I believe has their own walled garden app ecosystems (WeChat & co.?)
Judging from what all my European friends use, WhatsApp dominates at least the UK and Western Europe?
WhatsApp seems to dominate in Europe and South America.
I have FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and Discord on my phone...
Even still most in Asia also use WhatsApp.
Source: me, I've lived on all continents
I didn't use WhatsApp there. I had to SMS / tweet with my satellite device.
I kind of miss XMPP, which seemed like the answer at one point. As it is, I need about six messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Telegram, a Matrix client, Slack, and I'm probably forgetting one) plus SMS/iMessage to keep in touch with everyone.
https://snikket.org/ is worth checking out as a (self-)hosted personal chat system.
LINE and Ali/We chat are now more like platforms, for example, LINE has a wallet called LINE Pay that you can use in retail stores that grew out of selling virtual stickers for their chat client. They integrate to transit services and other things too.
Kakao utterly dominates the market for messaging there (as it does amongst the international Korean diaspora). Even government services use it.
Same happened with Skype after it was bought by Microsoft, and I seem to recall this is relatively recent. There were (are?) two Skype clients - one for 'personal' (the original Skype) and another for 'enterprise' (rebranded Windows Live for Enterprise possibly?) and not compatible. Again, I recall trying to help confused Windows users figure out why the (incorrect) client wouldn't log-in with certain credentials.
Teams is supposed to completely replace Skype for Business
What are you saying? ICQ is still around.
Microsoft just kept making it slower, buggier, easier to eavesdrop on, and kept "refreshing" the UI over and over again until it became unbearable.
iMessage is incredibly popular with certain demographics in the United States -- it's an in-group signifier the way teens have always had in-group signifiers (when I was in high school, it was AIM, a Nokia, and wearing Abercrombie) and that isn't about bullying. If Google had its way, its products would be used as the ways to "bully" the out-group. So this is much ado about nothing.
It is notable that iMessage has persisted with its popularity in the US for as long as it has. And it is true that iMessage is definitely an ecosystem carrot, again, in the US. But in countries that didn't adopt SMS/MMS the same way we did in the US (b/c of cost/international variance/etc), the in-group messaging app is something else. It's always fascinating for me to go to other countries and see a ton of iPhone users not using iMessage but something else because that app has become the in-group signifier.
And every teen I know uses Discord more than they use almost anything else. The ranking typically goes Discord, IG, iMessage.
Having said all of that -- even if you took away iMessage, the iPhone would still be a status symbol/in-group signifier for a lot of people, especially young adults in the US. Samsung has had the best track record with some of its devices with approaching similar brand loyalty/"it" factor, but even if Apple adopted RCS -- it's not like the phone all the influencers and cool teens would be using would be Pixels. It would still be the iPhone for a host of reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with technology. White earbuds have been a fashion marker for 20 years now and that's what this comes down to. It isn't about lock-in or regulation or technology. It's about fashion.
Exactly this, Google was happy to be against open communication platforms when it felt it was in their interest but as soon as it goes the other way "Oh we should all be using RCS"
Reap what you sow
I'm honestly surprised more people don't complain about it...and given Google is really the only other big phone software maker now, it is their role to try to say something imo. "You reap what you sow" (as this article says) honestly sounds ignorant (or just pro-Apple) and really ignores the major problem here. Google has been bad at messaging apps, that doesn't mean this concern isn't real or a fairly big problem. Especially when the stats show that this is creating a hardware monopoly for Apple (look at the stats for young people,) in 10-15 years this creates a much bigger hardware market share for Apple. That is not a desirable outcome.
Except stats don't back up what you are saying, at least not in the US. RCS is no less trash than SMS, it's actually an improvement over SMS. They could come together, along with carriers, to create an even better standard but one party is holding out...and blocking any innovation (hint, it's Apple.) I don't get how people are ok with them hijacking an open standard.
They don't want features like end to end encryption because it relegates them to being a dumb pipe and limits their ability to innovate e.g. parsing SMS messages for advertising purposes. Also many carriers are closely tied to governments who want to be able to monitor communication.
I've worked for a number of telcos over the years and can assure you that they don't have the interest of users at heart.
As such, RCS isn’t the answer simply because the carriers were involved. SMS’ successor should basically be a vendor agnostic WhatsApp or Signal complete with E2E built into the base spec instead of duct taped on as an extension that can conveniently be ignored.
Great. Build something, then call me when you have the default messaging app on board on every platform save one.
From my perspective, RCS has the best shot at this and the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good.
They're a minority phone player. They have their own messaging platform as a feature of their mobile OS, so making it available to other platforms is anathema to their own business goals and success of their own platform.
I don't feel hurt or victimized by their choices here. It's not in my way at all.
They DO have a much bigger footprint in some desirable segments of that market, but overall they're a minority player. By definition, minority players do not enjoy any monopolistic power. They are under no obligation to give up any competitive advantage until and unless they exhibit true, market-manipulating monopolistic behavior.
Though, to be fair I can see how that could be confusing (because English).
iOS is a minority player in the mobile phone market by a wide margin globally, and by a small margin in the US.
End of.
Major Player: an important and successful company, especially when compared with other, smaller companies in the same type of business or industry. Source https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/major-pl...
Ergo, the vast majority of people would agree that Apple is a "major player" in the phone industry despite having a "minority marketshare".
PS. There's nothing wrong with the point you're making, I'm only pointing out that its confusing to others because of the terminology you're using.
Most people I know are brand agnostic but platform loyal. Google could have captured half of all English speaking countries and 85% globally if not for their incompetence. They still could since here we are complaining about Google’s messaging apps.
Yes, Apple has a bigger market share than ONE Android handset maker. But if you compare by platform, iOS is, in the US, more or less even with Android. Globally, it remains a small minority.
47% of a market is NOT a dominant position. It's a GOOD position, but it's not strong enough to control the market in ways that typically produce antitrust interest.
That they choose not to support a standard protocol as a competitive advantage is exactly the problem.
Imagine if you bought a 4K television that had AppleTV built in, and then you find out that the 4K feature is only available if you use the built in AppleTV interface, and HDMI is limited to 1080P.
There is a case to be made that such anti-competitive behavior is illegal.
b) There is no such case that such behaviour is illegal or that it is impacting competition in the messaging space. The fact that WhatsApp, Telegram, Kakao, Line etc are so popular is indicative of this fact.
Microsoft was accused of using their Windows monopoly to put Netscape out of business. Which monopoly is Apple using to what end, and who are they putting out of business? Microsoft’s behaviour resulted in the Great Web Stagnation in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but there is nothing of the sort here. Facebook, WhatsApp, Signal, Discord, and Telegram seem to be doing ok. So who is being harmed here?
I don’t buy the RCS argument. RCS is insecure and inferior to all the platforms I mentioned, and pushed only by carriers (who I am sure have the users’ interests at heart) and Google.
Also, if we follow your logic, Apple needs to authorise other apps to process SMSes. That would be the equivalent to Microsoft letting users change the default browser. Microsoft was never forced to port IE to any other platform.
Are carriers clamoring for Apple to implement RCS? If they are, what are they offering Apple? And if they are and have been lobbying for Apple to implement RCS, then is it possible work has already begun for a future OS release and we just don’t know about it because they haven’t announced that release yet or it’s not far enough along?
I have this vague impression that the carriers don’t particularly care about RCS themselves, and so Apple wouldn’t have any reason to care either. Maybe I’m wrong on both counts.
RCS has a lot of those compelling features and so would be able to take market share away from those proprietary apps.
Great right ? Well no because RCS is unencrypted specifically so that carriers and governments can read your messages.
That would be a very bad product design decision. I would realize that I had made a bad purchase and I would return the TV to the store and buy one that didn't do that. There are lots and lots of TVs to choose from. On the other hand, if you really like AppleTV, you might not care. Either way, it is the consumer's choice, so no harm. Lots of TVs have features people don't like.
>There is a case to be made that such anti-competitive behavior is illegal.
No there isn't. iOS is a minority platform (globally) by a very large number. Also, there are a number of app based messaging options, many of which are quite popular and some use strong encryption.
You're second point is irrelavant. Apple is a US company and iOS is the dominant majority mobile platform in the US. I live in the US and I am discussing this as a domestic issue as it relates to me and the laws of my country. We wouldn't be having this discussion if iMessage was just another messaging app alongside the default SMS app.
The question here is whether Apple should be forced to implement RCS. They aren't stopping anyone from communicating since SMS and MMS are available. I suspect if RCS gains enough traction, Apple might add that capability for non iMessage users. I don't know that of course, but I wouldn't be surprised. iMessage still has many advantages over RCS for in-ecosystem users so it wouldn't harm them to add it. Time will tell I guess.
Are you really suggesting that Apple be FORCED to support this older, insecure, less useful RCS protocol instead of iMessage? That's absurd.
A messaging platform is for communication, not just for the individual customer.
Everything a company does to protect its position isn't "anticompetitive behavior." That term has a specific meaning in US law, and applies generally only to situations where market manipulation is being attempted (or committed) by a monopolist or a consortium of firms large enough to act as one.
