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Comment by eddieroger | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad you mentioned HomeKit, because at this point, I'm really starting to fight my desire to go out and hook all of these things up to make sure they work with HomeKit. Apple doesn't exactly have a history of really releasing the standards they say they will (looking at you, iMessage), but I'm all for the idea of standardized home automation.

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Remember when Steve said he was going to the standards boards the next day with the spec for FaceTime?

I checked intermittently for about a year afterwards: never saw any activity to substantiate that claim.

Would it have helped? It apparently infringes multiple patents Apple does not control. They lost to VirnetX and now Samsung is going after them.

When did they ever say iMessage would be an standard? I recall them stating FaceTime would be, but didn't some patent nonsense get in the way?

I'm misremembering - it was FaceTime, not iMessage. Whoops.

Unless I'm continuing to misremember, there was some patent issue that blocked FaceTime from working over cellular on the first version, but it was cleared up when AT&T finally accepted that they were the only carrier not supporting it.

No patent issue, just AT&T and money.

The patent issue is a DoD-connected company forcing Apple to abandon P2P and break the end-to-end encryption. Not unlike what happened with Skype, though quite a bit more hostile.

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