This sounds nice, but when you really think about the consequences it really is not.
Isn't this going to kill features that only some apps have or offer? What if one day Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp want to implement something "different" that could make messaging better but this policy is making things harder to implement because it would be impossible to make it interoperate with other messaging apps?
I don't get why you would regulate such a thing. I get the feeling that people here enjoy seeing big tech companies "owned" by big governments without actually realising that it is actually going to make things worse, that's what regulation does in most cases.
> [...] without actually realising that it is actually going to make things worse, that's what regulation does in most cases.
Feels like a uniquely american take. Companies that are maliciously compliant are not the norm.
Leaving behind that most is an ambiguous enough term that means you could basically discredit anything I come up with, how do you feel about regulations that limit the use of harmful or toxic chemicals?
What about regulations that disallow predatory gambling, or the sale of products that do not meet their claims?
Regulations are the only tool that society has to prevent companies acting against the social good.
If you think the regulations are bad then you should genuinely consider sending updated versions to your representatives.
> Regulations are the only tool that society has to prevent companies acting against the social good.
The fallacy here is that you don't get to decide what "social good" is, especially in this case. People get to choose what is good for them, we're talking about tech products here. I see regulations in this specific case as something that goes against progress, whatever that means for the company of your favorite messaging app for the reasons I've explained above.
What about startups that will have to think about this one more thing and maybe put in twice the work when they want to validate their new product?
We're probably leaving out about thousands of other cases here, that's why I made the argument that it sounds nice but it's actually making things worse from my point of view.
The fallacy HERE is "individual preferences accurately reflect collective good."
Again, there's no clear-cut answer at any given time whether or not "this particular possibly-restrictive regulation is good for everyone." Sometimes it is, sometimes it ain't. That's what you use democracy/government for, to figure these things out.
The whole point of market economies is to let people vote with their resources. The alternative of having people vote for a representative body that regulates how they transact is far worse. Best case you get a almost as good outcome. Worst case is 49.9% of people suffer horribly under state enforced "social good".
> The whole point of market economies is to let people vote with their resources.
How do negative externalities and imperfect information figure into that? Sure, I'd love to buy Monsanto's awesome defoliant because it's cheaper than BASF's equivalent, but I may also get cancer from it in 5 years, or I may be killing pollinating insects for many miles downwind and downstream.
Do you suppose market forces could have gotten rid of lead in paint or gasoline if regulations hadn't?
> Do you suppose market forces could have gotten rid of lead in paint or gasoline if regulations hadn't?
Yes. Consider how cars have become incredibly safe over the years. Is this because the government writes good regulations? No. It is because IIHS (and the government, as well) do crash tests and publish the results. Consumers gravitate towards cars that have top safety ratings.
Ironically, the government is why leaded gasoline still exists at all.
Regulation is a useful tool when there is quantifiable harm to an involuntary third party. That is not the case here. People have an infinite amount of electronic communication tools and services from which to choose. These are all voluntary without negative externalities causing harm on individuals outside the conversation (or outside the site when relating to the cookie policy).
Network effects can be overcome locally, by talking with your contacts and getting them to move to a new app/communication mechanism. It takes time, but compelling arguments will win in the end.
I think one of the big missing pieces in your parent comment about choice and negative externalities has to do with this network effect and I do not think the argument that it can be overcome locally is a very compelling counter.
It certainly is a difficult thing to do, but we see it happen time and time again. TikTok is now the biggest app, and it was nowhere a few years ago. Same with things like Insta, What's app, Signal, etc.
It is definitely a hard thing to overcome but not impossible. Especially as people become more privacy focused. I, for example, have had zero luck moving my family to Signal, and I'm the only non iPhone in the family network with my grapheneos phone and receive constant complaints about how I mess up group threads.
Hehe some would say bad products wouldnt be sold for long but the truth is that most bad products are not gone because the market dictated it but because of regulations
;)
> Worst case is 49.9% of people suffer horribly under state enforced "social good".
As an iPhone, iPad, and iMessage user, please explain how I will "suffer horribly" from being able to interact with the iMessage service from non-Apple devices.
1) If it is prohibitively difficult (with what that means entirely defined by Apple) for them to fully support all features of iMessage to non-Apple users, and the law requires that other devices have full parity (I don't know if it does; the article is pretty short and detail-light), then Apple may have to remove features from iMessage even on Apple devices.
2) Apple may choose not to try to implement new features that they otherwise would have, for several possible reasons: similar to #1, they don't think they can feasibly implement them cross-platform; due to the extra effort of supporting multiple platforms, they no longer have the dev resources to devote to it; they think it will no longer be as profitable; etc
Sorry, but this is complete nonsense. All apple have to do is release documentation on the iMessage protocol, and allow other vendors to use this protocol to build apps that can use apple's iMessage service.
Apple obviously won't write these apps, or support those apps or the devices they run on.
Also, If Apple at a later date add features to the iMessage protocol then they document the changes & make this available and are clearly not responsible to implement or support these changes on platforms other than their own.
Apple is not being forced to do anything at all here, except stop blocking other vendors from using iMessage.
> All apple have to do is release documentation on the iMessage protocol
Do you know the specific requirements of the law, and that this would be within their terms? Because, as I stated fairly clearly, I do not know what the law requires, and was working based on one possible (fairly strict) version of what it could be.
If the law just says Apple has to open the protocol, then that certainly reduces the potential problems—but, as hellojesus points out, there may be aspects of the service that Apple is unwilling to give away because they involve trade secrets. Now, you and I may not particularly care whether Apple is able to protect every single one of its trade secrets, but I guarantee you they do, and unless the law is worded such that it requires them to give those away (again: Do you know the wording of the law? If so, please share and enlighten us!), I think that there's a very good chance that they will choose to remove functionality from iMessage rather than do so.
To be quite clear, on the whole, I think that opening up iMessage will be for the best, even being an Apple and iMessage user myself. I was simply responding to a post that was asking for potential ways in which existing iMessage users could suffer because of it.
> Apple is not being forced to do anything at all here, except stop blocking other vendors from using iMessage.
> All apple have to do is release documentation on the iMessage protocol, and allow other vendors to use this protocol to build apps that can use apple's iMessage service.
Your very argument is contradictory. The law does require Apple to do something. It requires them to reveal trade secrets and IP.
Yes. That would be the point. I don't think anyone would meaningfully argue AGAINST the idea that it is "detrimental to Apple and their interests," which is literally all this means.
That changes nothing. I can't receive unsolicited messages on my xmpp and matrix accounts until I allow the contact invitation.
At worst you could be flooded with invites but that wouldn't be much different than any one of our linkedin accounts and there could be easy mechanism to ban external servers that are reported to allow too many spammers.
I'll grant you that - but the proposed legislation isn't requiring Apple to allow iMessage users to receive unsolicited messages from external services.
It would require additional effort on Apple's part to keep third party tools' spam efforts at bay. At some point the cost of doing that isn't something Apple could justify, and at that time unsolicited messages absolutely will increase in volume.
Ah, so you have never heard of market failure, market manipulation, cartels, negative externalities, qash trading, self dealing, insider trading, wage supression agreements, and dozens of others?
You do realise that without government to keep fraud and manipulation in check 'free market' collapses into anarchy in one week?
> You do realise that without government to keep fraud and manipulation in check 'free market' collapses into anarchy in one week?
Can you provide an example of this? Or maybe point out some theory/philosophy that builds to this? I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm legitimately curious what is out there as this doesn't seem like a self-evident claim.
The whole point of market economies is to let people freely trade goods and services, but has absolutely NOTHING to do with the silly fantasy of "consumption equals governance." That's textbook nerd BS that just doesn't play out well in real life. You need direct governance, you can't expect a tool designed for one thing to do another.
> Even the biggest fan of free markets agrees government need to prevent market failures, such as natural monopolies caused by network effects.
No, the biggest fans of “free markets” do not think that, in fact, they mock both the general idea of “market failure” and the specific places where people outside their faith identify such failures:
I clicked the first link, which argues that free markets are bad because central banking has failed.
Central banking does not exist in a free market. Of course it will fail. Free markets are designed precisely to avoid the inevitable failure of a central authority.
> I clicked the first link, which argues that free markets are bad because central banking has failed.
You may have clicked on it, but I don’t see how you got that message from it. It argues that free markets are good, and that problems attributed to “market failure” are instead failures of other things (like central banking) that are not features of free markets. (All of the other pieces argue variations on the same thing; its plays a central role in the Mises Institute’s economic dogma.)
The market decides, which is a collection of signals from an amount of players that outweighs any one individual.
It is a much better method of concensus than regulation when no involuntary third party harm exists. It ensures those that have a stake are able to vote, where the size of your vote is proportional to the resources dedicated. Of course not everyone has equal voting power. Why should they when it comes to privately consumed goods and services?
Because it turns into an exploitation shit show incompatible with a stable prosperous society if we just satisfy your fetish for the perfect embodiment of abstractions like “the market.”
Well, maybe. Some fought for the same state that turned around and gave GM a whole ton of money. My boss got a couple PPP loans, and a new car. There might be some ebb and flow to the whims of those pulling the strings, but it sure looks like those who are close to them do alright.
It only targets big "platform providers" not startups. It even levels the playing field for those startups. People get so ideologically tangled that they just knee jerk.
I wish people being even that principled... I think the reactionaries in this debate are just the current generation of Apple "fanbois" who, for whatever reason, feel some need to "protect" a trillion-dollar company, or just good ol' fashioned elitism?
My pet theory is that the frothy bile in posts wanting to keep iMessage private is probably grounded in psychology/sociology: People with a quite genuine fondness for Apple's products and services, combined with their higher barriers to entry (monetary cost), forms the basis for their in-group identity, and they don't want an out-group seen as inferior (Android users, etc) from getting to join-in their, private, shared-experience. It's the same as with kids fighting over PlayStation vs Xbox.
Heh, it reminds me of when I was like that: I was a very visibly-on-the-spectrum kid who knew Photoshop, before anyone else at my school even knew what it was; when MSN Messenger 6.0 came out with support for custom user avatars/profile-pics: I thought this would lead to "normal" people learning Photoshop/digital-art and airbrushing and all getting their own Wacom tablets to make their own avatar-art and I'd lose my... special status as that one weird kid who knows Photoshop. Nah, turns out in the end everyone at school just used photos of themselves or the logos of rock bands (Radiohead's was popular) or sportswear brands. And in 2023, most people still don't know Photoshop.
So being an Apple user tends to makes someone protective of whatever they feel makes Apple... Apple. Fortunately those people aren't MEPs who get to vote on legislation with a demonstrable public benefit.
> you don't get to decide what "social good" is, especially in this case. People get to choose what is good for them
He or she doesn’t get to, but the society does. Collectively. Not individually. That’s the premise that makes the difference between “society” and a “collection of individuals”
> [..] you don't get to decide what "social good" is
Well, technically I have a say, I elect my leaders and can write to them with my opinion. Often it is the case that salesmen and charletons get into those positions but the basic premise of those positions is that they're intended to act in the social good. What you propose is that somehow tech companies will act in the social good by themselves, which I find particularly dubious.