See
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-practices
Neither of those situations applies to iOS and iMessage.
This is supposed to be a technical community so can we stop with this lazy abuse of terminology.
Apple has not hijacked the SMS protocol in any way, shape or form.
They've simply created an app that supports two protocols: SMS and iMessage with a UI that abstracts the difference.
iMessage isn't hijacking anything, as it's _not involved with SMS_. It's an entirely separate system from SMS. If you can't use iMessage, then the client uses plain old, non hijacked, non augmented SMS.
The word "hijacking" is being used because it's an aggressive sounding term that makes Apple sound like a bad guy. It's propaganda.
To me this would be similar to me operating as a browser vendor and having my own CDN that implements a separate protocol from HTTP, provides additional features beyond what HTTP can do, and displays a different color of banner to indicate that the website you are using is coming over my CDN. Then I don't allow arbitrarily anyone to implement my CDN protocol or connect to my CDN, so other browser vendors can't provide a competitive experience. Later when I have built a large marketshare, I decide that I'm good with HTTP 1.1 or whatever version of HTTP at the time and stop upgrading my implementation of that protocol. This is damaging to the other browser vendors and of users of websites that only support HTTP. Obviously this is an imperfect analogy given the client-server nature of HTTP, but I figured this might resonate with this audience.
I don’t know what to make of your analogy, it’s one of those “if facts were different then thing would be different” sorts of things, so just go ahead and read your first sentence.
A literal reading reads as Apple hijacking software they wrote and own the source code to… to support an additional protocol. It’s now been just over 10 years since iMessages was released into the wild as a feature of the Messages app and society has pretty well gotten used to it. Would you be happier if they were two apps, one called Messages and with an inferior communications channel and the other with blue bubbles called iMessages supporting all the iMessage features of today? Android had that feature 10 years ago or more. It sucked before you could change the default SMS messenger to Hangouts or something else, and once you did, Hangouts experientially worked the same as Messages does post-iMessages.
You could say that things have changed as users have become more aware of the difference over the years, but honestly, if your initial expectation was the default message application on my phone does what I have known as texting (which is/was SMS/MMS) which is a part of my phone plan that I pay my provider for and then you start doing something wholly different with that communication, I would consider that some sort of hijacking. You have seized my action and intention and redirected it to serve your own purpose.
Optimally? Switch over to an RCS implementation. If existing rollouts of RCS don't support enough of a feature set to please you (looking at E2EE), push to get that done. Don't go the Google route and end up choosing "collaborating is hard, so let's just not do it".
If Apple won't do that, drop SMS from iMessages and open the protocol or at least force users to choose or acknowledge the choice. Auto-negotiating a protocol choice makes sense when you are going from one open standards-based protocol that any vendor could and should implement to a newer version of that protocol with the same expectation of general availability (think the path through the versions of SSL and TLS). It's disingenuous to automatically shift traffic and offer enhanced features through a proprietary protocol when communicating with clients that only implement and can only implement the open protocol. It makes it seem like the other clients are intentionally inferior or otherwise making user-hostile choices. It's good for business though.
With respect to Android, that's its own slew of problems and mistakes that shouldn't be the bar Apple needs to clear. iMessage and Facetime are easily better than any communications implementation Google has produced in the last 10 years. Hangouts and its various precursors were better when they were based on XMPP or had functioning XMPP gateways. XMPP wasn't an standard intended to replace or progress SMS, so that doesn't really meet my criteria either. RCS is the way forward, but there's little demand for it or business reason for it in the Apple camp. Maybe if carriers declared that they are going to start taking RCS seriously and start removing SMS from plans and charging more for it.
It’s a common pattern for people to state that if X was different in some way, then there would have been a different story to tell. Something else would have changed if only X was different, so yeah; if facts were different, then thing would be different. If that car were red instead of blue, it would be a red car, which is true, but useless, because it’s not a red car, it’s a blue car.
You opted for an analogy that involved HTTP versions, including a hypothetical one, and a hypothetical CDN. The 30ish year history of web browsers is already littered with examples of browsers that did everything you were describing and some things that you didn’t. IE6 was famous for its stagnation because Microsoft dissolved the IE team to try and accomplish what you said, and you know what happened? The market reacted, forcing Microsoft to put the band back together, who then spent years trying to play catch up before eventually abandoning both IE and then it’s replacement in order to build a Chromium shim. Now I have government websites complaining that my browser isn’t Chrome rather than my browser isn’t IE. Y’know, the more things change, the more they stay the same and all that, but at least the banks don’t demand I have a browser with ActiveX controls so there’s been some progress.
So to bring this conversation back on track:
> You could say that things have changed as users have become more aware of the difference over the years, but honestly, if your initial expectation was the default message application on my phone does what I have known as texting (which is/was SMS/MMS) which is a part of my phone plan that I pay my provider for and then you start doing something wholly different with that communication, I would consider that some sort of hijacking.
So keeping in mind what I said about this being one of those “if facts were different thing would be different” things, who is complaining that Apple is offering them an improved messaging experience?
1. iPhones already offer the means to disable iMessage. At any point, you can disassociate your phone number or email address with the iMessage service.
2. It is part of the on-boarding process to opt into associating your phone number with iMessage, and if you don’t, then you will be sending and receiving SMS/MMS messages through the Messages app.
3. Despite having to opt-in to iMessages, and despite having the ability to disable iMessages at any time, iMessages is a popular service, at least in the US, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s better than SMS, it’s better than MMS, and when the other person also has iMessage enabled, you don’t have to worry about character limits (which are really byte limits, try sending an SMS with anything except ASCII characters), and you can send that 4K video or the last 20 pictures you took or whatever because it is a quality of life improvement that doesn’t require you to seek out an alternative.
You can still seek out alternatives. Literally billions of people use message protocols that are not iMessage, even on iMessage-capable platforms, so your conjecture that Apple hijacked SMS is an academic point at best, but honestly it’s just a dead end. Apple could not remove SMS/MMS even for just pragmatic reasons, and probably contractual and legal ones too. Neither of those are solid reasons to not develop a new message protocol as a feature for their phones because they are in the business of selling more of their phones.
So they evaluated their options, made a business decision, and accepted the trade offs by delivering a QoL improvement to their paying customers without disabling their ability to send text messages to other phone numbers that did not have iMessage installed, and created a visual distinction between the two types of message formats so people could come to recognize using basic human pattern matching when and how they can take advantage of the improved message format.
> Optimally? Switch over to an RCS implementation. If existing rollouts of RCS don't support enough of a feature set to please you (looking at E2EE), push to get that done.
Sure, they could, and there’s a case to be made that maybe they should look at implementing RCS, but why would that be at the expense of iMessage? Apple’s customers like iMessage. RCS looks like it could be a solid replacement for SMS and MMS eventually, but I think it’s really just going to live on phones alongside SMS and MMS for the foreseeable future, so this would be an additional protocol to support rather than a drop-in replacement for anything.
But there doesn’t seem to be a slam dunk case for RCS and the reason for that is that Google seems to be the only one that has a good implementation. If the carriers were clamoring for RCS, and I’ve seen no indication this is a priority for them, that would be a stronger case to support RCS. If Apple’s customers were clamoring for RCS, that would be a stronger case to support RCS.
But cross-platform rich communication with push notifications is already a solved problem, it’s just not solved by iMessage.
I still wish Apple would have pushed to develop an open standard as the path to improved user experience and messaging rather than making the progressive enhancement path go from an open network to a proprietary one. On the other hand, walled gardens have always been a productive pursuit for them, so why change?
The protocol support in iChat went from OSCAR (AIM & ICQ, .Mac) to SIP to Bonjour to XMPP (functionally Google Talk for most people, although I did experiment with Gizmo Project and the Facebook Messenger XMPP bridge) to Yahoo Messenger. Messages wasn’t their first multi-protocol chat client, but it does work fundamentally differently as I think you well know.
SMS and MMS might have been open at the time, and I appreciated the capability of point to point messaging someone that didn’t have to be signed in and in front of their computer to read it, but absolutely sucked compared to the plethora of proprietary push notification messengers that existed or were coming into existence circa 2011. They still suck, and that’s the best argument for additionally supporting RCS (and while I’m still trying to form an intelligent opinion around RCS specifically, it looks like a mixed bag at best but maybe still also a QoL improvement from where I sit now).
I agree with you that there should be a decent interoperable standard between iPhones and Androids, even if that’s functionally just between iPhones and Google’s Android, and maybe that will be RCS. I mean we have no evidence that Apple is not working on adding RCS to the list of protocols Messages supports, but as someone who has migrated across too many messaging clients and servers that all pretty much serve the same purpose, I also don’t want it to come at the expense of something I have already that works and works reliably just to chase the open standards dream. There’s too many cross platform options today for me to be invested in having one more.
Because all of the reports over the many years show that users know that a blue bubble indicates that this message is only going to be readable by other iPhones. And that a green bubble indicates it has fallen back to SMS and will incur a cost.
