That's a pretty uncharitable way to interpret the statement, when the three features OP mentioned are a part of literally every modern messaging platform that people use. Not just iMessage and RCS (the open protocol which is the best analog to iMessage), but WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord, Messenger, Instagram, Slack... It's actually hard to think of one that doesn't. I guess IRC, if you consider that in any way comparable to the others, but it really isn't at this point, being a now fairly obscure protocol reserved mostly for tech-savvy people and niche cases.
It's so "open" and so "best" that Android doesn't even provide a public API for third party clients to use it. It's just yet another pseudo-open thingy that in practice is only open to a handful of mobile oligopolies, and all other developers are locked out of it just like they're locked out of iMessage. Google replacing the actually-open SMS with vendor-locked RCS is a major reason why Signal is dropping support for SMS. Much good that fake openness is doing, smh.
Many of my friends have made the choice to get an iPhone so that they can use iMessage (and FaceTime)
Downvoted because this is the comment equivalent of the manager walking into a technical discussion of how something should work and demanding "just make it work" and leaving. Or commenting on a war topic "I just want peace I don't care how it happens".
Like, you and everyone? But that doesn't make concerns like "people who don't use Facebook don't want their photos routed through Facebook servers without their knowledge or consent" magically vanish. There's a reason federated open protocol multi-service clients never became dominant and it's not because the problem space is trivial. "Just make it work" gets you iMessage, and that slurped your SMSs through Apple servers without telling you, which is still one of the cheekiest most unbelievable things I'd heard of at the time, despite that being tame by big tech company standards today.
Anyway, maybe I wasn't being precise enough, more precisely I meant Unicode, anything that can send Unicode with file attachments works for me which is every message service already. All the other extra stuff apple and google do with custom emoji and other things like that is irrelevant to me and I would happily give it up to have all written communication in one client with one red dot showing unread messages and one list of contacts.
WRT to privacy concerns, maybe my dream client lets me prioritise which services I prefer and it drops down to the lowest common denominator. So I could prefer Matrix > Signal > Telegram > iMessage > WhatsApp > Email > (the google one?) > Facebook Messenger for starting new chats or groups. I don't see what else you can do as some people can only be contacted on Facebook messenger; either you stick to your principals and your kids don't go to football club or you suck it up and use Facebook for that chat?
Companies want to get users into a walled-garden where they can target them for financial and political gains.
Democracy trying to push things away from the latter seems good. Do you agree?
I'm sure other people in a similar position will also know what I'm talking about.
It was super lightweight, cheap, multiplatform - when I was interning in Singapore in 2012, I was able to stretch a 2MB pay as you go SIM plan over 2 months using WhatsApp over WAP on a Symbian iPhone.
There are few things I will be more loyal to.
Now, with my biases declared, I am genuinely open to understanding why SMTP/IMAP based chat didn't take off. I don't know much about the protocols but as you say, email should have solved this problem. But somehow it lacked that immediacy of instant messaging that made me feel that much more connected to my family halfway across the planet.
Maybe that's what it was - email delivered in 1-5 seconds is completely fine, but instant messaging needs to be delivered in under 500ms ideally.
Is there something about the email protocol that makes it slower due to some tradeoffs?
The email client was much clunkier, presumably because it had to support all the other usage patterns of email.
Worth noting this was a phone that didn't have a touch screen and I was inputting via the numpad
I signed up the moment it came out and they had some teething reliability problems for a while, but it's been great for months now. Element is a much better web client than any of the others and it's nice to not have to worry about which computer or platform I'm on when I want to write a message.
An alternative is to self host the same set of services.
Actually, you have the *choice* to run a server or not. (Conceptually similar to old school email, you can live on your own server, or live on someone else's servers.) For matrix (or heck even for email) if you do not wish to manage your own server, there are free and paid services that you can leverage.
> ...instead of them opening the built in app and just having at...
This is not clear to me if you were referring to Apple to open up their app or if you meant matrix. Because i agree that Apple should open up their app....Even though i am a matrix fan. More open apps helps everyone involved to communications plaforms (including and especially users). But, if you meant for matrix to have their app open...well, matrix is the open protocol, and there are already many opened apps, such as Element, Cinny, Fluffychat, Schilid, etc.
> ...and get my friends and family to join to chat...
Yeah, no matter if Apple opens up or not, the network effect of asking/hoping friends/family join something else is real and non-trivial. Matrix won't solve that alone, because its not necessarily a tech-only problem. My personal hope is that - whether it is matrix protocol and associated clients, servers or something else entirely - i do wish we had some universal, open protocol that allowed for everyone, everywhere to chat...and which was not controlled by a few, powerful entities.
Despite not using proper Matrix it still is enormously useful to me just by being a good client with good bridges.
For actual Matrix-Matrix comms I think Slack/Teams is probably a more realistic use-case to replace.
But if you wanted to, you could. It's about control.
It will be impossible to build an app that supports everything. And with 10%-20% global turnover as a fine, the EU is turning into a dictator.
[ ] - Can send and receive basic text messages [ ] - Can send and receive rich text messages (bold, italics, underline, headings, etc.) [ ] - Ability to send and display file formats (debatable which ones - maybe force custom animated emojis to be transmitted, cached for later use as compatible file formats (webm, gif, etc.)
Just as an example.
The EU is going to mess it up, as they likely will by forcing all companies to "fall in line" with standards that will likely not be updated frequently, instead of allowing smaller companies to innovate first, then enforcing current policies if there's too much BS behaviour in the industry.
See - current rumors of Apple creating "special" Apple USB-C cables that will be the only ones to allow faster charging and data transfers, compared to other high-quality USB-C cables that an iPhone won't permit to have high data transfer rates and will charge devices slowly. You can set the standard, but companies with enough money and legal know-how can still bypass the intent of the law! Smaller companies can't compete on the accessories market.
Unless other government are serious about this (the EU is a fairly small market segment compared to the rest of the world), we're going to see more of this regulation dodging and chicanery from massive companies while smaller ones suffer or struggle to succeed in a marketplace dominated by capital interests.
If E2E were not available for any reason whatsover, we could go back to that as necessary, though might lose some extra benefits of integrated E2E platforms like perfect forward secrecy (or maybe not; I'm not really up to date on my crypto).
With a standard and open protocol enforced, we could create a FOSS client that automatically pre-shares a public key and de/encrypts messages before sending them, so the UX would be much better than the awkwardness of early PGP.