All capitalist companies (and by that I mean, any company that is enjoying success in a capitalist society) have an often unstated goal of monopolising their market.
It is a natural outcome of competition that eventually there is a victor. The whole premise of capitalism is that competition is good, but eventually the strongest will win and you have a monopolistic leader.
The only antidote to this is regulations.
Making the argument that regulation hurts smaller companies is also something uniquely American. This regulation (and many other tech regulations) are really aimed at people abusing their position today, not some theoretical startup that somehow captures 60% of a market overnight.
FWIW, I actually really like iMessage and agree with the decision Apple made not to open it, but I can't abide talk like this because a lot of people seem to think that regulation is somehow anti-capitalist, when in reality regulation is the only thing that could keep the capitalist machine running once there is a monopoly position or a sufficient moat around a service.
Well, I respectfully disagree, I'm a firm believer that regulations disproportionately hurt smaller businesses in the long run because those giants that have the monopoly move way faster than governments and they usually have thousands of smart lawyers ready to find holes and exploit/get around regulations made, usually, by people that does not understand the subject enough.
Want to take a guess and see who does not have thousands of smart lawyers?
Just FYI: We have the Apple's example with USB-C ready to showcase this exact thing.
Regulations can disproportionately affect small businesses and still be worthwhile by virtue of preventing the thing they're regulating. For example, might be harder to start a train company with rigid safety standards but not spilling toxic chemicals over small towns is ideal.
I think USB-C's relatively flimsily implemented open standard is kind of evidence of why Apple is hesitant to things like RCS. Good luck charging a Nintendo Switch or your laptop with just a random usb-c cable you found laying around that came with who knows what. Hope you have an entire day day.
> Well, I respectfully disagree, I'm a firm believer that regulations disproportionately hurt
Yeah you made the point very clear already in all your other posts, no need to repeat it everywhere. Other point errors in your arguments like this being for 75b corps completely nullifying your core arguments, lets just say most of the forum including me, EU and indeed world doesn't share your view at all.
In fact, some healthy dose of regulations makes society actual modern society, less people dying and suffering because money-first. Speed of progress at any costs, believe it or not, is not the ultimate measure of how 'good', moral or developed society is, despite very very few getting richer quicker that way.
I did not make the case that ALL regulations must be erased to a zero, at all. I do believe that there must be a minimum of regulations that actually make everyone prosper and go along with each other. Unfortunately, regulating messaging so that anyone can have just a single app on their phone for that specific task is beyond unnecessary, but that's just my useless opinion I guess.
Regulation is also used as a euphemism for unelected bureaucrats creating policy with the force of law without real democratic input. Unless you consider the regulator retiring from government to take a seat on the board of a company he or she used to regulate or give $100k paid speeches to same a form of democracy I suppose.
I don't know if that's what it means in the EU, but operationally it's observably what it means in the USA. I will say from a distance it looks like the EU's unelected bureaucrats have even more power than the American ones do.
Your use of the term "unelected bureaucrats" as a delegitimizing pejorative is risible. Do yourself a favour and read Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk.
The EU's civil servants are, by and large, an exceptionally talented bunch of people, most of whom are multilingual in addition to being experts in the fields they were hired for.
As for their having power, it's subject to democratic constraint. Maybe you should inform yourself about the process by which EU regulations are made? (No, it isn't perfect; you could start with the Trilogue Process).
We'll regulate as we see fit in the EU. Businesses that don't like it are welcome and free to go do business elsewhere.
> We'll regulate as we see fit in the EU. Businesses that don't like it are welcome and free to go do business elsewhere.
I predict that if the US foreign policy elite deems it desirable that Google operate in Europe, then Google will operate in Europe. The US based empire is happy to let the EU regulate cheese and wine, but when it comes to geopolitics they keep them on a tight leash. The Ukraine affair has shown that beyond all doubt. Hats off to the French though for rejecting permanent occupying forces under De Gaulle and never letting them back.
It's nice to pretend that GDPR somehow struck a blow against corporate overreach, but in reality it was permitted because it didn't degrade the value of Big Tech for the Intelligence Community.
Do you have any examples? Net neutrality comes to mind, but that feels a quite extreme example due to complete regulatory capture of the FCC by big telecoms.
> All capitalist companies (and by that I mean, any company that is enjoying success in a capitalist society) have an often unstated goal of monopolising their market.
That's ridiculous. There's plenty of companies that want to do what they do well and make a good profit, but have no interest in being the only player in their market.
Not just that, it's removing barriers for competition. Which is what good regulations is all about. (and, technically it more than just bubble color, it's also including everyone in group chats)
I think what the (grand)parent would argue is that this isn't removing barriers to competition, it's removing competition itself. That is, iMessage is a feature provided by Apple that makes their products more compelling as compared to their competitors. By requiring Apple to provide this feature to their competitors, they lose one of the key differentiators that make their products "better" than their competitors.
> [...] want to implement something "different" [...]
The slippery-slope argument we're seeing here is that eventually, regulations would require all products and services to be exactly the same for inter-compatibility, which in turn induces a cooling effect on any innovation or novel developments (at least for existing product verticals under regulatory capture).
You're saying Apple's iMessage is a response to competition as a feature to compete.
It is, in actuality, anti-competitive as there is no way to a competitor to participate other than creating a separate platform or App for messaging. Because iMessage comes with and is supported by both all iPhones and Apple it is an uneven playing field; it is impossible to compete & is therefore anti-competitive.
The same thing would happen with TMSC, at the moment Apple buys out a large chunk if not all of their production capacity for a node - this is fine, it's just business. If Apple said to TMSC, "we'll buy out all your capacity for this node but only if you contractually refuse to sell this node to any other company while we're using it" this is anti-competitive behaviour.
That's pretty funny considering the European Commission's original complaint against Apple was for anti-competitive behavior.
Maybe things would have turned out differently if Apple hadn't embraced, extended and extinguished SMS. Maybe regulators would be a little more lenient if the App Store was ruled with anything other than an iron fist. But now they have to take action, not because Apple is unique, but because their business practices are interfering with the progress of the rest of the industry. Competitive agency is a weak excuse when they're a noted tyrant on their own platform.
Yes, but users choose to visit sites like they choose to visit a park. They would know the risks before going.
The lawlessness described here isn't harm on a third party against their consent. It's fully known by both parties at the time of the voluntary transaction.
If your were in charge when the telephone network was designed, poor people would not even be able to make a phonecall to their middleclass neighbour or senator, they'd have to buy a special Rich People phone
Your hypothetical would make sense if iPhones didn't support regular phone calls, SMS, and every other messaging app out there. All people without iPhones can't do is send blue bubble messages to iPhone users. That's literally it.
That's a bit reductionist. Encryption, variable-sized payload attachments, reactions, dynamic group membership are some potential featurs. And - critically - integration with systems NOT tied to outdated mobile cell infrastructure (you need to procure a phone number and special systems to send an SMS).
Apple is the last real holdout here, keeping SMS and MMS alive.
Is it really only about bubble color, or also about encryption? Apple goes to great lengths to secure those blue bubbles, even as group texts. Green bubbles are not secure, and Google is pushing an interoperability standard that does not secure group chats because Google likes reading your comms for its advertising business.
I don’t think we need to identify Google’s motives as malicious. Google has been trying to get people to use its own messaging apps, but Google missed the boat, bungled the user experience, and kept confusing people with new apps.
Google would probably love it if Android shipped with a Google-branded, end-to-end encrypted messaging app that people liked to use.
I think that there is a combination of internal Google problems and problems in Google’s relationships with Android vendors that makes this difficult. And then, any such app would be probably be in, what, 6th place at this point? Meanwhile, Meta has apps #1 and #2.
> I don’t think we need to identify Google’s motives as malicious
I would argue that the evidence over the past several years has shown that the default position w.r.t. to Google's motivations should not default to 'benign' under any circumstance. With all other things being equal, and without evidence to the contrary, it makes sense to operate under the assumption that Google will enthusiastically and universally do everything they can to violate your privacy in any manner available to them, no matter how subtle.
> I would argue that the evidence over the past several years has shown that the default position w.r.t. to Google's motivations should not default to 'benign' under any circumstance.
“Not benign” and “not malicious” can both be true. Google is motivated by self-interest, is staffed by engineers which have various conflicting self-interest and ideologies, and has a culture with various competencies and dysfunctions. Sometimes Google will do things that benefit consumers and sometimes Google will do things that harm consumers, but it’s not out of altruism nor is it out of malice.
The regulation was originally an antitrust case leveled against Apple by the European Commission. It contained many things that are unrelated to saving human lives, but will make developers and users lives better in the long run. We do this because the status quo (Apple having unfettered control over their ecosystem) hasn't worked out for people outside of the ecosystem. In lieu of trusting the world's largest company to build a text-messaging replacement that works on other phones, we do have to drop the life-saving legislation to focus on nannying the next iPhone.
Developers lives, not necessarily users. It was also a huge waste of time and money for all parties as it achieves nothing - Facebook are the market leader with WhatsApp both globally an in Europe - iMessage barely registers in the top 5.
The law isn't specific to Apple, it also affects WhatsApp. Indeed in the EU that's probably much more important. Personally I don't know anybody who consciously uses iMessage, but the extreme network effects of WhatsApp make it socially impossible to move away from.
Why wouldn't it improve? Currently none of these services offer interop; in the future they might. That's a static upgrade to me, and I'd imagine most other people too.
Some in the United States would be grateful that a large multinational regulatory agency would focus on an issue whereupon green bubble people identify as blue bubble people versus matters of more import.
They would call this a win.
Not arguing against your comment. Just adding a viewpoint that some have. I.e Big government should spend more time on these kind of things instead of “life saving” things.
I am really glad to come across this comment. As another european, I am shocked at the reaction to this regulation. But then again, HN is mostly an american community.
On that note, I think the GDPR banner problem won't be solved until the UI is shown at the browser level, just like tracking permission dialogs on mobile: having the same UI for all sites would prevent tricking users into over-complicated form because at least it would be the same form everytime.
Right now, too many end users get fatigue fooled into blaming the EU rather than the companies tracking them, whereas on mobile they are aware that it's Facebook triggering the dialog, not the EU: just see how many users end up refusing Facebook tracking when they have a clear choice that doesn't push them one way or the other.
It would even help companies who currently delegate handling GDRP to thirdparty services that prey on small companies worried about being non-compliant.
That's what I was thinking, just have it as a presetting in my browser to reject all but necessary functional cookies as a header setting in requests and be done.
My understanding of GDPR, et. al. is that you don't need consent to use cookies. You need consent to use tracking cookies, third party cookies, and any cookie that isn't essential to the use of the app.