This whole blue message bullying narrative is because users very much are knowledgable into what is happening at a technical level.
Ask a few kids and then come back.
I think there's a lot of truth to the word "hijacking" here.
At least as recently as last year, I've discovered instances where iPhone users will not have received a message/image (both from me and others in group chat) seemingly randomly.
I really don't like that Apple has managed to sell a prevailing narrative that it's somehow the fault of users who don't buy their expensive hardware that is necessary to use their software that impinges on an open protocol.
I don't think it's so irritating. When you set up your phone you are prompted to allow iMessage to use the number. If you allow it you'll have to remove it again after you decide to not use it again. Just like you have to cancel a subscription if you don't want to use it any more.
Since this is a technical community, and you're a technical person who presumably knows how iMessage / Apple's infrastructure works, can you explain if this is correct:
- I'm an iPhone user with phone number N. In Apple's system, I'm flagged as supporting the iMessage protocol. Presumably Apple has some gateway that routes messages, and this sends me down the iMessage route.
- I swap phones. I now own an Android device. I have the same phone number N.
- Apple's system is slow to update, and its gateway still sees me as an iPhone user supporting the iMessage protocol.
- All messages from other iPhone users to my phone number are routed incorrectly and I don't receive them until Apple updates its gateway to use SMS for my phone number.
If the above is correct, what would you call that? People who want to contact me have no idea what a protocol is, but Apple has impacted their ability to communicate with me. They think all text messages are the same, but this layer Apple has built isn't open or interoperable, and is additional friction for anyone wanting to switch off their platform.
It's very hard to excuse this behavior.
It’s not intuitive of course, but you can totally turn it off and deregister, even if you don’t have your iPhone anymore.
On the contrary, Messages is routing messages to Messages IDs, and it's kinda on you whether you use an ID string that looks suspiciously similar to your number.
This is incredibly easy to turn on and off:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201349
To be clear, you can have an iphone with an SMS phone number and Messages, and not ever mingle the two. Further, you can have a SMS phone get your SMS messages, while Apple users with your number reach, say, your iPad. That's a valid use case.
In the situation you lay out above, where you forgot you didn't want to use that as your Messages ID any more, you can "de-register" if you forgot to remove it:
If only if it worked as advertised. I can turn it off as to messages directed only to me. But if a group text was on iMessage and I'm the only one who bounces off to Android, new messages to that thread will exclude me, EVEN IF I'VE DEREGISTERED MY NUMBER. I've tried this repeatedly. The only way to begin receiving messages from that group is if EVERYONE on the thread deletes the old thread and begins a new one in green bubbles. It ENRAGES me, and it's been the biggest barrier to me transitioning to a Galaxy phone. When I'm the only one on Android, I just stop receiving the messages to the legacy group threads. And there's no way I make 30 iPhone users all delete those threads. Apple could ask its own servers "have any of these iMessage accounts deregistered their number? If yes, force thread back to SMS/MMS." Apple does not do that, and thereby severely handicaps any effort to move away. I hate it and would happily support a class action to change that practice.
When I've switched back and forth from Android on a few occasions I've had to have users update that contact card for SMS to work properly. I don't think its necessarily an iMessage issue more iOS, but if anyone is still having issues with the switch after de-registering, check that.
iMessage falls back to SMS within a few minutes if the message can’t be delivered. This often happens if the recipient doesn’t have a data connection.
However, they do have UI on all of their iMessage programs, and on the website that you can get to from any web browser (on any brand of device) for your AppleID/iCloud account that can remove your phone number from your AppleID at any time. Then, after some minor propagation time, messages from Apple users to your phone number will no longer be routed to your iMessages account, and will instead be sent as SMSs.
So you have an option to tell Apple at any moment, even after you have switched, that you no longer want that number attached to iMessages. How exactly is that hijacking?
At the time I send a message to an iOS user (who has iMessage enabled), there's no way (AFAICT) for me to choose whether that message is sent via SMS or via iMessage.
(Perhaps if I turn off my data connections, iOS will eventually send the message via SMS?)
My wife and I use Signal to message each other and we have Signal as sms handler on our android phones. For some reason, she had to use a dumb phone with no Signal app for a couple of weeks. After a few days, she was suspicious that she is not getting some sms'es. I wanted to test if this was true, but I couldn't. Any message I sent to her number through Signal would be sent as a Signal message which wouldn't be delivered and I couldn't figure out how to send as sms. I had to change my sms app to another app, and then send using that app. Now, the new sms app couldn't read all older sms because Signal removes all sms from android sms database into Signal. So, now I use separate apps for Signal and sms.
I think that's why GGP's comment ("Apple's approach is they have essentially hijacked the SMS protocol") is justified. If you want to use any iMessage functionality, you surrender your ability to send SMS to iOS users.
It surely doesn't warrant a per-message-toggle and a global setting seems reasonable in my opinion.
On Android you can set Signal as your SMS handler and use it as a similar dual client. I miss that feature when using iOS.
Apple iMessage user. The water is fine here.
Eventually I had to disable iMessage.
There needs to be an interoperable, highly functional solution that doesn't depend on wireless carriers.
0: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/signal-statistics/#:~:te...
> Danger zone
> Most users should not do this under normal circumstances.
What is the danger here? Where is the F-Droid application?
iMessage took over because iPhone users could no longer send group SMS. Apple killed group SMS. Google never did this. Only tried to change Sms and enhance it.
If everyone has it turned off, it is just the normal group SMS experience (also terrible). SMS group chat isn't gone, you just very rarely see it because there is almost no reason for an Apple user to disable iMessage.
This is also no different to everyone in a group who can use WhatsApp or a similar app using that.
SMS is the lowest common denominator fallback. RCS is not much better.
One of the group chats my wife uses for work is all SMS users except for her.
Or am I misreading your comment?
Apple built a superior service, and the price of using that service is an iPhone. Does it suck for Google and Android users? Yes. Is that the whole point? Yes. Is there anything wrong with that? I don't think so.
I'm an iPhone user, but rarely use iMessage. Most of my instant messaging actually happens on some combination of Google Chat! (or whatever they call it these days), KakaoTalk (I'm Korean) and WhatsApp. Plenty of other alternatives out there too.
I think I have just one friend who I use iMessage with regularly.
Not very clear at all, IMHO. Would you prefer that iMessage conversations didn't "interlink" with SMS recipients? Is that a better outcome?
This is yet another example of the power of the "network affect" and the difficulty of crafting a reasonable regulatory framework.
I'm just pushing back at your assertion about "monopolistic behavior" but not at the general difficulty of regulating these sorts of ecosystems.
Possible non-monopolistic solutions:
- an open standard for phone-number linked messaging.
- Allow any messaging app to assume imessage’s role and send/receive sms messages instead of the imessage app.
- separate imessage and sms into separate apps. As you pointed out, this is probably the worst option since nobody really wants this experience.
As for regulation:
“All general-purpose communications platforms with over 10mil users must allow and enable open access to 3rd party client developers and inter-platform communications gateways” - problem solved
This is frankly delusion.
What is the SLA for a feature? Who decides? How fast can they be deprecated? In the face of security bugs? In the face of active exploitation? Who controls feature additions? What if the operator doesn't want to build the feature? What about abuse? Are they allowed to remove encryption guarantees? Strip e2e encryption?
etc etc etc.
It's nothing like a trivial problem.
We have an example of numerous open-standard communication platforms that existed, and then failed, because they couldn't keep up with competition.
All a "Well, if you get big enough!" law would do is ensure a constant cycle of competitive death.
I think you mean because they couldn’t be monopolized and monetized as effectively as a proprietary solution.
Because you chose to buy their phone. Just buy a non-Apple phone, plenty of them.
You can turn it off at any time. Settings > Messages > iMessage off
How does this “harm users”? If anything it provides a service that most users appreciate heavily: read receipts, typing indicators, flexible group chats. If you want to use SMS, you can. If you want to use WhatsApp, you can. All this talk about Apple having a “monopoly” over its own ecosystem is not only incorrect but just tiresome.
Apple isn’t “guilty” of anything here.
I get those extras you refer to (read receipts etc) only if i have an iphone and so does the other user. Yet with an open standard i could have those with everyone.
Other apps have features imessage does not - yet i can’t intermix whatsapp/snapchat/vibr/telegram etc with my sms messages - apple is holding my sms’ hostage in the imessage app when i might prefer to send sms’ and whatsapp messages from a single app
Apple knows the lock-in increases the value of their devices. That’s harm - my iphone costs more.
You can download and use something else if you don't want to use Apple's Messages app.
You can configure Messages to use only SMS and not do iMessage.
You seem to be saying that Apple should provide a multiprotocol tool that supports a bunch of platforms and allow you to intermingle them, which is a fine thing to want, but if it's not in Apple's interest to build such a thing I don't know how you can describe their choice as "wrong" or "harmful".
No, entitlement is thinking that Apple should be free to break anti-trust law, and engage in illegal anti-competitive practices.
