I don't want an over the top chat app, I just want to text people.
what? sms is a basic phone function, how is supporting sms "embracing" anything?
If you, as an iOS user, don't want to use iMessage you simply go flip the toggle. If you "just want to text people", it's just that easy. Really.
Got stats to back this up? I have 3 friends who use iPhone's that do have that toggle flipped.
- 1.36 billion iPhone users
- 1.3 billion iMessage users
How do you want Apple to indicate if this chat participant is costing you money by the message or free?
Everyone's concerned about teens. Presumably teens know that T-Mobile and the other carriers give the family plan adults the ability to read their dependents text messages. As a teen I would want to stick with the encrypted bubbles your parents can't read and tell my parents about, thank you very much.
It's not punitive product design. It's seamlessly integrated and meaningful, both on chat leaks and on costs of messaging: Blue sky, text safely. Green could literally cost you.
Teenagers know that blue = iPhone and green = non-iPhone/SMS and that blue offers significantly more features and functionality vs SMS (delivered/read receipts, group chats, stickers, rich media, memojis, etc), which is the overwhelming reason why blue is preferred.
So lowering the cost of 3G made it more economical if your friends had iPhones as now you could spend €20/month for '1GB' (which was mostly iMessage & web browsing at the time) and avoid spending that simply on SMS. (excuse the price inaccuracies if any, it's been a while since I had that iPhone 3GS)
And even now, on T-Mobile (as that’s the one I use, so the only one I can verify myself), if you have an account with multiple lines (e.g., a family plan), you can go into your account, click “Usage”, then “Text messages”, and it will show you all text info for all lines on the account (but no actual text content). And not just for “kid lines”, but for all regular lines as well. You can look by individual line or download that data as a bulk file.
I just checked my t-mobile account, and despite it not showing the text content (which t-mobile certainly has access to, unlike imessage; t-mobile cannot even track metadata for those individually), it shows an entry for each text with the phone number with info on who was the sender vs receiver, timestamp, and other metadata.
Luckily, T-Mobile only shows that I had 8 incoming messages (all of them were just automated verification code texts) and no outgoing messages this month, because pretty much all my messaging these days is either on discord or imessage.
Even without the actual text content though, that metadata is still some very sensitive info that teenagers almost definitely wouldn’t want their parents to track. Hell, I am not a teenager, have nothing interesting in that data (doubt anyone would care to know about existence of those 8 automated verification messages, and neither would I be embarrassed if someone did), and still absolutely wouldn’t want anyone else to be able to see that info.
I'm not convinced that handing everything to a different company is a solution, but I'm glad you found a plan you're comfortable with.
I stand corrected though, you are right, i don’t think the content of messages has been ever obtainable. At least not since 2006 when it became explicitly illegal for carriers to provide that info to anyone (including the customer paying for the phone line) outside of special circumstances like a court orderc subpoena, etc. (so practically it isn’t an option for the heavy majority).
However, it is factually true that i can get metadata (datetime of each text, phone numbers of both parties, who sent who how many messages, etc) about texts being exchanged from my carrier by just clicking through a couple of menus in the app today. I checked that right before posting my earlier comment. And it is also factually true that despite the carrier not being allowed to disclose to me the content of those messages, they themselves indeed have have full access to the content in plaintext.
All your messages have been recorded by the government, since the government has been collecting all push notifications on iPhones, and iMessage runs over push notifications
> Why does everyone care so much?
You seem to both care about it, and also wonder why other people care about it ?
Otherwise, looking from the sideline it's fascinating seeing Apple fighting this battle that they brought upon themselves and have no chance of winning.
I think Apple will almost certainly win on a purely technical game of cat and mouse.
I think you need to adjust your definition of winning. Blocking 5% of messages is a 'win' for Apple. I won't use a messaging service with a 95% success rate. I won't migrate from iMessage to Beeper. I will submit, Apple would have liked a more decisive victory.
Right now, they blocked a part of Beeper mini, and nobody expecting a rock solid service would join Beeper Mini so Apple's won't be losing any of their core customers.
But the news cycle keeps going on, Beeper Mini is still there for those the group of users that wants it alive, and I wouldn't be surprised if next week for instance actual iMessage users came out to complain about getting kicked out of the service as colateral damage from the whole additional filtering.
And of course this whole publicity for Beeper is a door opened to any other company to give it a shot, as Apple is playing the cat and mouse game, and not taking any more drastic option.