So for me, that reads as anytime I am asked about consent, it is an admission that the site is using my data/adding cookies in a way that is unnecessary and invasive. Automatically decline!
According to my Lawyers in Switzerland, this is the correct interpretation.
I'm working at removing google analytics from my product site specifically because it means I don't need a cookie consent popup any longer, despite supporting log in (which will set an actually essential, non-third-party cookie).
Respectfully, Americans can have this take because we created an environment where these companies could flourish. There is no European messaging standard for us to regulate because no European business could get to that point at all.
Respectfully, its mostly because anything that is successful in Europe is immediately purchased by the big US tech giants.
Mojang and Skype come to mind. As well as three of my former companies that are now owned by Oracle.
The EU market is definitely harder, it is not as contiguous and large as the US one, even the smallest required task: localisation, is hugely expensive.
So you can hit a critical scale faster in the US, sure, but any time anyone actually conquers Europe all that awaits them is acquisition.
> Respectfully, Americans can have this take because we created an environment where these companies could flourish
Flourish is a generous term.. There are countless examples of companies in all industries who will take full advantage of no regulations in the pursuit of profits solely.
And only when it's too late and they have caused so much chaos for people will they lobby for their own "symbolic" regulations.
There is a happy medium in there somewhere, but the US model is not it.
USA is a country with one language, one economy and 330 millions people.
When you create a company there you automatically unlock a bigger market than EU, the comparison is not fair.
Also, anecdotally, SMS was invented in europe so no need to regulate something already open and european.
> I don't get why you would regulate such a thing.
Because there's absolutely no downside to telling Apple it can't artificially make its iMessage platform restricted to Apple devices. We literally have seen leaked emails where Apple deliberately does this as an anti-consumer platform lock in play. The slippery slope hypothetical you provide is not the reality. Nobody is asking governments to regulate adding cool new features to the <Open Message Protocol> and force everyone to comply and implement them. What regulators are saying is that Apple can't deliberately make Sneetches out of us and needs to allow interoperability on their human-critical messaging platform. In the US the DMCA actually makes it explicitly legal to reverse engineer a protocol for the purpose of interoperability. This idea basically extends that to "and you can't punish users for building applications that interoperating with it" but of course is framed as "just fucking stop disallowing it greedy asshats".
If I could install a 3rd party SMS app on iPhone (like how Signal used to work on Android) I'd be more skeptical about needing this regulation.
If Apple wasn't doing this artificially and iMessage actually had features that were innovative, and that other people couldn't reasonably be expected to implement in a way that wouldn't be a detriment to the protocol, I'd be more skeptical. (TBH they've probably spent more resources on preventing interoperability than if they didn't care and let it be open...)
> Isn't this going to kill features that only some apps have or offer?
No, degrade gracefully. If the feature is an improvement for everyone and should be required, we know how to have working groups update a spec and have implementers follow (even when one leads the pack and drives the spec changes in the first place as is often the case these days). If that doesn't work build a new protocol and win people over with your obviously better CoolNewFeature.
It's like you don't believe it's possible with the countless man centuries of resources these companies have to have software both interoperate and degrade gracefully when one client doesn't support all protocol features. I don't buy it; I believe we can.
IOS 9 or 10 (been a while) turned off SMS fallback when the user upgraded to that version. People kept calling and complaining texting no longer worked, and it was just that they could only text IPhones. That was 100% a dark pattern / monopoly practice with no reason but to ensure market share.
I'm sorry, but that doesn't seem accurate. I've been using iOS since ~2015 and I don't recall ever having lost the ability to send or receive SMS messages.
I had 25 IPhones all turn off the SMS fallback on the upgrade, and found Apple documentation for such. It was an intentional act, and happened over and over.
Well, if we are going for anecdotal evidence, that hasn't happened to me even once over the past 4 iPhone upgrades. SMS as fallback is enabled by default, and it has been this way for every single device I upgraded to so far.
If you left iMessage on when you upgraded from iOS to an Android device, everyone who had an iPhone would still be attempting to send you iMessages and you'd never get them on your Android phone.
If you downgraded to an Android device without first telling iMessage that your phone number was no longer on the iMessage network, then it would fail. This is unrelated to SMS fallback on an iPhone sending iMessages.
I saw, with my own eyes, an IPhone upgrade to a new major IOS version and the SMS fallback setting turn off. The change may have been walked back, but I saw it myself, and had to fix it on dozens of phones.
I have sms fall back turned off and I can still send sms. All that check box does ask you if you want to send SMS if iMessage is unavailable instead of automatically sending SMS.
> Because there's absolutely no downside to telling Apple it can't artificially make its iMessage platform restricted to Apple devices
There are plenty. Like users thinking imessage is shit because of third party clients. Or taking away an app devs right to restrict how and where their app is used. You have no inherent right over how imessage is restricted. I mean, by what right or authority do you even get to even discuss forcing how a free(!) app is restricted or forcing an all network/server to provide services to arbitrary clients? If I block firefox on my webserver, will you or EU tell me I can't??
>Like users thinking imessage is shit because of third party clients.
If those are the concerns against forcing them to open it, they shall force them now! I mean, lol...
>Or taking away an app devs right to restrict how and where their app is used. You have no inherent right over how imessage is restricted. I mean, by what right or authority do you even get to even discuss forcing how a free(!) app is restricted or forcing an all network/server to provide services to arbitrary clients?
There are no "inherent rights" period. Right comes from law, which ideally comes from what society deems worthy to have. If EU wants open messaging than can be made into a law. It's that simple.
Whether the app is free or not is irrelevant. It's enough a consideration that it occupies a big percentage of usage share, so having it close presents a moat against communicating with a big chunk of the population (and also restricts those using iOS just one client).
>If I block firefox on my webserver, will you or EU tell me I can't??
They very well could, if the right conditions applied...
Absolutley not true. The law codifies what is already true with respect to rights but the law also fails to codify rights as with womens rights and involuntary servitude, women and black people didn't suddenly gain rights when laws were passed, they've always had those rights except the law and society failed to recognize that until some point. Law or not there are fundamental and inalienable truths from which rights and obligations can be discerned.
> If EU wants open messaging than can be made into a law. It's that simple.
Yes and if EU wants to do any number unfair or dowright evil things they can, it is that simple. What is your point, did I dispute the simplicity?
I was talking about what consumers what and what service is being offered by Apple and the inherent unfairness towards one group of consumers and favoritism towards non-american electronic makers and developers. They claim to be democratic and support equality and fairness under the law and by that claim I can contend they are in the wrong by their own standards.
Any company and consumer would naturally be treated the same if the EU is not a banana republic and as such this affects everyone.
> Whether the app is free or not is irrelevant.
It is abdolutley vital! Commerce and trade can be regulated and taxed by government authorities but a free app is not commerce. This is regulation of speech and interaction between people. If apple at least had ads in iMessage it could be commerce but it isn't. You are throwing away your rights so u can satisfy some rage against a corporation you don't have to interact with.
> It's enough a consideration that it occupies a big percentage of usage share, so having it close presents a moat against communicating with a big chunk of the population (and also restricts those using iOS just one client)
So a big chunk of the population made a choice but the government should prevent them? Very democratic! You can pass laws forcing government services and entities to not use iMessage but even the US isn't banning tiktok outright or forcing them to be compatible with something they control because... you know, of the people, for the people and all that.
> They very well could, if the right conditions applied...
Yes and that is unfair and concerning because in a free society people have liberties that allow them a choice about who they want to interact with.
>Absolutley not true. The law codifies what is already true with respect to rights but the law also fails to codify rights as with womens rights and involuntary servitude, women and black people didn't suddenly gain rights when laws were passed, they've always had those rights
Nope. They got them when those laws were passed.
You might think that they always "should have had" those rights, which is valid, but different from "always had them".
But they absoltely didn't have them, and if they attempted to exercize them as if they had them, they'd be ignored, prevented, beaten up, or worse.
>Yes and if EU wants to do any number unfair or dowright evil things they can, it is that simple. What is your point, did I dispute the simplicity?
Yes, they could. You could perhaps argue morals (based on what? Your take of what's "unfair" and "downright evil"? Because I'm a European and I don't find this law unfair at all), and that could be discussed.
But you didn't discuss morals, you wrote "by what right or authority". Well, they have the right and the authority, so?
>I was talking about what consumers what and what service is being offered by Apple and the inherent unfairness towards one group of consumers and favoritism towards non-american electronic makers and developers.
Sorry, but if you come here to sell something, you better sell it on our terms and under EU laws. If you don't want to do that, you can always opt to not sell it.
Also, you don't know what "consumers want" in general. Did you ask consumers if they want to keep Messages closed?
> But they absoltely didn't have them, and if they attempted to exercize them as if they had them, they'd be ignored, prevented, beaten up, or worse.
Our disagreement is that you think a right is something granted by the law and inability to excecise a right means you don't have it. A right simply means there is a valid justification to allow a person to do not do something. You can have a right and it can unjustly be taken from you. The government or even the fundamental rule of law exists in part to enable justice and justice exists beyond the confines of law and government. If it is just for a person to or not do something and there is a valid and reasonable explanation for that thing then it is justifiable and preventing or coercing a person to contradict that would be unjust therefore it is a right. If the law fails to codify a right then the law is unjust with that respect.
To put it differently, after a law is passed to recognize a right, people can ask for compensation for past injustices even though in the past the injustice was legal. This is because despite legality, a person had rights and due to a failure of law and society that right was not protected and damage was done.
> But you didn't discuss morals, you wrote "by what right or authority". Well, they have the right and the authority, so?
Well that is what I am challenging. The EU or governments in general don't have absolute authority over all things. In the case of EU and democratic governments there is a contract of law between the people and the government defining the authority of the government. I don't know EU law well but in the US the government has the right to regulate commerce which iMessage as a free app is excluded. In a free society, unless the government has explicit authority to regulate something it can't just restrict what you do, that's the whole point of liberty. I was genuinely asking what authority the EU had to regulate the activity of offering a free service to the public that doesn't involve hosting content, only transporting messages. This authority if legit would mean the EU can for example interfere in moderation decisions by sites like HN.
> Sorry, but if you come here to sell something, you better sell it on our terms and under EU laws. If you don't want to do that, you
But nothing is being sold, iMessage is a free app so your point is invalid.
> Also, you don't know what "consumers want" in general. Did you ask consumers if they want to keep Messages closed?
There are people who prefer a closed messaging ecosystem. For people who want a more open system there is Signal, Wire,Briar, Threema, All the Matrix clients,etc... there is no shortage of optiond and most of them are supported on the iPhone. So you and the EU don't care about open apps being available to the EU. You just want to force others to not have a closes messaging system.
I agree with your philosophical understanding of rights and law and government. I disagree that iMessage is free or that because it's free the government does have authority over it. And I disagree that you're applying your principles consistently to your argument or to the situation at hand.