We have these law for a reason, and they can and aught be used against companies that engage in anti-competitive practices.
> but if it's not in Apple's interest to build such a thing I don't know how you can describe their choice as "wrong" or "harmful".
It is wrong and harmful, if it is declared illegally anti-competitive, according to anti-trust law, which they are required to follow.
For a community that's apparently so harsh on big tech monopoly, I'm always surprised by the constant defending of Apple's anti-competitive practices here, even when it's at the expense of other companies. Shows to me that Apple has done a really great job with it's PR, if anything.
Apple has a platform, not a monopoly.
Precisely which antitrust statutes is Apple violating? Please be specific.
Specifically section 17200 which disallows unfair business acts or practices.
And specifically what courts have held that this makes illegal would include business acts that "otherwise significantly threatens or harms competition".
Not sure where you are getting your incorrect definition of the words "control the market".
But based on your other comment, it seems you are also under the very common mistaken idea that a company has to have a "supermajority" of a market for it to fall under anti-trust, or anti-competition law.
Thats not true. Even federally, which is has a much less expansive definition of anti-competitive behavior, than california.
There have been multiple federal judges who have ruled that even a company with less than 50% of the market, could be covered under anti-competition laws.
Its ok though. You probably weren't aware of this, and were just following this very common mistake, about the definition that anti-competition laws use.
Most people don't actually read court cases themselves, and just repeat these common mis-understandings.
Source:
"See Hayden Publ'g Co., Inc. v. Cox Broad. Corp., 730 F.2d 64, 69 n.7 (2d Cir. 1984) ("[A] party may have monopoly power in a particular market, even though its market share is less than 50%."); Broadway Delivery Corp. v. UPS, 651 F.2d 122, 129 (2d Cir. 1981) ("[W]hen the evidence presents a fair jury issue of monopoly power, the jury should not be told that it must find monopoly power lacking below a specified share."); Yoder Bros., Inc. v. Cal.-Fla. Plant Corp., 537 F.2d, 1347, 1367 n.19 (5th Cir. 1976) (rejecting "a rigid rule requiring 50% of the market for a monopolization offense without regard to any other factors")."
Thats the source for federal law, and the common legal opinion is that california law is actually much more broad, and prevents more things.
But if you want a specific example, that used california law, you could just look at the recent Apple case, which did rule that Apple had engaged in some anti-competitive behavior (even though, it didn't rule that way on every single count. It still ruled that way on at least 1 of them).
So a judge, in california, has already ruled that Apple could engage in some illegal anti-competitive behavior, despite not having a "supermajority", even if that court case is going to appeal right now.
Congratulations. You have found, presumably by broad googling, a case that suggests a minority market player can still be found to be misbehaving. Of course, you provide absolutely ZERO context for the citation, which is honestly part for the course here. What was the behavior in question?
For this to be a convincing argument, you're going to have to explain what the judge FOUND in this case, and why that applies to Apple. Or is your point to just say "LOOK! Someone with less than 50% of a market can still engage in illegal restraint of trade!"? If so, sure, granted. But the larger point stands:
In this particular case, there is nothing to suggest that Apple is ANYWHERE NEAR a Sherman Act problem w/r/t iMessage, because:
- You don't have to use iMessage even if you use iOS, because there exist several other competing messaging tools; and - You don't have to use iOS, because there is at least one very significant mobile OS player in the market
Wanting to use iMessage without using iOS is a common desire, but simply wanting a thing doesn't entitle you to it. Apple is not violating your rights by not giving you this.
Great, so I am correct on that, and you repeated an incorrect mis-conception that a supermajority is required. I provided sources, whereas you just asserted that a supermajority is required, without any justification at all, and were actually wrong on that.
You can feel free to do more research if you want. Because I know that you will not be able find conflicting court precedent that says that a super majority is "required". The actual court precedent proves others.
But I will remind you again, that you said this "because to do that you have to have a supermajority market share". And this is wrong, if you intended to say that a supermajority of a market is required for something to break anti-competition or anti-trust laws.
Since I have shown you a definitively wrong statement, I'd reccomend that you use this as a wake up call, that you haven't actually looked into this enough to know what you are talking about.
I can't provide hundreds of hours of teaching lessons to you, on how this stuff works, when you are getting basic facts like that wrong, unfortunately.
> You have found, presumably by broad googling
I have those sources saved, actually, because I got so annoyed at people repeating this very common and incorrect assertion that a supermajority is required for something to be illegally anti-competitive, when the court precedent is clear that it is not the case. So I looked into this enough, that I found extensive legal opinions on this saying otherwise.
> a case
It was not "a case". It was 3 cases. And if you had read or paid attention to the sources I posted, you'd see that it was 3, which makes me think that you didn't actually read them.
You can either do the research or not. I don't care. I've done it, and found that it is absolutely not the case that a super majority is required, and I've pointed you to actual court opinions saying so.
> Apple does not control either the mobile
Actually, there is another court precedent that proves that actually, Yes, Apple has engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior, related to its control of the mobile market. It was the Epic vs Apple case. And in that case, there was an instance where, yes, Apple did engage in illegal anti-competitive behavior, due to its control of the market.
> there is nothing to suggest that Apple
Judge Gonzalez Rogers ruled that Apple's behavior was illegally anti-competitive , actually. So that judge disagrees with you, and thinks that yes there is an instance where their control of the market is large enough, that they could engage in illegal, anti-competitive behavior.
> why that applies to Apple
The point being proven here, is that we have court precedent, even for Apple specifically, that yes their control of the market is large enough, where yes it is possible for their behavior to be illegally anti-competitive.
Unfortunately, its not really possible to engage in the more complicated discussion of how it could apply to messager, if you aren't even willing to accept 2 basic premises, which is that Yes it is possible for behavior to be illegally anti-competitive, without a supermajority, and 2 Apple has already been ruled to have a large enough share of the market, that some behavior could be illegally anti-competitive.
These are basic facts, and in order to move on from that, you'd need to have actually read a couple hundred pages of the Epic Vs Apple case, and watched the trials, like I have, if you want to understand Apple specifically.
So I will repeat again, my main point, and keep it simple, so you will actually read it. Apple has already, by the court system, ruled to have a large enough control of the market such that it is possible for them to engage in illegal anti-competitive behavior.
You tried to imply that this would be impossible, for Apple to currently be having a large enough control of the market, such that it can engage in illegal anti-competitive behavior. And that is wrong. Because the court system already ruled otherwise.
I have neither the time nor the inclination to dive into the transcripts here to figure out exactly how the issues in these cases apply to messaging, a topic I note you studiously avoid.
As we used to say: plonk.
This part right here is the important part of how to apply it to apple:
"You tried to imply that this would be impossible, for Apple to currently be having a large enough control of the market, such that it can engage in illegal anti-competitive behavior. And that is wrong. Because the court system already ruled otherwise."
Some part of me would LIKE it if someone would make (in effect) Trillian for iOS, but expecting Apple to do it when it is not in their interest to do so is just entitled.
It is not a violation of antitrust laws to build a better mousetrap, and require people to do business with you in order to enjoy said mousetrap.
Am I harmed by Ferrari simply because their roadster can go faster than my Ford Pinto? The driver of the Ferrari gets plenty of extras that I don't in my base Ford.
Apple makes phones (ferraris) that can send sms messages (make left turns). They allow you to runs various messaging apps (self driving software) on your phone, but only allow their app to send sms messages (make left turns).
It is not uncommon for someone to have installed an assortment of apps from the following, Android or iPhone: Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Viber, Signal, WeChat, LINE, WhatsApp, Hangouts, Slack, Discord, Telegram and maybe someone is still using BBM somewhere.
In addition to the iPhone Messages app, I have, and use the messages features of 4 of those, which I think is probably low, and I might be overlooking some. In order to make it all work though, I have notifications turned on for them, and the experience of receiving a push notification from Slack is functionally the same as receiving an iMessage which is functionally the same as receiving an SMS or MMS. In fact, it’s a pretty standard experience across most or all messaging apps, with the key difference that when I tap on the Slack message, it takes me to the relevant chat box in the Slack app, instead of the relevant chat box in the Messages app. It was much the same on Android. This setup and usage pattern is probably the common case; I’m not exactly coloring outside the lines using default phone features that require zero or minimal additional setup (i.e. hitting “Yes” on the notifications prompt) and reflects the behaviors I’ve observed or asked about in how others use their phones.
Now on Android, the key difference was that you could designate a different app to receive your messages. At the time that I used Android, Hangouts was the best one I found which was head and shoulders above the trash default on a Galaxy Note II (can’t remember if it was Samsung or Google SMS software by default), but as far as the basic experience of seeing push notifications from messengers aggregated and then deep-linking into the associated app, it was basically the same as my iPhone now.