Apple isn't losing either, but they're now dragged into guerrila like battle with no upside for them.
They won't be losing _any_ of their customers. For the most part[^], nobody using Beeper Mini has paid Apple for anything... otherwise they wouldn't need to use Beeper Mini.
[^] Yes I'm sure there's at least a few people with an iPhone and a Windows PC or something that see this as "iMessage on Windows".
For instance if you have a mac and an iPad but use an android phone, iMessages will go to both Apple devices but not where you want it the most, on your phone. That's the kind of pain point that pushes a group to fully move to another service if the android members have enough weight, but would be fine if there was a reliable android client.
based on the history of tech-related cat and mouse games, then Apple will probably lose.
Just like Sony could not prevent people from pirating Playstation DVDs, Apple itself could not prevent iOS jailbreaks, music labels could not prevent CD ripping, etc etc etc
if there are enough people who are strongly motivated to bypass whatever protection, eventually they will probably bypass it.
This tension is at the center of the it all, and why Beeper Mini exists in the first place.
I doubt that. iMessage is a free service if you have almost any Apple OS product (iOS, iPadOS, macOS). You aren't making ongoing payments for the iMessage service.
You could say you paid for iMessage in that you bought a device that worked with it. But you do not pay for iMessage.
On what is paid and what is free, Beeper mini is free, iMessage is free (as we've learned from the whole saga, you don't even need an icloud account). Using someone else's public facing API without consent is rude, but hey, our whole industry started with kits to plug into the AT&T network with unauthorized material, and as of now no money is changing hands.
Yes I’m sure “can anyone use other services as their product backends for free, directly against the TOS of said service” is going to be a really interesting and complicated legal question…
Happy to explain. First thought, why do you care so much?
> Nor do I want it.
Why? What about exclusivity makes the world better? Why shouldn't I be able to communicate well with someone using an Apple device? Why should someone using an Apple device not want someone to communicate well with them?
Sure there are other systems. But switching costs are so high. Especially with iMessage, folks are going to use what's provided them out of the box. It doesn't seem like a reasonable ask to get everyone en masse to agree to & switch to a lone cross-platform system. What's really needed is standards & interop. You should be able to use what you like, be that iMessage or RCS or Signal or XMPP. But none of these options should be locked out of working with others.
I'm so baffled by the strident defenses against possibility. From someone whose name is @unstatusthequo at that, going to bat for status quo lock in seems like a low and dark comedy. Un status quoer, un status quo thineself. Don't triple down on the fixed & limited!
Or CASL in Canada?
Or the "Spam Act" in Australia?
Or the PECR in the UK?
Yeah, what we need is more regulation. That's been solving the problem.
I think you got it in the reverse order.
“User has an android phone” doesn’t indicate “possible spammer”. However, “spammer” typically indicates “user has an android phone.”
iMessage is apples system, we live in an app world, you don’t have to use it, most people use WhatsApp so just download that, Google users have to download it too because it’s a third party service. How is downloading a free app a high switching cost? You can use it alongside iMessage. Most people use
There is plenty of freedom of choice without a third party app hacking into another system. Get a grip.
> most people use WhatsApp
I only know of one person who uses WhatsApp and it's to keep on touch with folks in Brazil. No one uses it here, from what I can see, and no one has offered to share WhatsApp ever.
The ease with which you suggest yeah everyone can just use an obvious easy to agree upon other central alternative is so facetiously ridiculous and painful. Everyone has a mish-mahs of preferences & existing accounts. It not just that you've deeply shirked what the actual switching costs are (since everyone will pick different things), it's that having these crazy anti-cirumvention laws is stupid, that not having adversarial Interoperability like what Beeper is doing is a sad corporate lichdom sucking the lifeblood of what should be the most vibrant sector of our age: communications technologies. Babel fell, and these merchants of disconnection have been keeping us from communicating with each other ever since, to make a couple more sales. Vulgar pieces of anti-human garbage, just disgraceful.
That being said, the reactions in this thread are way over the top. A lot of Android users in this thread seem to think there are a huge number of Apple users who refuse to talk to Android users or that iMessage is some sort of messaging nirvana. Both are not true.
The other elephant in the room is Apple created iMessage, Apple pays for the service's costs, and therefore Apple has the right to decide who can use it. Third parties do not have the right to use it. It's sad that sone non-Apple users feel entitled to use iMessage.