First off, arguably it's very much not free because it's only available if you purchase an Apple product. The cost of operating iMessage is built into the price you pay to use Apple's services and software when purchasing their hardware. I can't go to Apple.com and freely sign up for iMessage.
Second, I can't set up a free lemonade stand on my lawn and secretly add harmful substances to the lemonade and gov't can't touch me because I didn't charge a fee. I mean come on, that's not how the government works either.
We cede a monopoly on violence to the government so they may govern all aspects of life where we believe they are needed, not just commerce. In order to protect and maintain a free society, the government must discourage and punish people that encroach on other peoples' rights universally.
If we reach consensus that as a society the mechanism we use to communicate with each other should be standardized and open so that anybody may interoperate with it, because it's in line with a free society where we believe individuals have a right to the liberty of running their own software in whatever way they see fit (much like your choice of car or clothing), then that's that and the government can step in and try to protect those rights.
>Our disagreement is that you think a right is something granted by the law and inability to excecise a right means you don't have it. A right simply means there is a valid justification to allow a person to do not do something. You can have a right and it can unjustly be taken from you.
Without a law granting/protecting your right to X, or at least the power to grant it to yourself and enforce it, you don't have a right to X.
You, at best have, a "justification for having the right to X". And even that is debatable. You might just think you have a justification, but ther people might disagree with you that X is any kind of right you oughta have.
So, where does this "valid justification" comes from? God? Some holy book? Some wise document written by founding fathers? Sorry, we don't believe in those things in these here parts. It needs to be based on either law or a body (could be "the people") that can force it into law.
> But nothing is being sold, iMessage is a free app so your point is invalid.
Doesn't matter to my argument whether its paid, or given free as a lure to keep you in the ecosystem (which is the money maker) - or even just given free in general, out of the goodness of their heart.
If a company doesn't like the terms under which a country or union of countries asks them them to sell and/or give away their app, they can always stop giving it to that country/union of countries. Easy as that.
>You're the bully here.
"Bully" against a company? For making make their app more open and compatible? That's some next level Ayn Rand shit right here...
> Some wise document written by founding fathers? Sorry, we don't believe in those things in these here parts. It needs to be based on either law or a body (could be "the people") that can force it into law.
This is actually false. Our founding fathers very much were not settled on where rights originated. Some believed, like GP do, that rights are innate and that it's the responsibility of a government to try and protect common ones. Others believed, like you, that rights need to be enumerated. One of the arguments against enumeration is that such a list could be used, as you are trying to do, as a mechanism to exclude rights not officially listed or known or conceived of at the time, which could lead to unintended oppression.
Should the government have innate power to oppress by omission? Are laws an allow list or a deny list? Does the government only get the power we the people grant it, or does it get every power we don't specifically reserve for ourselves? Neither position is absolutely correct. That's why we have courts and process. But the scales tend to tip towards the government only only being allowed power we cede to it, not the reverse.
Here's a relevant example: consider freedom of thought. Western governments generally do not explicitly codify such a concept. But we practically universally believe that human beings are afforded the the privacy of their mind. After all we're allowed to express ourselves freely and all our laws are designed to punish actions. The bill of rights was created at a time when it was impossible to know the nature of someone's thoughts, so this question was preposterous. But it's becoming possible now to capture an image of one's thoughts. If we could use that information to discriminate, it's very sane to imagine a self-serving bureaucracy would try to. So how do you establish your right to think in a society where it's innately oppressed by virtue of not being explicitly granted? See: civil disobedience.
I agree with your position but not with your rhetoric.
The whole thing is NOT about the app, it is about the provided service.
Some companies are becoming base infrastructure and so they need some regulation. What do you think if your piped water company would refuse to sell you water just because your house number ends with 8?
>Nobody is asking governments to regulate adding cool new features to the <Open Message Protocol> that participants can choose to implement or not for their users as they see fit.
Isn't that exactly what you're asking of Apple? Apple already has SMS. You want them to adopt RCS because it has cool new features that are lacking in SMS.
I don't think so. I haven't read the EU documents and the article doesn't say, but you can do this without forcing a company to adopt anything.
Let's say I propose this rule: Apple must publish the iMessage spec and allow other services to send/receive iMessages.
That doesn't force Apple or anyone else to implement any specific feature, beyond allowing others to send/receive messages. WhatsApp or Signal could decide they don't want to implement the iMessage protocol and they're free to do so. WhatsApp might support voice calling, but that doesn't force iMessage to implement voice calling. It's simply saying that third parties can choose to implement the iMessage protocol if they want.
There may be features that will only work within one platform, but that won't give anyone a lock-in advantage since others can implement those features if they're popular. For example, let's say Apple implements CoolNewFeature. They have to publish the spec for CoolNewFeature. Sure, maybe it will take 6 months for Google and WhatsApp to implement CoolNewFeature, but there's nothing preventing them from doing so. Likewise, WhatsApp already has voice calling, but you won't be able to do that with iMessage folks because Apple hasn't implemented that. That seems ok to me. If Apple starts to lose users to WhatsApp, they'll want to implement that interoperability. If it isn't an important feature, it isn't important whether they implement it or not.
To me, it seems like this is about preventing companies from creating walled gardens. It's not about forcing companies to adopt certain standards or features. Apple doesn't need to adopt RCS. If others could send/receive iMessage-protocol messages, it would provide an interoperable system. Some might complain that X protocol is better than Y protocol, but that's the history of everything. Ultimately, those types of things haven't prevented third parties from creating interoperability with less perfect protocols.
Just publishing the specs will not allow anyone to send/receive iMessages. It's built on a closed loop CA / certificate system.
Remember that Steve Jobs actually announced on-stage it would be an open protocol without actually discussing that with his engineers? The architecture is designed to be closed from the get-go, and opening up the iMessage ecosystem in it's current design is simply not possible without giving 3rd parties considerable access to Apple internals, affecting a ton of stuff beyond iMessage, and pose serious security risks.
Could Apple re-design a messaging system which would allow this and roll it out transparently to all it's users? Absolutely, but that would require a ton of engineering work, and won't be there tomorrow.
You're forcing Apple to carry/send/receive messages for their direct competitors. Apple obviously subsidizes the cost of iMessage currently from their iPhone sales. A workaround could be charging users a monthly rate to connect to their servers I suppose. But that seems like it would maybe defeat the point a little?
You can send iMessage an sms, that is letting other companies interoperate with it, no? That sounds like WhatsApp is choosing not to implement a way to send a message to iMessage.
But you can't be blue and send iMessage an iMessage with all the nice modern messaging features. Have you ever had a group SMS where some people are iMessage and some aren't? It's unnecessarily jarring and I know that WhatsApp and Google/Android etc. would support "likes" and "loves" and "exclamations" if they could. I'm 100% certain they know exactly the right message format and data structures to use too. It's Apple that won't let rich texts be displayed as such from anyone who's not an iMessage user, by design.
> It's like you don't believe it's possible with the countless man years of resources these companies have to have software both interoperate and degrade gracefully when one client doesn't support all protocol features. I don't buy it, I believe we can.
Every instance of that is a huge guesswork mess that I wouldn't wish upon average people to navigate though. RCS has tons of "maybe implement" features, and don't even get me started on the mess that's XMPP. If you ever tried to use OMEMO from two different clients at once, you know what I'm talking about.
> and don't even get me started on the mess that's XMPP.
If two clients have good implementation, there is nothing messy about user experience. The only problem is that most clients are developed by hobbyists in their spare time, who might have very different ideas on how to do key verification, etc, so you get only what you get. It is not because of the protocol.
> By the way, iMessage is XMPP. Whatsapp is XMPP. Just artificially closed. Long etc.
I've heard these rumors, but they don't seem to be true. WhatsApp seems to have moved on a long time ago (to a binary format wrapped in an implementation of the noise protocol framework) and I find zero indication iMessage was ever XMPP.
But that's besides the point. XMPP is great for a uniform ecosystem (in fact, a lot of XEPs are some company standardizing their use-case), but awful if you allow federation and third party clients.
> Because there's absolutely no downside to telling Apple it can't artificially make its iMessage platform restricted to Apple devices.
I would assume one downside is a higher amount of spam. Currently you need to have an Apple device to send an iMessage. So sending spam is an expensive proposition.
Spam operations have so much money that buying a bunch of iPhones is not an issue, even if they didn't, they could buy older, used iPhones for pennies.
The bigger headache is the iCloud account required to send iMessages. A pain to set up, and after a few spam messages Apple will just terminate the account. And probably blacklist the phone used to do it. Sure, this isn't terribly expensive, but compared to the barrier of entry to SMS (zero), it is pretty substantial.
I'll add some anechdata: I get frequent text spam (about 1/day at the peak, it's slowed a lot recently). I've gotten maybe 5 spam iMessage messages during the entire lifetime of my phone.
I've never understood the origins of this argument. I'm pretty sure it's rooted in deep misunderstanding.
If I want to spam you I buy a bunch of numbers on Plivo and start sending your number messages with SMS, the existing standard. They show up in iMessage on your phone. The only difference is they're green instead of blue.
So, how do I need an iPhone to send you spam? iMessage doesn't do anything related to spam other than let you delete and report it.
But if it did work that way, then the standard could include that messages need to be signed with a device attestation key from an approved vendor or something like that. There could be a way to have your attestation keys registered like we do for CAs today so that your attestation hardware could be used. Phone manufacturers would all implement device attestation, like Apple and Google do.
Please note I’m responding to the claim that there is “absolutely no downside” to making Apple devices more interoperable. I’m not saying whether or not that is a good enough reason not to.
I know the difference between SMS and iMessage. Currently I get plenty of SMS spam. I get pretty much zero iMessage spam. I’m pretty sure that I would get more spam if iMessage was made interoperable, even if device attestation was implemented as you described. Some Googling suggests that RCS, the competing standard for messaging, does not implement device attestation.
> Please note I’m responding to the claim that there is “absolutely no downside” to making Apple devices more interoperable. I’m not saying whether or not that is a good enough reason not to.
Right, I'm just genuinely confused. How would you meaningfully distinguish between the spam? Why would there be more of it? Wouldn't it just come in blue instead of green? I'm not sure I understand how adding a 2nd avenue for spammers opens new doors when the existing avenue is totally sufficient. Perhaps if you could send messages from an email only account is what you're saying? Personally I would hope there'd be ways to control unsolicited messages in the messaging apps and report spam to the carriers. And honestly I was thinking that as an sms replacement, messages from email-only accounts would be something different carriers would want to gate/control onto the network as they see fit. Or more ideally the protocol itself could require messages to be signed with device attestation keys. Why iMessage doesn't give me better spam management options for existing SMS is the real question.
In the Messages app on iOS, how the message was sent is clearly marked. At the the top of the conversation window, above the chat bubbles, it will say “Text Message” or “iMessage”. This line will also appear between chat bubbles whenever the current thread changes how messages are being sent.