So, what is the advantage here? I thought it was “neat” that I could designate the Hangouts app as my SMS receptacle, but even by that point the dream of one unified phone messenger for everyone a la Adium or Pidgin was dead for me, and is still dead for me. If Apple put in the additional work to build an SMS/MMS access API, they would also be on the hook for supporting it. If at some point in the future I took advantage of this and moved my designated SMS/MMS app to WhatsApp, not all of my iPhone-using contacts necessarily use WhatsApp and I wouldn’t want to see my chat experience degraded for them specifically, so I would probably still be using iMessages, but now the SMS/MMS users would show up in WhatsApp instead, and the “unified inbox” that is notifications center would still be aggregating from 5+ apps and deep-linking me into the relevant conversation threads.
So, how do I profit from Apple expending employee time on this feature request? The Messages app is still the best SMS/MMS interface I’ve ever used, and still has the familiar interface I’m used to from Adium/iChat AV, and the “problem” described all up and down the comments here seems almost entirely academic. I think the people that stand to benefit the most are people who have a very specific setup: iPhone users with iMessage disabled on principle + only one other messenger that they could in theory receive SMS/MMS messages in if there was an API. I won’t yuck their yum, and as paying customers they can ask whatever they want from Apple, but I’m a paying customer too and I’ll be honest, I would rather Apple expend employee time on almost anything but that.
I don't know how sound this argument is but for me, as a non-Apple user I think I am harmed by people using iMessage, I can't text them without accidentally ending up in that technology ecosystem. I can get 15 context-free messages from other participants in an iMessage group chat. I freaking hate it. If it was clear that iMessage is not SMS then that same person wouldn't send an iMessage group message they would send a mass text, but they don't. I can't force that person to so my SMS in box currently has 15 messages at the top that read "Yes", "No", "Out", "Maybe", "My kid has dance so I will be late", "Sorry man, take me off this list Thursdays are no good for me now"... etc.
It sucks.
No, you chose to put Apple between you and your carrier.
Make a different choice. Apple isn't imposing itself on you.
> monopolistic behavior
> It doesn’t matter to me if a company achieves a monopoly
Ok, so you don't actually care what the meaning of these words are, you just want to throw them around when someone does something that you don't like.
Right, because the other option was to put google between me and my carrier - which comes with a ton of stuff i’d be upset about (e.g. terrible privacy protections) but you’d blame me for “choosing” because you don’t actually care if I have a choice you just want to blame me eye rolls
“Apple isn’t imposing itself on you”. Both Apple and Google don’t force people to use them but they do things that make it harder and harder to choose neither of them. In 2022 it’s not easily possible to live without Apple or Google as a consumer without severely putting yourself at a disadvantage.
Regulation is needed not to create an even playing field but to stop companies from screwing consumers. This is why European and Australian warranty and quality laws for products are much better than American ones. Saying make a different choice only leads to all companies to do the bare legal minimum. In these cases upping the legal bare minimum is absolutely necessary.
Americans seriously need to stop drinking this free market Cool aid. It’s not a free market. It’s highly lop sided and the consumers are at a disadvantage.
In complete fairness, Apple doesn't stand between you and your sms carrier. I can't think of any company that does that actually?
All companies that I am aware of pass through sms messages to the carrier sms service, and deliver messages from the carrier sms service. Most companies layer a service on top of the sms, but sms itself is meticulously unmolested in every system I'm aware of.
Finally, giving devs an api to intercept and process sms messages would be naiveté in the extreme. With so much sensitive data coming through sms, it just would open too many holes. A random dev could intercept passwords, 2 Factor information, account balances, and on and on.
For my part, I would be entirely against hackers having that access.
You can see this since if you switch away from Apple after using iMessage, anyone using iPhones will not be able to message you unless you go through a procedure to remove your phone number from iMessage.
The messages people say are hijacked are from other Messages users, sent to an individual's Messages label that happens to look like their phone number.
Anyone using SMS can SMS your number on your new phone, since SMS is not being hijacked, and Apple is not intercepting SMS to do anything with it.
If you don't want Apple friends using that label to reach your remaining Apple devices (a normal use case!), then remove the label yourself before ditching your iphone:
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201349
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203042
Or, remove it yourself after:
The only time I use iMessage is when I speak to friends and family back home.
And only one of them (the one made by the platform vendor) can degrade to using the sms service that the hardware is capable of and I pay my carrier for.
Nobody is forcing you to use this.
Few countries (only the US? Canada?) actually have any real social usage of SMS at this point. That’s becoming increasingly the case in the US as well, Apple/iMessage aside. Everyone else has picked an app instead (usually given an effectively local monopoly to an every changing array of owners over the last 20 years). That’s true even on Android without this SMS gatekeeping status that you speak of. Given the world is majority android, and the lack of SMS/RCS leading to any kind of decentralization, your argument doesn’t seem to have much merit that opening up iMessage would usher in a new decentralized era.
WhatsApp can't and won't, because using SMS would break multiplatform compatibility.
They do control their PLATFORM, but that's within their legal rights.
If you don't like how iMessages work, you can absolutely choose another phone platform, or another messaging tool on iOS. Since you have this choice, there is no "monopolistic behavior" here. Apple are not obliged to allow all comers to use their systems.
Yes I can buy a google phone. And when I have a problem with something on it you’ll say “well just go buy an apple phone there’s plenty of options” and all of a sudden i’ve used up my two options.
ALL markets have limited choices, and yeah, it'd be nice if MSFT hadn't completely failed any time they tried to do mobile, but healthy competition exists in the mobile space now between Android and iOS. There is no applicable antitrust regulation here.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta...
You know you can just disable iMessage and then the service is not used.
Apple does not hijack or intercept SMS messages. Apple respects the delivery label(s) you put on your Apple Messages.
The messages people say are hijacked are from other Messages users, sent to an individual's Messages label that happens to look like their phone number. This label can also look like an arbitrary email address of choice that does not even have to be your Apple ID.
Anyone using SMS can SMS your number on your new phone, since SMS is not being hijacked, and Apple is not intercepting SMS to do anything with it.
If you don't want Apple friends using that label that looks like your number to reach your remaining Apple devices (a normal use case!), then remove the label yourself before ditching your iPhone:
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201349
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203042
Or, remove it yourself after:
So it looks like your phone number, but isn't. Have fun explaining that to any random trying to message you at your phone number.
> then remove the label yourself before ditching your iPhone
First: thanks for the link, I genuinely didn't know Apple added a service to deregister. It took them so long.
Then, you still have a flurry of issues if you want to keep iMessage for some people on your iPad or Mac for instance, but switch to an android phone. You can deregister the number, but contacts that were using your email in iMessage (so "the label that looks like your email but actually isn't") and try to just send a message to "you" (your name in the "To" field) will send an iMessage when every party involved really wants an SMS to be sent.
I think you'll blame the user for not understanding the situation, that what worked before won't anymore, and they should either realize your phone is not on the "blue bubbles" anymore and they need to force "green bubbles" even if they're sending messages to seemingly the same person using the same app. And they propably will need to do that at every message until they realize they need to recreate a new thread, explicitely with your phone number this time.
That’s disingenuous. It took you so long to realise they were doing it.
It is not. It creates an account on their platform, with the phone number as an identifier. It does not interfere with SMS routing in any way. This bullshit is already all over the thread, has been corrected countless times, and is plain wrong.
It's like a zombie dog that will follow you whatever you do, and will keep eating messages sent to you again and again. There's an ecosystem of tutorials online to go the right step to minimize the effect (e.g. https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/three-steps-...)
That doesn't look like a "Apple did no wrong" situation from any angle we look at it.
It definitely was bad when iMessage first launched, but they probably made that site five years ago and it works to get rid of it.
In Europe I see people using anything but iMessage, so...
In the US in many places (like teenage users) they do have a dominant market position, and they abuse by actively trying to worsen the user experience of buyers of their products who dare to include an Android phone user in their friend groups.
That's quite a logic leap and a logic twist.
The whole green vs. blue started way before Android even had any messaging story (and it still doesn't). It is literally "users on iMessage vs users sending SMS".
Funny how it's "they worsen user experience Android boohoo" in the US, but the exact same thing in Europe is "yeah, it's fine, they don't have a dominant position".
Carriers have a lot of control over Android and they simply didn't want to be cut out. Google could have just copied iMessage from the start if it wasn't for carriers not wanting to be cut out of messaging.
You can download WhatsApp or Signal or Facebook Messenger or whatever else you might want, and have those work fine. iMessage works really well, and Apple enjoys some network effects here, but you say "they consider this a competitive advantage" like that's a bad thing.
They made a better mousetrap here. Bully for them!
Signal on Android is a far better experience than Signal on iOS, because the former allows you to choose it as your default SMS app and the latter does not.
But you're right - what we really need is a way for each messaging app you install to be able to inform the system which contacts it can reach, a simple way to set a priority order (eg. just a draggable list where you can put iMessage above Signal above WhatsApp above SMS), and a single messaging frontend which can render all the ongoing conversations in each installed messenger. (I believe AppleTV attempts something like this for video streaming services?)
The view that Apple is forced to support other protocols or networks "just because" is pure idealism.
The history of technology and business is a "maze of twisty little passages, all alike" for longer than we admit. Interoperability relies on government/intergovernmental mandating of standards - if you leave it to industry you get patent encumbered formats (see H.265).
