iMessage gets a major makeover that puts it on equal footing with Signal

arstechnica.com

3 points·pseudolus··5 comments

I can use Signal with people not using Apple hardware, can I do the same with iMessage?

apple was forced to adopt rcs for green bubbles. so blue bubbles are getting the next exclusive drop. the cycle continues.

“We believe RCS Universal Profile will offer a better interoperability experience when compared to SMS or MMS,” the company said in the statement. “This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users.”

up until recently, you couldn’t do anything on signal without blasting your cell number out there, sometimes not even on purpose, right? since cell number was the exclusive identifier. but now you can do the same as with imessage, if i understand correctly.

I think the headline means "puts it on equal footing as a secure platform" rather than "turns it into exactly the same product meeting all of the same user needs."

What a disingenuous article. Uses as many techie sounding terms as possible and even points out the icloud backup problem, but fails to point out that your keys are not your own, and so no matter how secure the E2E is Apple can still read your messages. (particularly if ordered to by a government.)

Signal does not have this failing, plus it has all the Metadata encryption. Also it's cross-platform and actually auditable. There is no way iMessage is on "equal footing".

The headline is definitely wrong due to all of the above and also due to iMessage being closed source. iMessage does not have the transparency or auditability to be on the same footing as Signal, which is free and open source.

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