But I think I see the miscommunication. I’m assuming that iMessage gains interoperability and thus there are more people who could potentially send spam. But I think you are arguing that SMS would be replaced with the more advanced, interoperable protocol. In that case, I understand your arguments why there would be the same amount or less spam.
> It's like you don't believe it's possible with the countless man centuries of resources these companies have to have software both interoperate and degrade gracefully when one client doesn't support all protocol features. I don't buy it; I believe we can.
Did you ever look into what happened with XMPP extensions?
Yeah Google killed XMPP because they just had to have a better proprietary protocol and now look where that got us... nowhere. To your point though, I believe Apple and Google 100% staffed and capable of implementing robust support for extensions. The problem with this historically is that it's one off devs and hobbyist projects that have tried to support this stuff. I don't think it's fair to draw conclusions from that. Look at the web and Chrome and what Google can do when they actually put their weight behind something (imagine if they had done for XMPP). Look at Apple and Google and WebAuthN. WebAuthN has optional extensions. It's completely do-able.
Essentially, think of all the amazing grassroots OSRS clients we'd have that wouldn't have been C&D'd over the years if it was illegal to punish users for writing interoperable software...
> Because there's absolutely no downside to telling Apple it can't artificially make its iMessage platform restricted to Apple devices.
I am looking forward to Google being able to finally get ahold of my iMessage and hoover it into their surveillance capitalism machine. What a huge benefit to me!
Incorrect. If multiple services interoperate with each other, that does not mean that one service can vacuum up the entire data on that network. As an analogy, Gmail servers cannot touch emails that are stored on Outlook and have never been addressed to a Gmail recipient. And if your position is that Google gets access to traffic flowing on a heterogeneous group of iOS and Android users simply because of RCS, that is again incorrect. RCS does not enable any new insidious capabilities that Google may not already have by the virtue of building Android.
RCS will have no effect on iMessage whatsoever. Messages between a homogeneous group of iOS users has no reason to touch Google owned (or other) RCS servers. And for Android users, RCS is a meaningful upgrade from traditional SMS.
>Isn't this going to kill features that only some apps have or offer? What if one day Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp...
Okay, this is where I think we need to make clear who this requirement applies to. If we click through the first link, found in the first sentence in the article, to the actual source text[0] and run it through Google Translate, we can find that this requirement only applies to companies...
>... whose market capitalization reaches at least 75 billion euros or whose annual turnover exceeds 7.5 billion euros. To qualify as gatekeepers, these companies must also provide certain services such as browsers, messaging or social media which have at least 45 million end users per month in the EU and 10,000 business users per year.
The point for the legislation is to force market leaders to open up and enable competitors, today and tomorrow. Calling them out by name works fine for today, but won't apply to the next TikTok/Instagram/WhatsApp/etc.
Calling those companies by name would be extra stupid. Let's say out of nowhere there's a new company that fits to all the criteria but it's not called by name? The law would have to be changed to add their name to the law. It's wasting a lot of time. Instead of that there's a list of criteria and company is automatically on this "list".
well this is the way legislation works, it's considered bad form to call them out by name so you choose some few characteristics that apply to them which has the side benefit that if in the future some other company comes along with those characteristics the same laws apply to them.
It would only be a bill of attainder if it used arbitrary characteristics not relevant to the stated purpose of the bill to target specific companies. The definition cited is not arbitrary in that sense - it targets large companies in specific markets, and there's an obvious rational connection with the stated purpose.
I believe that both comment are trying to say that:
- Google and Apple must do X => unconstitutional
- All Companies bigger than X with chat-like apps and an app store and a near-oligopoly OS must do X => probably constitutional
- All Companies such that (proceed to list dozen of random characteristics meant to only ever apply to Google and Apple ) must do X => probably unconstitutional
I can't wait to forever jump from app to app because as soon as one company exceeds 7.5 billion euros, it'll get struck by this new set of laws that makes its entire business model impossible. Of course, that's assuming that the EU doesn't expand this when they notice that happening...
I've heard the same when the US forced MS to allow different browsers as default, when the EU mandated a common charging port for mobiles and again when they mandated USB-C. I've yet to see the groundbreaking innovation that I am missing in the smartphone charging area that was suppressed by EU regulation.
This again is a talked up hypothetical problem at best. We've had chat for 30y now and while progress has been disruptive in the beginning, things have considerably consolidated.
I don't quite get what's so great about having to install 5 different chat clients just because your social network is too varied to force them onto one.
It's a case of corporate greed where sensible solutions (like licensing out the protocol) are not done to damage the opponent. I don't profit from this - if companies hadn't been this evil, the EU wouldn't have come down on them. If they don't like it, they can just stop selling smartphones in Europe.
> What if one day Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp want to implement something "different" that could make messaging better but this policy is making things harder to implement because it would be impossible to make it interoperate with other messaging apps?
That's still possible. The company owning that platform just has to ensure that its services are accessible by any client. Protocols/APIs can still be further developed or brand new ones introduced. But they still have to be documented & be made accessible.
>it is actually going to make things worse, that's what regulation does in most cases.
Yes all those regulations that actually make things worse.
Which ones are those again? specifically?
I find that generally people who make hand-wavey boogeyman 'regulation is bad' arguments typically struggle to identify which regulations are bad and why, and conveniently forget about the thousands of regulations that make their life livable every day.
I agree with your criticism of the companies who time and time again decide to utterly destroy their user experience just so that they can spy on people. They should avoid that.
It made browsing the web an inferior experience for all users. Come on. Let’s not continue this charade and just accept a valid argument when you see one
I agree. These companies are making the web a worse experience for all users. I wish they would stop.
At the very least I get the option to not be tracked on those shitty websites, but I would really, really have preferred if they didn't make me go through all those intentionally confusing and probably illegal steps to opt out of tracking.
Did providing a pop up on every website you visit saying they use cookies enable your ability to use the accept no cookies feature browsers have had since Netscape navigator? Was a regulation required to enable a feature of all browsers since the dawn of graphical browsers? Or are you saying the regulation allows you to remember that literally every website in existence uses cookies since you forget between websites?
I’m trying to figure out in what way this has made anything better, safer, or whatever? By the way, cookies is like the 1996 way of tracking and those opt outs don’t opt you out of tracking.
So, yeah. Super giant win for regulations there - clicking away useless disclaimers en masse to satisfy some EU bureaucrats poor understanding of technology. I’m sure they got a great post out of it. It’s like the pop up ad that you are required to pop up on every website but no one benefits, not even the website owner. At least a real ad the website owner makes some money.
I don't want to disable cookies. I want to be able to log in to things, and I'm not happier if the site uses localstorage instead of cookies to track me.
The GDPR doesn't forbid using cookies, by the way. If cookies are used to remember that you logged in using a session cookie, or remember the state of a shopping cart, or stuff like that, no warning is necessary. It's a law which requires consent to tracking, not consent to cookies.
You complain about lawmakers' poor understanding of technology, but I don't think your understanding of law is any better if you think that "every website is forced to show a pop-up". They choose to show a pop-up because they're forced to get consent if they want to track you.
GDPR doesn’t say anything really about cookies, actually. I think you meant ePrivacy.
Fact is most popups inform you about cookie use but don’t give you an option to do jack. And what makes you believe they’re ePrivacy compliant? I’ll bet you 90% of those sites, even when well intentioned, pollute you with tracking cookies anyways.
Edit: by the way no modern website uses cookies to maintain your shopping cart, and instead of relying on a persistent credential cookie, you could just use a password manager to expedite login and be more secure overall. Finally, “private” mode on most browsers contains cookies to short lived session cookies within the tab lifespan.
> GDPR doesn’t say anything really about cookies, actually. I think you meant ePrivacy.
I meant GDPR. It's the reason why websites have to get consent if they want to track you. I believe you're right that it doesn't mention cookies though, I don't believe it cares about what technology is used for tracking.
> Edit: by the way no modern website uses cookies to maintain your shopping cart, and instead of relying on a persistent credential cookie
That's what I meant. You store some unique ID on the client in a cookie, then you have a shopping cart database on the back-end. I didn't mean to imply that the cart items are stored in the cookie, just to distinguish the persistent shopping cart use-case from the logging in to a user account use-case.
> you could just use a password manager to expedite login and be more secure overall.
I do this. I still want to be logged in for a while.
> Finally, “private” mode on most browsers contains cookies to short lived session cookies within the tab lifespan.
I know. Would you find it very convenient if your browser always acted as if you were in private mode and didn't keep you logged in for longer than the lifespan of the tab? No? Neither would I.
No, you’re wrong. It’s ePrivacy. GDPR set the framework, ePrivaxy has largely superseded.
Actually, I do use privacy mode at all times. The only hindrance is the need to recredential. I have a password manager that auto fills those forms in. It works great, and is better security overall. My cookies database shouldn’t be equivalent to a password file, and I don’t carry around a pile of spammy cookies handing them out to every invasive spy company, hoping an obnoxious pop up mandated by an ineffective regulation will shield me. I use computer science, which always works, rather than political science, which is just a degree for folks who like to drink too much.
You always have the option to turn off cookies. There is literally 0 check you have as a user to ensure a company isn't nefariously using cookies despite your preferences. All the law did was force trash pop-ups everywhere.
I don't want to turn off cookies, I want to be able to log in to things. And the cookie technology isn't the problem, tracking is; if the tracking happens locally using localstorage instead of cookies, I haven't gained anything.
The law didn't force pop-ups anywhere. Some companies chose to put pop-ups on their websites.
I have to admit this is a clever response but it's also an example of a meaningful regulation that corporations are trying to work around. They are annoying on purpose. The law doesn't say to make an annoying popup, only that you can't do user hostile things with cookies.
But surely everyone knows that companies will absolutely comply in the most minimal way possible to any regulation and will actively seek loopholes. Their incentive is profit, not egalitarian utopia. We may wish the universe were different, but it’s not. It’s like wishing the sun won’t expand and consume the planet some day out of respect for life.
Or you could have turned off cookies entirely or per site in your browser since 1996, and not depend on the goodwill and compliance of an advertising company. But as has been demonstrated there are a bazillion ways to track you even with cookies blocked that you have no control over nor are covered by this spam pop up inducing bit of transnational bureaucracy.
The ones that created cookie popups everywhere. It’s horrible. It’s the worst. Everyone can see how horrible it is. Nobody understands why this is still a thing.
Companies who decided to continue their invasive policies chose to implement those popups to provide legal cover. Non-invasive companies don't need to do that. The issue is with the companies, not the regulation.
The issue is with both. It is not exactly surprising that for-profit companies implement the regulation in a way that minimizes their expenses, and the outcome this produces could have been anticipated when the legislation was written. The outcome matters more than the intent.
You come up with some unknown theoretical magical features which will suddenly make it impossible to implement due to this ruling. That's not what this is about, and I think everybody on this forum understands a bit too well the current situation on the market, and the reason for this ruling.