I've made the switch to Signal, my girlfriend uses it on her iPhone to replace iMessage since I made the switch to Android last month. She can also use it on her Windows laptop unlike iMessage. My family members who are tech-y enough use Signal with me, and when they're not, I can still send standard SMS through the app. Signal even implements responses similar to iMessage 'likes' and 'hearts'. I don't think I could praise Signal enough for the great implementation they've built. Their crypto-enterprise this past year did make me feel a bit slighted, but as I don't use that feature, I can't comment on it.
To do so, you have to go into your default apps, set the default messaging app to Signal (factory default is Messages for Pixel devices, likely whatever Samsung uses for Samsung devices). I just checked to see if there were any extra settings you have to enable in the Signal app, but it doesn't appear to be so. If a user uses both SMS or encrypted chat, you can long press the send button and decide between which it will use.
Do note, that any previous messages sent via SMS from other apps won't show up in Signal for message history. Likewise the same if/when you switch to another SMS app.
- iPhone + iPad? Supported.
- Android Phone + Android Tablet? Supported.
- iPhone + iPhone (no SIM card/no phone number)? Not supported.
- Android Phone + Android Phone (no SIM card)? Not supported.
This, according to them, because they want to simplify the setup experience. But in reality adding a bypass option to the onboarding process to provide the tablet setup experience would be trivial and should have happened three years ago.
You can add this to the "list" like no Gifs on PC even though the code exists for mobile clients, and they share a lot of source code already.
Unfortunately, I don't think even this is supported. The Android app can't seem to act as a secondary device in any configuration.
I'm sure there will be more attempts to come.
Google never seemed to understand this convenience. They released Allo without any SMS support and were hostile so suggestions that it was a gating feature to adoption. Allo predictably failed as it offered no benefits over competing services, and no SMS fallback so that it could be the single messaging app.
If Google wants to level the playing field they should do it by competing and innovating. I suggest they start that endeavor by better understanding why people actually use iMessage in the first place.
Hangouts on a Google Fi phone used to let you consolidate everything to hangouts - SMS, Chats, Calls, etc. It was a pain it was limited to Fi, but it worked just fine. You could also pop open Hangouts in Gmail in your browser and there all your sms messages were, nicely grouped and tracked.
Then apparently hangouts stopped being cool enough - so Google decided to shutter it in favor of "Google Messages". Technically - "Messages for web" also supports the same feature set as the integrated hangouts, but it FUCKING SUCKS.
The phone/browser syncing is bad, the UI is a complete regression. Just the process of enabling it required me to actually contact support at google fi (you have to open settings, disable previous sms settings for fi, stop hangouts, update your google account, and then opt into a beta).
Basically - Hangouts did exactly this, but Google continues to act like Google, and shutter any product that might actually be a good foundation to build/maintain, since Google has shown AGAIN AND AGAIN that it can't actually maintain any product.
Google can innovate just fine - it's the follow through that they lack.
Google has messengers on every android phone preinstalled and nobody uses them, because they create them, never significantly update them and then abandon them. It's completely their fault they don't even get a mention when people talk about messaging apps.
I've since switched from Android to iOS, but Fi+Hangouts was amazing at the time. Too bad Google seemingly abandoned both projects.
Around the time that they started f-ing around with 15 different chat apps and killing off products, and integrations with other products, was when a Google account with "integration" started to become more of a hassle than worthwhile to me, personally. I used to use gChat, Hangouts, etc. but now I just use iPhone stuff since everyone I know has iPhone stuff. Apple hasn't deprecated anything since at least 5 years ago (the last time I had a work iPhone) so to me that signals that I can keep iPhones and not have to continually figure out what the "new way to chat" is, like I had to with Google. I've almost completely migrated from Google, except for Photos (which is superior to alternatives, IMO; I can actually backup my Google Photos from my Linux CLI whereas I couldn't figure out how to reliably do that with Apple Photos) and Google Search usage. I have had my Gmail account since ~2004 and I basically killed/deleted all of the services in my Google account now (even Google Voice sucks now, so I basically abandoned my phone number I used from ~2001 that I ported into it) except for forwarding email to my new email address and using Photos. I used to be "all in" with Google, but they made it too hard to keep using stuff that kept being killed off, so they dug their own grave.
Of course Google has killed all that many times over. They made their own bed.
Given iMessage basically has no base outside of the US because everyone uses Whatsapp or Line I'm not convinced this is terribly neccessary.
I never understood why Google didn't just clone Apple's app many years ago. Hangouts was pretty close - take that, add e2e encryption for in-app threads (like iMessage) and make sure SMS is there as a peer. Make a client for the major platforms and then let the project slip into maintenance mode.
Instead, they championed RCS which (last time I checked) isn't encrypted which is borderline unethical IMHO.
Network effects are big and they were intentionally reducing theirs! Shockingly it hasn't gone well since then.
We've never really dug in to why, as we're both using the default app. No other conversation has ever had this blue message and lock symbol and checkmarks going on.
HN opinion has been negative on Google for a while, and this is filtering into the consumer landscape.
It doesn't mean they are going out of business tomorrow or at all, but I see a period of MSFT-like regression, reflection and then a Nadella to bring them out of their malaise.
On the other hand, the US is unique for this because iMessage is not as popular outside the US.
I've always seen it this way:
Facebook is trying to be the new Google.
Google is trying to be the new Microsoft.
Microsoft is trying to be the new IBM.
IBM is trying to be the new Oracle.
Meanwhile, Apple is trying to be the new Sony.
At this point, Sony wishes it could be Apple.
There is a publicly-facing Google site to enter an RCS enabled cellphone number, in order to disable Chat features… including end-to-end encryption.[0] This feature should only be configurable on-device, ideally, or at least be behind a login and 2fa. It’s just there on a public site. This is basically asking for sim-swapping attacks. And you’d never notice, only wonder why your RCS e2e keeps turning itself off. I wonder which individuals and agencies may benefit from that…
Even with the Chat features enabled, RCS doesn’t not support e2e on group texts[1], unlike iMessage, which does[2]. Google is just playing dirty pool and calling Apple users bullies by proxy, and I’m calling them on it.
Edit: Apple has a similar site to disable iMessage. This setting should only be available on-device, or if it has to have an online workaround, behind a login with 2fa. If you no longer have access to your phone, you should have to contact Apple support or go to an Apple store. The status quo benefits bad actors and intelligence agencies more than it improves the experience for end users IMO.
[0] https://messages.google.com/disable-chat
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202724
[2] https://support.google.com/messages/answer/10262381?hl=en
iMessage is really good because Apple focused on making a great product.
Google just deployed the same logic to remove dislike counts on YouTube, despite those being valuable for users.
Kids without phones may even, gasp, be bullied over it. Wouldn't that mean that Google, Apple and all handset vendors benefit from fear of bullying over not having a phone at all?
The article is not quite correct. The base RCS standard does not include E2E encryption, but at least Google's implementation includes it as an extension. Not an ideal situation -- IMO it should be a required-to-implement part of the base -- but it's definitely there for those of us using Google's infra, at least.
Part of the elegance of iMessage is that E2EE isn't optional.
E2EE is mandatory in Messages.
Backup is optional - my phone has never seen an iCloud backup (all local backups).
I don't think I'm twisting it. Pragmatically, unless you fiddle with the options, iMessage won't give you end to end encryption. So I think it's fair to call it optional.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...
Besides, almost everyone uses Whatsapp, regardless of the phone brand.
For me and my peers, SMS is for 2 factor auth, spammy advertising, and the occasional parent that mistakenly sends a SMS instead of a WhatsApp message.
In fact, here is a small taste only with French data, which I guess is still an European country.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1188330/sms-traffic-volu...
For more than 10 years, SMS and a chat ap have lived side by side. The favorite chat app changed a few times, but SMS just plods along, never really gaining or losing market share.
SMS lost huge market share to messaging mobile apps so EU telecoms changed their business model from selling SMS messages and/or calls plans to selling GBs data plans. For example you can buy unlimited daily, weekly or monthly data plan or x amount of GBs data plan. Some EU telecoms went so far to sell bundled apps data plans like this https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/%2B_Smar...
Snapchat is basically MMS with rich user experience and advanced features. Is anybody still using MMS when you have something like WhatsApp and Snapchat?
Plus in many pre-paid plans the amount of SMS is almost unlimited, or with packages like 5 000 per month, which hardly anyone ever consumes half of it.
Doesn’t apply from 4G onwards, where everything is IP, but still.
I recall the early SMS functionality being added to cellular phones after the introduction of 2G in the early 1990s and as I recall, one claim was it monetised the massive amount of spare signalling capacity on the network. In the UK I recall that being said in 1994 by Orange (the first UK 'challenger' network vs 1G incumbents CellNet and Vodafone) when I had a Nokia 2010 handset.