I couldn't care less if Apple is 'owned' or not, its nothing special to me compared to all other corporations. Having at least a bit compatible messengers is definitely something positive, its quite a mental gymnastics to immediately try to come up with some theoretical reasons why this shouldn't happen at all (and failing at that). If apple didn't do typical apple thing to create its own standards and share it with nobody, they wouldn't be hammered by regulators 15 years down the line (lightning port, now this, we will see what comes next, plenty of topics to pick up).
Apple knew very well this will eventually come, same for USB, but they made it into operational cost of having some sort of advantage to get more income till its stopped. Now correction happens. You regulate such thing because clearly corporations only care about profits. And markets, as wonderful as they are, always put money on the first place so waiting for them to move corps into more considering-society territory is often a fruitless effort unless you have gigatons of patience.
The job of most government officials is to find plausible solutions to real problems, get a mob engaged and mobilized to solve it, then get the money voted into play so they can extract it via kickbacks and other indirect payments from the contractors.
They're gonna be trying to regulate anything they think is capable of justifying the racket.
Example: Youtube.com 17million dollars running for 18 months, healthcare.gov, 2 billion dollars failed on launch and not used at all.
Healthcare.gov was famously a boondoggle, and did have to be rebuilt. But comparing a notorious failure to a generational success is a bit disingenuous. To say that no one uses healthcare.gov is also a bit disingenuous. It set a record for signups in 2022 at 16 million plans sold.
For a different comparison, why don't we look at Uber: it has market dominance to the point of being a verb, yet it loses more money per year than Healthcare.gov has cost in its entire existence.
Also, worth noting is that dozens of states managed the Obamacare site rollouts just fine as an example of government managing tech projects just fine.
Maybe not regulate. Maybe just don't prevent adversarial interoperability from happening. In an ideal world, a company trying to sue someone who built an unofficial client for their service should be laughed out of the court building and fined for wasting judge's time.
Remember ICQ? The official clients were bloated and generally meh. Many people didn't ever see them, not even once. Almost everyone I knew used QIP, Miranda, Adium, or something else third-party. ICQ the company sometimes broke the protocol and then there was a massive uproar. Then clients got updated and everyone carried on messaging. But the system being involuntarily open like this meant that there were ICQ clients for so many things that wouldn't ever get official treatment otherwise. Basically — if it has a network interface, a screen, a means of text input, and can run arbitrary code, it'd have an ICQ client built for it at some point. There was one in the form of an ELF binary for Siemens phones for example.
No one is asking for a standardized protocol. It is my understanding that what is being asked for here is the documentation of their existing protocol that would allow third-party clients and bridges to be built. And this is an unequivocally good thing.
> "Isn't this going to kill features that only some apps have or offer?"
No, I don't think so. You can set a standard that defines a baseline of features that all interoperable messaging apps must support. But that doesn't preclude apps from offering additional functionality over and above the standard.
I don't even think they have to do that. I think the law will just mean that they have to allow other apps to implement their protocol, not forcing them to follow a specific standard. Like, they can still use iMessage and add new features, as long as there's some way for third party apps to use it as well.
What sort of features would prevent a client from receiving a text-based message? XMPP used to work across platforms but commercial interests killed it. Surely, messaging clients can publish a protocol and provide a reference library for others to use to directly contact users on their platforms?
Well looking at Apple's more recent features for iMessage, Animoji and Memoji related features are presumably non-trivial to slap into an existing app.
> What if one day Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp want to implement something "different" that could make messaging better
This is never how it was supposed to be. The internet was the massive success it is because it is built on open standards.
Back in the day, if anyone wanted to build a better protocol at something, you had open discussions and eventually come up with an RFC that anyone and everyone can implement and be interoperable.
While it's difficult to shove that genie back into the bottle, anything that in any way promotes interoperable standards above these terrible proprietary walled gardens is a huge win.
Seriously, there's no serious argument that suggests that this is the likelihood. Sometimes it gets better, sometimes it doesn't. The problem is, no one notices the good stuff due to regulation because you're just used to it.
Frankly, it's getting irritating that people aren't understanding this more?
Why is a citation needed for something that's logically obvious? Why do we need to provide links to an "expert" telling us 3+3=6 when we can just use a calculator?
Because you are getting the basics of economics wrong.
You have spent many years of schooling learning to count.
Have you studied economics for at least 1 year of formal education? Have you read a book by a real economist?
Read 'Economics, the user's guide'. This is not how they think, this is not how they argue.
What we have here, is a person who hasnt learnt math arguing that 3 + 3 = 7 and claiming it's logically obvious.
Or like a medieval scientist arguing that Spontaneous Generation (Mice spawn in straw by themselves) is a law of physics and it's logically obvious.
I have an undergrad degree in economics from Harvard University. Gotta say it makes me pretty well equipped to poke at how BS it often is.
edit: this is me idiotically angrily responding incorrectly to the wrong person. leaving it for the message "don't trust these clowns with fancy degrees, they often are clueless" :)
I really love it when people "flex" their training by converting every question in life into something in their domain and then shouting at everyone who argues with them. Love it.
Economists are often the worst, because almost everything involves money, so you can just pretend that every problem is an economics problem.
I think it's more it's an SMS replacement or extension, which is supposed to be an open protocol, and they're not opening up the API to support the additional extended features (which is something out of Balmer/Gates era embrace and extend playbook, "we'll extend JavaScript, but you'll need IE to use any websites using the extended features and the site features will be broken without it" which is an anti-competitive practice that breaks what are supposed to be open platform independent protocols). Do something new, sure, extend features of an open protocol, sure, but if you're going to communicate with other Messaging platforms as a feature, you need to allow other messaging platforms the option to support those features on their end as well. Such as encryption, the ability to add emojis to a comment, full size attachments, etc.
Signal is actually removing SMS support, so problem solved on that end. But Signal can be installed on most platforms anyway, so if someone wanted to participate in the extra features, they always had the option of simply installing the client app. I can't install iMessage for Android if I want to be in the family group message and not see "Mom liked an image" 15 times. I personally dislike iPhones, but I still want to participate in my family's group chat, Apple doesn't give me that option. At least with WhatsApp, Signal or whatever what phone we have doesn't matter and we don't have to join the walled garden to use really basic features. I don't know what phone my friends in Signal group chats or WhatsApp use, because it doesn't matter.
If you're going to bridge different platforms, allow the other platforms to update to support it. It is exclusionary. Apple does this with FaceTime, I have my family install Duo/Meet on their Apple phones because I have to explain to them I don't have an Apple device for it, or if I do, its my work machine. At least that's a little less hostile than, "you can chat with your family but you're going to see activity you can't participate in".
> Isn't this going to kill features that only some apps have or offer? What if one day Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp want to implement something "different" that could make messaging better but this policy is making things harder to implement because it would be impossible to make it interoperate with other messaging apps?
Just open the standard/api/protocol, document it, and it'll get integrated into pidgin or some other alternative within a few days. Currently it's not a problem of not having apps trying to integrate protocols, but protocol designers intentionally locking other apps out of the ecosystem.
But also, you generally want to iterate faster than "write a new spec and wait 2 years for implementations to support half of it". The alternative to which is just implementing it and hoping the other party can somehow make sense of it. Emoji reactions being supported by only a few activitypub implementations is an example of it.
This is incidentally the reason moxie cited for not making Signal federated.
Why "hoping"? Just bake the ability to advertise and query for capabilities into the protocol. This is an issue that has been solved many times before.
And yes, it might mean that only one client would support a shiny new feature for a while. But that's exactly the situation with iMessage, s/for a while/forever/.
Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp aren't baked into the devices people buy, though. I don't know if that is a valid distinction in terms of the EU's thinking, but it's one I would be perfectly happy with.
> people here enjoy seeing big tech companies "owned" by big governments
Absolutely. These corporations laugh all the way to the bank as they destroy our privacy and exploit us for profit with surveillance capitalism, destroy our computer freedoms with hardware cryptography only they have the keys for, pollute our web with unending advertising and annoyances driven by "engagement engineering". Someone really ought to check their goddamn audacity. My only complaint is the fines aren't big and frequent enough to surpass their cost of doing business.
I'm sorry, I just don't feel sorry at all about the trillion dollar corporations. Maybe they should try not being monopolists who want to own the platform and their users. Then maybe the state won't feel the need to remind them we are not cattle to be sold to the highest bidder.
Tell that to its threats to do client side scanning on what's supposed to be our devices. The fact they can even get away with even suggesting such crap points to the fact their crimes are a lot worse and more fundamental than privacy violations: they destroyed our fundamental computer freedoms by denying us the capability to run or not run whatever software we want. Under Apple and its peers, we are oppressed at a fundamental level by being forced to accept whatever bullshit whims a corporation decides to impose upon us with a software update. They have the keys to the machine, they determine what code it runs and doesn't run.
> The others, this law is trying to force interaction with, not just did, but actively and aggressively do.
They are not excused either. They should be sanctioned even harder until they cease and desist all exploitative behavior.
What's there to do 'differently' about a chat client? They haven't changed in the last 30 years or so. "Special features" could still be implemented by non-standard protocol extensions while still being able to exchange bare bones messages with all clients which accept the standard protocol.
Telegram recently implemented some new features, and I was too lazy to update the client. It showed "you need a recent version of Telegram to see this" message instead of new functional. I don't see how other messengers won't do exactly that for unsupported types of content.
I imagine they'd setup a basic protocol for interoperability of simple messages and then each client can build anything they want on top? Similar to other protocols. At least that's what I am hoping for
The problem is that SMS is nowadays a poor fallback, lacking support for a number of widespread features that are part of the EU's required baseline for interoperability.
The DMA requires interoperability without a decrease in security - this explicitly includes end-to-end encryption, which iMessage supports. Since SMS has no standard for key distribution/discovery, it already fails at that hurdle.
It also requires that features such as group messaging and audio/video calling.
So, let me get this straight -- the EU is now requiring end to end encryption? Haven't they been harping this whole time on how that enables child predators?
Just like with the deliberate sabotaging of non-certified (read: cheap) USB cables to make them slower, HN posters never fail to defend Apple at every opportunity.
There should be a browser plug-in that makes ChatGPT check whether your comment is against HN guidelines, upholds standards for a good discussion, and whether the argument is sound or not.
Issue is ChatGPT is too politically biased for many discussions unfortunately.
I miss this a lot. Trillian and Adium were a couple of other clients that allowed this. It was really nice to have some choice among what client to use.
I fondly remember iChat from my younger years. XMPP was incredibly powerful -- I would kill for a single client app for signal, telegram, facebook messenger, whatsapp, and more today.
I've been thinking about building one. I currently have too many other projects though, so this is going to be my next one, when I'm more or less satisfied with my ActivityPub server. It's so strange that no one has even tried to fill the niche for a modern desktop multi-protocol IM app. The one I have in mind would be properly-desktop though — multiple windows, 100% native controls, complete ignorance towards touchscreens, etc.