The main problem was too many phones in one place causing errors on the signaling line. Like a concert. You'd get to a point where maybe one call can go through every 10 seconds. Then one person tries to send an SMS "because he can't get through" ... and the phone helpfully keeps retrying to send the SMS, each retry causing >1 minute of nothing signaling on the network. The network is now dead and while existing calls work fine, you can't even hang up anymore, never mind making or receiving a call.
Don't forget - SMS was a hack in the system messages:
> The key idea for SMS was to use this telephone-optimized system, and to transport messages on the signalling paths needed to control the telephone traffic during periods when no signalling traffic existed.
If they had just kept iterating on Google Talk and made it similar in functionality to iMessage, they would be in such better shape today. Instead, they’ve thrown away the last ten years on messaging.
I thought Google had their own thing, but I think I was getting confused between Messages by Google and Hangouts (or one of their other apps).
Can you do a hangouts chat within messages by google? (The whole Android messaging ecosystem is so confusing to me!)
Hangouts is dead, replaced by Google Chat.
On Google Fi, Messages can sync messages with web app. I wish there was a Messages for iOS for reading Google Fi messages on my iPad. But that would be a pretty niche use and they would have to call it something less confusing.
Hangouts used to have the ability to do both Hangouts and SMS. But it didn't have the ability to automatically switch like iMessage. They could have also rolled out the ability to sync SMS to more carriers instead of just Sprint and Google Fi.
The reality is a google is a total mess. We couldn't get their speakers to work with their calendars on paid accounts for the longest time (think 5+ years).
Would do regular SMS messages but you could configure your AOL, MSN, and even Facebook messaging at one point IIRC all inside of the same interface. It's too bad it lost out compared to Android. Was so far ahead in so many areas.
Hangouts was cool much before iMessage and Zoom as mentioned in the article. I remember it being my main messaging platform. I remember being amazed with the video chat quality with multiple people. Google was at least 5-6 years ahead of the game. But then, it just fell more and more behind.
As far as Google products go, nothing is user-centric and everything gets clunkier. Only Google product that feels staying alive is Google maps and maybe Google search. Not that Bing is better but there are times, I Bing a search to find something I can't find in Google search. I feel like even Gmail is falling behind now; it stayed the same billion years. Simple filtering, organizing tools stayed the same.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/19/google-...
https://twitter.com/mwseibel/status/1477701120319361026 (posted on HN)
Hilariously, I had to use bing and HN's algolia search to find these
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/scree...
On mine, that screenshot looks like the green has an unpleasantly high saturation compared to the blue. The higher saturation increases the perceived value/lightness, lowering contrast.
[0] On my phone (a Pixel5a running Android 12), Display > Colors is set to Adaptive, rather than Natural or Boosted.
Convert that screenshot to grayscale in Photoshop to see
https://i.imgur.com/U8mEB93.png
This has always bothered me. Apple definitely knows this and is doing it on purpose. The color green they chose is just hard on the eyes. They don't think it's a good color.
This bit annoyed me; while the base RCS spec does not include E2E encryption, Google implements it as an extension. Now, I don't know how their implementation works (is it the Signal protocol? is it some homegrown thing? haven't looked into this), and it absolutely should be in the base RCS spec as something that's required to implement, but saying it lacks E2E encryption is not quite correct.
I think he's right: the big problem I have with SMS is that it's run by the carriers, who are terrible at non-phone infrastructure — that's how you get SMS delivery latency ranging from seconds to days, completely opaque to the user, and new features are a long, slow grind. RCS preserves that model going forward.
I will say SMS Is still useful when you don't have an internet connection.
TBH I feel like most people are moving away from SMS already. I suppose google could just go the route of Apple and bake in google messaging or something into the OS.
iMessage benefited tremendously from being the default. Combine that with Apple's mobile market share in the US and you get the present situation.
My gripe isn't really that it won in the US. Its that you need Apple hardware to participate.
Google may be self interested but they're right about one thing: knowingly allowing and fueling this social dynamic is inconsistent with Apple's brand. But it was never really about values, just making consumers feel good about their purchases.
Can WhatsApp do sms/mms now?
Their point is Google should have stuffed their iMessage equivalent (such as Hangouts) inside of a generic texting app that also handled SMS/MMS by default, and then enabled all the same features that Apple did and released it for iOS.
It's been said here already that gchat had the features that could be been integrated into Android's SMS app, add end-to-end encryption and they would have crushed the iPhone.
From a user perspective, the Messages app can. I want SMS/MMS seamlessly integrated (like when my cellular data connection dies, the bubbles go green), like the Messages app does. If WhatsApp cannot, then it's definitely missing a huge piece of usability.
Now, what is the selling point of a Pixel phone? They are designed to spy on and abuse their users by default. The entire business model is built around collecting data on you for sale to other parties. Phones are VERY personal, most people wouldn't even share their phone with a friend!
Maybe phones have just become too personal as a device? Maybe it is time to close the book on businesses like Google that ship shiny spyware where the utility features of a phone (messaging) is an afterthought...
Been doing this for about two years and now ~80% of my personal conversations are over Signal. And most of these friends are not very technical.
I love my little successful rebellion against the walled garden. And it will make my eventual transition away from iOS much easier.
Just a somewhat related personal anecdote, sorry to deviate a bit from topic.
EDIT: Yes, Signal is centralized and I would have loved to use Matrix. But the clients are bad. Email me if you want to build a better one
I travel a lot and now essentially live in 2 different countries at once so tying all my communication to a phone number is a no-go. Now FB messenger ironically is my go-to (only real cross-platform app that everyone seems to have), even though I'm not a fan of FB at all.
I remember when iMessage came out, and for some people it was a way to get away from getting charged for texts. Especially international! Things have changed so much it's hard to see the original inspiration in 200x.
As for interop, in 2020s it looks like platforms are the style du jour, things like XMPP didn't quite cut it. I'd be happy to see that change, but for google to lay this claim sounds lazy to me.
"If the company really wants to do something about iMessage, it should try competing with it."
Bikeshedding at scale. This is what it looks like. I'm surprised that their home automation systems don't have some incompatible chat platform embedded in them.
If you're a Google Fi users (cell phone service) you have to do some wonky hacks to make iMessage work because Google doesn't support it. Then every time you run a software update, you have to re-enable iMessage.
Google lost a fight, and is crying about it.
They do EVERYTHING in their power to screw over people on iPhones... and then they want Apple to play fair? Ha.
The worst thing is that when you travel between countries, iMessage is really the only good way to text friends without getting silly international text fees.
Therefore, all of my friends have to have iPhones... or I've basically stopped texting them. It's sad. But hey, that's on the phone companies too for charging money for texts. It's all shitty.
But Google being shitty and then bitching about Apple... that's rich.
Or, in less loaded and hyperbolic terms, a visual indicator of the medium used for the conversation.
Jony and Apple could have left a switch setting for black letters instead, but no, the Apple way is read white letters on a mid-tone gradient.
My last iPhone, I never upgraded it from iOS 6 because I didn't agree with this design direction, and I have to say it's a breath of fresh air using Android because you don't have to deal with a single guy making all the decisions for you.
RCS would be a regression for people who /do/ use iMessage, as RCS can randomly drop encryption, does not support multiple devices per account, and does not support group messaging. In addition to that, RCS's feature set is defined by carrier groups, who like to charge extra for "value add"/new features, and who don't move at the speed of tech release schedules.
At its base level it is meant to be e2e encrypted but that fails frequently enough that google has to have special UI to indicate the failure, even though they endeavor to minimize how visible that indication is.
For group chats (the ones that seem to pop up in examples) RCS does nothing: it isn’t e2e.
Group e2e is challenging, which is why it’s still rare even though it has been the behaviour of messages’ group chats since day 1. That said it is mind blowing to me that the carriers specified RCS’s group protocols as anything other than fully e2e. If you’re going to make it a standard you don’t get to half ass it. :-/
Then as others have said, in RCS your keys and account are tied to your phone number. This is not as much of a problem in the US, but in many countries changing carrier means changing number.
This can't be true, because if it is there is bigger problem than some google's protocol. Why are they still torturing kids with these parades? Get some celebrities to make the green texts cool, this is madness.
"Server for forwarding iMessages to clients within the BlueBubbles App ecosystem"
You have to have a mac desktop/laptop/VM to use it. Pretty complex setup process, but looks promising.
For a company that is reticent about so many important problems, this seems like poor form.
For the rest of the world, I don't think it'll ever pick up at all. SMS is long dead in the past, and, AFAIK, only still relevant in the US. Elsewhere, SMS is for verification codes and spam.
The only bad part here is that YouTube's days are numbered. The other stuff doesn't matter. I suspect that worldwide iMessage and whatever Google is pushing on a given day is a rounding error.
They are using hype to increase their stock and axe them later to show a better earnings report further increasing stock prices.
They are intelligent and runs on innovative hype but at their heart they’re an advertising company.
[0]https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/7/22660516/tiktok-average-wa...
SMS is like a spam graveyard where 2FA codes and other regulatory compliance related stuff shows up. SMS is primarily texts from my bank and spammers. Most folks in the rest of the world are using WhatsApp, with the occasional country where Telegram is more popualr.