KDE has a built in chat client that seems to do the job most of the time. What's severely lacking there is client support.
Because of it libraries for all kinds of services exist already. KDE Telepathy sounds pretty close to what you're describing (native (Linux) controls, multi window, no touch screen design, plenty of different protocols).
With the KDE project slowly seeming to move towards Matrix rather than XMPP I wonder how long Telepathy will stick around. It can still be a pretty good start for your own chat application, though, as large portions of the work have already been done for you.
An alternative approach I've seen people take is what I'm doing myself: Matrix/XMPP combined with various bridges. That way the chat client only needs to speak one specific protocol. It has its downsides but it does save you from having to develop abstractions over abstractions. You also get multi device support for free without having to scan tons of QR codes if you need to reinstall your client for whatever reason.
I looked at the screenshots of KDE Telepathy and I'm not convinced. This kind of multi-protocol IM client exists for every major desktop OS — this and Pidgin for Linux, Adium for macOS, Miranda for Windows, etc. The problem with all these apps is that they're not modern. They do great for text messages, but that's it. Anything beyond text is an afterthought if implemented at all. What I mean by "modern" is first-class support for all the IM features people now take for granted: media attachments, server-side history with search, replies, mentions, reactions, forwarding, bot features, channels, etc. None of these existing apps even try to do any of this. This is what I want to fix with my future project.
For a brief period Facebook was the biggest XMPP server, it was fun using OTR[1] on Facebook messenger. I think Whatsapp is still using XMPP under the hood but the server is closed.
My fave was Miranda-IM. Windows-only but did a wonderful job of sticking to native windows API and so was very lightweight and native-feeling in an era when that really mattered for performance.
Libpurple powered the messaging on Nokia N900. It was really a great experience, seamlessly using the same app for SMS, FBM, Skype, Google Chat and few others.
Adding to that Pidgin has a nice plugin called OTR that enables E2EE regardless of the platform/transport being used. OTR exists for Weechat [1] as well.
I am not a fan of offline key exchanges through a centralized privacy-focused server as in, the server stores a key. Moxie knows why too. I wish he would come here so we could have that discussion. Perhaps I am old fashioned but I prefer military procedure of go for authentication in an out-of-band communication and verifying via voice each others key fingerprints or better, physically exchanging keys in person.
These were all multi-protocol clients supporting more than XMPP because MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and AIM all had their own thing. I believe Facebook was always its own thing but they exposed an XMPP proxy. Only Google Talk really relied on XMPP from the start but it was pretty much a token player in the market until two things happened: 1. They integrated with Gmail making Google Talk readily available to Google’s entire Gmail user base without installing a separate Windows-only client (or finding a compatible messenger, iChat ended up natively supporting XMPP within a couple of years) and 2. Instant Messaging went into rapid decline as users switched to mobile-first messengers (IMing was always a desktop-centric experience and the various pre-existing protocols were not battery efficient and you typically had to have the client open and active to be signed in).
That's not really true. These clients often reversed engineered other chat protocols and thus supported services that didn't support Jabber / XMPP. This was before e2e encryption was the norm so it was easier to do.
You can do that today with Matrix and whatever client you want (albeit with much more friction than what was previously possible).
There a bunch of bridges[0] available for pretty much any communication network you can think of and some people even go so far as to use their Matrix client for email too.
If everyone's messaging has to be compatible with everyone else's then maybe we will finally only need one messaging app on our phones again instead of 5. Sounds great. I just want to be able to send messages without thinking about which app I need to go into to communicate with a particular person; that really breaks my flow when I'm trying to get something done. I don't give a shit about any features apart from pictures, groups and emojis.
> You don't care about any features, apart from the features you care about. Just like everyone else.
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.
I similarly interpreted OP as someone who only wants basic features in messaging while the reply implies that not everyone views those three features as the only necessary features. Nothing uncharitable about saying that everyone’s needs are different.
Exactly. For example, I care about pictures and emojis but not groups. And groups crucially is the one thing that (from what I hear) is extremely non-trivial to do well alongside with E2E encryption. So nothing "basic" about it, it turns out.
> RCS (the open protocol which is the best analog to iMessage)
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.
It doesn’t matter if it’s an obscure protocol, if it’s used in a large business then they must comply. Wait until discord or any of the gaming focused media apps try to unify on features.
Sounds like what you really need is a contacts manager that links to recent conversations with them. You know who you want to contact, you pull them up and navigate to the relevant convos or apps.
To be fair, that was probably the same opinion you expressed when buying an iPhone. Nobody thinks about the consequences of who they can text when they buy a phone, and why should they?
I never bought an iphone, because it seems to me outrageously overpriced (especially since we know now that it takes 2-3 years until they make it lag on purpose) and I don't like the company anyway.
Probably because every automated system has to send 10 emails per action, making me have 100 emails every time I look. Turn off the team wide email notifications and Id check it more often.
And that's IRC in the nutshell, until you joined you have no history of any conversation. Sure you can scroll up in future apps like Discord but barely few read the channel conversations when they join a new server.
I forgot email. Even better, integrate messages with my email client and then they would all be in one place. Can't wait. Don't care how they are sent, just want to know if I write something to someone it gets there. Don't want random strangers to be able to write to me without my consent. That's my spec for the ideal setup.
Twenty two minutes ago you cared about groups, pictures and emojis. Email clients don't do emojis well or groups well, SMS doesn't do any of them, and IIRC Blackberry did everything in one program 15 years ago.
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.
Email does sort of support groups, they are just reply all + consent to be receiving the group messages. I put emoji in emails, I don't understand what the problem is there?
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?
Users just want simple direct communications to work (yes, with more features than that, E2EE, image sending, and such; but those features are not the focus).
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?
What about this is a walled garden. SMS exists, this is an attempt to get green bubbles painted blue, and reactions to attach to a bubble. These are all visual changes and not at all required for functionality. Explain how this is such a problem that a government decided to focus any effort on this. It seems like they have nothing better to do.
Apple's walled garden of the app store, no sideload apps, is a way they can profit. What financial or political gain is Apple getting from people using iMessage instead of WhatsApp?
I had a globally distributed family and WhatsApp was literally a life changer for me back in 2009/2010.
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 social contract of email dictates that it is not a real time communication media. Some people do check their email in real time, but many don't, so you can't rely on that.
I don't check anything in real time. I do it maybe two-four times a day. I don't want clients, bosses or friends that expect me to reply within seconds to messages.
The solution I use to minimise this is Element One (https://element.io/element-one). This is a paid for service that operates bridges from Matrix to Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. I then get to communicate with all those contacts in one place (I'm on Android so iMessage not a problem).
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.
That's correct. It's encrypted in transit, but the endpoint bridges decrypt messages then reencrypt them. IIRC you can run the bridges yourself on your own servers - Element just offers this service as well.
Matrix comes up quite often here. Tell me why, even as a nerd, I want to run a server and get my friends and family to join to chat, instead of them opening the built in app and just having at. This is a non-starter.
> ...Tell me why, even as a nerd, I want to run a server...
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.
I talk to exactly one other person using "proper" Matrix to Matrix communication. Everything else I do is via bridges. I talk to people who are using WhatsApp and Signal clients, and I use it as an IRC client (it is an excellent IRC client).
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.
> Tell me why, even as a nerd, I want to run a server
Apparently you don't want to, which is fine. Just use a publicly available server, there are many out there including matrix.org.
But if you wanted to, you could. It's about control.
I'd be fine with the EU proposing certain standards that must be met in order for an app to be used as an official messaging app, like:
[ ] - 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.
I wish somebody had stolen the Windows Phone idea of linking all the socials to the Contacts system, so if you want to message a person you go through Contacts and it would show their full unified social history. It would be simple to expand this so their preferred contact app is up top on their contact page. Remove the messengers from your home-screen altogether and start from Contacts.
I'm actually very afraid of precisely that, because knowing the EU, they will want administrator access, to "combat misinformation and disinformation" and "monitor for extremism" of course. Nothing nefarious.
Before even the flawed STARTTLS was a thing, people wanting to have private communication over unencrypted email would simply exchange public keys and use PGP to create encrypted messages.
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.
Misleading headline. This affects many apps and is much broader.
In fact, this line from the article is far more serious: “Apple, for instance, will also need to contend with a reported requirement to allow side-loading of apps outside of its App Store, something it's spent years fighting internationally”.
>>> allow side-loading of apps outside of its App Store
Just in time to replace that broken Siri thing with OpenAI based assistants!
Previous app submissions were rejected on the basis of being "too close to existing functionality". Maybe they meant dysfunctionality? If the EU needs witnesses of anti-competitive behavior I volunteer.
Overall the experience will be worse. No doubt about that. Features like the Privacy Nutrition Scorecard (I can't remember what it's actually called) won't be nearly as powerful, for example, because other giant multi-national corporations will just create their own app stores to avoid playing by Apple's rules and "paying the Apple tax", which is something that they have to pay and end consumers don't. I.e. it's just a payment negotiation between big corporations.
It'll also lead to fragmentation and you'll have to manage 5-10 different "app stores" in order to use apps that you use day-to-day right now.
Overall it's just going to be a mess and really suck. Fortunately I don't use many apps so I don't see this affecting me personally other than occasional annoyance when I can't find something I may need in the future or having to help family members fix their phones now. For many though their experience using the iPhone will be degraded, particularly when it comes to software.
Yeah, like Android. 10 app stores and today nobody downloads their apps from Google Play anymore. Also all Androids are full of viruses too. Those reckless grandmas and their Android phones...
There's a price that the market (consumers) will bear to pay for a service. Let's call it MyBigBrand and you charge $5/month or idk, $10 for a one-time purchase.
Apple charges whatever their fee is, let's call it 30%, and they keep this fee and do lots of things with it including buy back stock and reinvest in improving their services.
MyBigBrand comes along and says hey that's not fair! They launch a marketing campaign "The Apple Tax" and file lawsuits. Courts decide Apple should allow 3rd-party app stores or that they can't charge the fee or have to reduce it.
In each of those scenarios, MyBigBrand continues to charge customers $5/month for their product. All that's occuring here is whether or not MyBigBrand gets to pay less to Apple or whether Apple gets to continue to charge MyBigBrand and eat into their margins.
For a consumer you still pay the same fee for the product, or potentially you have to download some other app store that MyBigBrand owns or collaborates with MyOtherBigBrand on and then they split the costs and keep more of the margin.
At the end of the day people are being duped into really caring about who gets to keep more of their money and it just doesn't matter, except that it appears Apple does something beneficial with the money they keep and having multiple app stores with exclusive apps will suck and be annoying.
Is there a good integration for Android? I never used Google Assistent, when I tried, it failed for basic tasks.
I rented a car with Android Auto, went inside my podcast app, and couldn't go back to Google maps, and of course Android Auto makes google maps stop working on my mobile phone when android auto is on.
So i was trying things like ,,go to maps'', ,,go to navigation'', ,,maps'', but none of them worked.