Messaging with a layer of rich features for billions seems like a hard problem. I'm not sure what iMessage is built on, but WhatsApp is using customized erlang/ejabberd and Telegram is its own golang MTProto stack. Each probably handle millions of connections on FreeBSD or something I suspect.
Is it still a powerhouse if no one uses it?
These threads are hilarious for anyone that's not part of the chosen 3% (or whatever) of the worlds population.
That's not what RCS is.
Can you use it not on the smartphone?
Can you use it without cellular data Eg with Wi-Fi only?
Can you throw out the SIM card and still send/receive messages?
If the answers is 'no' then it is a carrier lock-in.
Identity seems to be tied to a number (not carrier), but Messages uses Google Contacts as an optional layer of indirection.
So, if you change your number, and the other person changes (or adds) the number to your existing contact, your identity is preserved (for them). If the other person creates a new contact for your new number (or doesn't associate the new number with any contact), identity is not preserved.
> Can you use it not on the smartphone?
Yes, you can use Google Messages for Web on a computer, but the authentication is still tied to the phone via a QR code, and I think that communication actually is relayed through the phone if the conversation is via SMS rather than RCS.
> Can you use it without cellular data Eg with Wi-Fi only?
Yes.
> Can you throw out the SIM card and still send/receive messages?
I think that the answer is generally 'no', but there are a few edge cases (eg. I'm not sure what happens if you auth Google Messages for Web on a computer, set it to remember the device auth indefinitely, and then remove the SIM or turn off the phone).
> If the answers is 'no' then it is a carrier lock-in.
As you can see, the answer isn't quite so black and white.
RCS works through QR code outside, just like you can end text-messages.
Why throw out a sim card? You can use RCS with ANY carrier. If you can use it with ANY carrier, it's not carrier-lock in.
In Belgium, the number is personal and not from someone else. If you transfer carrier, you are allowed by law to take the number with you.
In the world with NMP - it is 'carriers' bound, but still - good luck moving to another country and preserving your number.
> Why throw out a sim card?
There can be any reasons.. but the most common one is someone 'liberate' you of your phone and other belongings (sometimes including documents). So now you want to talk to your family, you get a phone, login with your Google account... and now you are required the same phone number to work it back. So off you go to your telco office to restore the SIM. Oh. It is 3:00 AM and you don't have any documents/ID to prove what you are the someone you claim. And imagine if this would happen not in your backyard, but on the other side of the planet.
> In Belgium, the number is personal and not from someone else
MNP. But still you are tied to your /number/.
Unknown number: "Hey mom! It's me, your son NicoJuicy! I was robbed tonight, can you send $100 so I could get home?"
I would really prefer some identificator not tied to a local provider of a completely irrelevant service.
Telegram, at least, allows you to use a nickname, though it still requires '2FA' through the SMS for the registration.
It's because of the countrycode in your number. Which indicates... The country it of from... This is literally how the routing works in the network...
What an idiot example fyi. That's not even about vendor lock-in, it's about stupidity.
You can restore documents at the city hall or at the embassy abroad.
Ps. I'm more tied to an email. But still doesn't make it carrier lock-in. I also can't use my email when I'm not on the internet...
In those countries where Apple didn't have a > 50% market share in the early '10s, people simply couldn't use iMessage. For instance, this is a summary of how things went in Italy. I think something along these line could have happened in most other countries where prepaid traffic was the norm though:
1. In Italy, basically the entirety of mobile plans were and still are prepaid, which meant you charged your account with money which you then used to pay for your traffic. Most people also had plans you could easily change, which gave you stuff such as SMS and phone calls minutes for a fixed fee, and you paid for them using prepaid credit. More "serious" contracts were heavily taxed, and thus only make sense for corporate phones or if you have a VAT account to deduct some of the taxes (and even them they were not the cheapest option).
2. No prepaid plan included unlimited SMS until around 2015, when they had already become largely irrelevant to most people. Before then, you generally got a very limited amount of SMS per month or day, and those were often tied to numbers belonging to the same carrier.
This meant that most people in a certain area were basically forced to stick with a certain MVO for most of the '00s. For instance, a very popular 2007 Vodafone prepaid plan in Italy costed €6 per month, and included 100 SMS a day towards all Vodafone numbers (99 actually, you had to pay the first one). Having the "wrong" carrier in that time period meant that people had to pay a lot of extra credit to have a proper conversation with you - this was often a deal breaker for romantic relationships among teenagers, or led to people not contacting you at all. A very interesting time indeed.
3. MMS were basically never included in any plan ever, and when they did, they had the same limitations as SMS. Often, if your plan followed the "pay the first message, get 99 free" clause this was also true for MMS, meaning you had to pay for the first SMS AND the first MMS. If People were so wary of them that they actually deleted the MMS APN from their phones to avoid sending one of them by mistake - if you wanted to send a photo to someone you simply waited until you got home, in order to use MSN Messenger or email. The only usage of MMS I remember of in the '00s was sexting.
3. When iPhones and Android came out in the late '00s, data packs suddenly became a necessity to most early adopters. The iPhone heavily pushed its Internet capabilities a lot, and you often had just spent a hefty sum (remember: prepaid meant you had to pay the whole phone cost upfront) so you wanted to squeeze value out of it. Carriers at the time came out with the idea of selling extra prepaid packs with a limited amount of data (i.e. 50 MB a day, or 500 MB a month), which was not an awful lot but it was enough for maps and some light browsing.
4. I actually bought an iPhone 3G back in 2008, and it was truly amazing for its time. I paid around €550 for it, which was quite a lot for a teenager - I had to sink a lot of the money I had earned from my summer job in order to buy that. Most people around me were very against the idea of spending so much money on a phone - after all they could get by by simply buying a random Nokia 6610i or whatever for €100 and pay your 10 euros a month in prepaid credit and do whatever you needed to do. The fact that carriers in countries like the USA basically forced you into 2 year plans meant that you often got iPhones for cheap, which helped get a foothold in the market.
5. When people started to actually switch to smartphones around ~2011, most people picked up shitty €200 Android phones which utterly sucked, and the higher end saw a lot of fierce competition between the iPhone, Samsung Galaxy and the likes. Still, you could expect at most 1/5 of your contacts to have an iPhone, and still people were locked in those carrier walled gardens when sending SMS. If they had an iPhone you could send them iMessages, but that was not the case. The fact iMessage was integrated in the SMS app didn't help either: people back then had to actually _count_ how many SMS they had sent a day to stay under their daily caps, and mixing in special messages you didn't have to pay was actually pretty confusing. I think most people in Italy today still don't really know what iMessage is actually.
6. Data is carrier agnostic - as soon as true chat apps with push notifications such as WhatsApp and FB Messenger came out, people started using them as a loophole to avoid paying for MMS and SMS. Group chats, which were really not feasible before (remember: SMS caps), suddenly became popular. Feeling left out, most people left feature phones in order to use chat apps, causing SMS to quickly disappear in less than a year. As an example, I went from sending 100 SMS a day in 2012 to 20 a YEAR in 2013.
Good point. Messaging apps enabled group chats for real this time. SMS was something like proto/quasi messaging app.
>I live in Italy and I haven't received a single SMS from an actual human being in several years.
Btw spammers still use SMS. But spamming bots are not humans tho ;)
I suspect Apple will eventually support RCS as a strong improvement over SMS. This will help a lot with bridging the gap, but Apple will still use iMessage as a differentiator.
"Teens and college students said they dread the ostracism that comes with a green text. The social pressure is palpable, with some reporting being ostracized or singled out after switching away from iPhones."
Why is text color an issue? Or, is it just a stand in for referring to the different apps?
In a one-on-one conversation, it’s not the biggest deal…but in a group text it is a massive loss of functionality, enough to make people set up separate group texts with only iPhone users to restore the lost functionality when they don’t need to message the non-iPhone users.
It makes it very difficult to exit the Google system when I tried to migrate to Fastmail.
I don't really trust Google to manage messaging long term. Their messaging products have changed so often, I gave up trying to use them.
From there, you just need to export the data you want from the messages db. The schema is kind of amazing, but not in a good way.
You don't need to buy a tool - you can write a python/ruby/whatever script.
The article promotes a zero sum mentality. That only apple should win because iMessage is better and because google already messed up.
As opposed to a value oriented mentality that a new standard, RCS, could be better for android and iOS users alike.
Google hasn’t always been a great company. I don’t understand why we can’t celebrate wins, especially those that would benefit others, such as rcs.
To do otherwise is to indefinitely call some parties good and some parties bad, to engage in black and white thinking. Which is more harmful for ourselves and says more about ourselves than the individuals and corporations of the world.
It's rightfully calling out Google for calling out Apple when both companies are to blame for this.
The author clearly doesn't like RCS, which is an opinion he's entitled to.. but Google's approach to try and get multiple vendors to adopt an open standard (RCS), instead of creating a walled garden seems like the better path.
Google sounds like dudes who whine about cancellation.