Disconnecting and reconnecting andorid auto worked mostly (but not always)
oooh that would be awesome. I'm at a point where I only use it for timers and it even gets that wrong sometimes "I created an alarm named Timer for 01:30am".. oh yeah I can't just say "timer one hour thirty" because Siri hates British people and parses the numbers wrong lmao.
Also can we get multiple timers yet? Why is a device more powerful than the computer we used to send people to the moon limited to one timer?
Oh that's interesting! I'm using HomePods, how odd that iPhone Siri doesn't do multiple timers... It can work headlessly, so my guess is they've not bothered to write a UI for multiple timers on iOS... weird move
Just because you can download apps from an app store that is other than Apple's own does not mean that you can replace Apple's default apps.
Considering the number of people who celebrated in response to your comment, I think I get it now why people support side-loading---they don't actually understand it and are merely projecting their own interpretations.
Correct me if I am wrong, but you're using OpenAI simply to answer queries/questions, not to perform any actions. In that sense, it's not really an assistant. It's not creating reminders, sending texts, reading your messages, etc.
Is this what you're wanting from an OpenAI integration?
>>Tomorrow I can guarantee they will immediately cut costs and ship out piles of sideloaded garbage
Yeah except that's absolute nonsense because you could already do that on Android and yet I recall only one instance where a developer explicitly asked me to sideload an app(for Fortnite, no less). It's going to remain an incredible niche that will affect 0.00001% users at most.
Then what’s the point of forcing these companies to allow it? If it only affects such a small user base then money regulating it is clearly being wasted and should be used for something that will affect more people’s lives?
I think you are looking at it from the wrong perspective. It will affect hundreds of millions of iOS users. Whether these users choose to use their newly given freedom to install software not controlled by Apple is up to them - but the legislation affects 100% of iOS userbase.
(in hindsight I shouldn't have said it will affect 0.0001% users - maybe I should have said that I guess only that many users will choose to sideload software instead)
I'm thinking more of a smart fridge, or car app, or some other crap. I'm 99% sure a lot of them will stop going through the painful iOS process and just give you a QR code for their app
Actually yes it does. 3rd party app stores is where the majority of Android malware comes from. The vast majority of mobile malware is all Android for this reason. Whenever I need low hanging fruit for mobile malware analysis it’s always start at a third party Android App Store. It’s a dumpster fire.
iOS’ advantage is it’s walled garden. It’s a place where a lot of trust is curated for the nontechnical. This evaporates that.
What appears good for the highly technical is not always good for the user.
We can’t be expecting grandmothers to check signatures, ensure an app has certificates pinned, trust that a company won’t let its update domains lapse, and understand public key crypto to set up their GPG keys for a messaging alternative much less handle them properly. Hell I’ve had senior engineers send me their private GPG key when requesting their public key.
Delightful movement of the goal posts, highly technical move.
Your argument was that the moment there is no longer a need to be constrained by Apple's App Store rules, your Samsung dishwasher will make you install its app through Shady Store Incorporated, because it's easier, and it'll make your grandma install it.
Except that doesn't happen. Noone has done that. The highest profile case is Fortnite, and it makes you install it either through Epic Games, or the Samsung Galaxy Store, and the only reason for that is that Google feels entitled to taking 30% of transactions too.
That the EU's overreach has made a product worse for the majority of its users.
As a technical user, it doesn't bother me. When I consider many of my friends, it does bother me—most of them I know with non-iOS devices have complained about their devices moving slowly due to the junkware and the third-party app stores they've acquired (never F-Droid, always something sketchy). When I think about family members, I think about how web push notifications have rendered two of their phones borderline unusable.
Most "consumer-friendly" choices the EU makes are actually about developer & manufacturer profit. This isn't consumer-aligned. It eliminates the profit motive that's left iOS devices as more or less the only LTS phones on the market.
I don't like Apple products that much—I use Linux on my cell phone, but at the same time I refuse to adopt cheap rhetorical tactics to make app developers wealthier.
If they really wanted things to be consumer-friendly, they'd ban proprietary software. Instead, they make it easier for proprietary software developers to make profit off of users.
A convenient first step for European governments towards killing effective end-to-end cryptography usage in everyday messaging. It used to be checks notes „terrorism“ and „child safety“ and now the hot new thing is „interoperability“. Who would have thought, that of all the above, „interoperability“ would be the one that makes it into legislation.
Fact check: The Digital Markets Act explicitly calls out end-to-end encryption as a feature that MUST be preserved if the platform supports it.
From Article 7:
"The level of security, including the end-to-end encryption, where applicable, that the gatekeeper provides to its own end users shall be preserved across the interoperable services."
The way appositives work is that they qualify the preceding subject. Here you have two appositives so you can read "where applicable" as qualifying "including end-to-end encryption" or "the level of security." If "where applicable" is qualifying "the level of security" the staement reads "the level of security, where applicable, that the gatekeeper provides to its own end users shall be preserved accross the interoperable services." (And this seems to me the most accurate meaning. In any case it can be read that way.) Even if it is qualifying "the level of security" it is still in the end only "where applicable" which can still be read to mean the same thing. In fact, reading "where applicable" to mean "where already existing" as you implied, is redundant because it is already given in "shall be preserved" and "the level of security." Now we can read "where applicable" to imply that e2ee does not apply when the EU says it shouldn't.
Civil law countries don't like textualism. The spirit/intent of the law can often trump a literal interpretation of the text, so all this grammatical arguing is moot.
If we can ignore what the law says in favor of its spirit, then the law certainly means that the EU can "shut off" e2ee at any point, given their track record. Second, even if the above is false, it doesn't matter as whoever gets to decide "the spirit" of this law can say that it doesn't apply to terrorists, or doesn't apply durring x type of situation.
Apple currently provides no encryption at all when their users communicate with the owners of the 75% of mobile devices that are not Apple. Apple could do better for it's customers.
Well, the security coprocessor on every iPhone and Mac runs a formally verified operating system that manages the at-rest encrypted messages. Also, all software running on the phone is vetted before being allowed to hit consumer devices, which adds an extra level of security between malicious developers and kernel APIs.
There's no way Android will support that stuff across its entire ecosystem, so I guess it means the law is toothless? Maybe it means it will be up to each hardware manufacturer to ensure interoperability?
1. I don't think "formally verified" means what you want it to here. You mean there a hardware checks signature chain from boot to kernel, secure boot. Apple's software has too many security vulnerability to be considered "formally verified".
2. Android does support device attestation and secure boot. I 100% would love to see our future SMS replacement require frequent signatures from device attestation hardware (why not every message) and require E2EE messages.
This is not the kernel that runs on the host CPU. It is the one that handles keys in the security coprocessor. I don’t know of many hacks of that, in practice. There was one where you could guess the pin, and use a timing attack to power down the chip before it persisted the “bad guess” count, which let people brute force pins (with special hardware).
It’s worth noting that the kernel Apple ships is a fork of L4; no idea if they’ve introduced bugs since the paper was written.
Encrypted at rest does not actually do anything against interoperability of protocols (as I put in my comment), a secure element/coprocessor is nice but still does nothing against compatibility. Even if the entire protocol is somehow in the coprocessor (ala BPF/SGX) there is nothing preventing the counterparty from running it on a regular CPU.
Interoperability can break security properties though. If I send you an iMessage, I can be confident that someone that steals your phone (while it is locked) cannot read that message (ignoring things like state-sponsored attacks).
Prolonged unsupervised physical access is usually already seen as a compromise. Regardless although there is a lot more publicity on Apple's "online attack" difficulty, it's mostly the same story on any semi-recent version of android[0] (barring any unknown zero-days/backdoors from specific manufacturers).
I'm curious about this too. At least now I have fairly decent confidence that when I send an iMessage to someone, Apple protects their identity to whatever standard they have. Whatever trust I put in Apple, at least it's a single point of failure.
What happens if interoperability is enforced and messages have to be end-to-end encrypted? Wouldn't that mean that any side-loaded Android app would have to be able to get hold of my friend's private iMessage key?
On iOS I guess you could still keep the key private through Apple's SDK, but what about other platforms?
The protocol is just registering a public key for each device to the server-side directory. A device-specific private key is generated and kept client-side on every device that logs in to iMessage.
> On iOS I guess you could still keep the key private through Apple's SDK, but what about other platforms?
It's such a huge win for Facebook and Google - I'm not worried about "sideloaders", it lets them crack open the privacy of iMessage by simply having a view on conversations they can't see under the guise of interoperability.
The EU are just rolling a surveillance capitalist's wet dream with rulings like these.
I can't quite wrap my head around why people think that it is a good thing for Apple to be regulated into "opening up" (i.e. as opposed to being a "walled garden" platform).
If I were an entrepreneur, and say that I wanted to fork a Unix-like OS so that I could make a cross-device OS for consumer hardware that I, too, make---shouldn't I have the right to program my OS to seamlessly integrate only with the apps and the hardware that I want it to seamlessly integrate with (i.e., mine), because my suite of apps and hardware is exactly the kind of platform that I want to offer? Isn't it regulatory overreach when lawmakers are dictating how an OS should be designed and how a company should differentiate its product from the rest of the market?
Communication infrastructure is comparable to interstate networks, utilities, etc. If one is serving an appreciable percent of humanity expect to have your work, at least in part, and development avenues, decided for you by the governments representing the people you serve.
I believe there is a philosophical misunderstanding here. Your users do not exist to serve your whims. Your projects continued existence is not a right and is subject to the will of the people as decided by their representative governments. If that bothers you, perhaps you’re part of the problem? Collaboration is how humanity has survived so long and you’re seemingly arguing against that for your own fights of fancy without an iota of respect for the overwhelming population of people effected by your whims.
I struggle to wrap my head around how accomplished professionals can be so cavalier when speaking about civilization scale problems. I’m not sure if it’s hubris, mental illness, immaturity, or what. Regardless, it is revolting behavior to witness.
There's is a near infinite number of competitors to iMessage. There's Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Viber, Kik, Skype, Whatever Google Makes that they'll kill in six months, WeChat, Snapchat, Lime, Telegram... and I'm sure a bunch of others I've never heard of but other people live and die by. Not mention SMS and MMS.
As a result, I don't understand why people are so mad at iMessage that they need it crippled. You're not forced to use it. Apple doesn't block other messaging applications.
Plus, this law in question is a great foot in the door. Wait until they start lowering the monetary valuation of companies to slowly encompass all major messaging apps. At which point they'll have leveraged themselves right into a position of ending E2EE forever.
I know this thread is from the EU- but I'm giving the US perspective here just FYI.
>There's is a near infinite number of competitors to iMessage
50% of phones in the US are apple phones. Nearly everyone is exclusively using iMessage (and doesn't even realize that it's proprietary while trying to mix in SMS). Hardly anyone uses anything like whatsapp here. Good luck getting any somewhat older person to use multiple messaging apps. So to say there are an infinite number of competitors is completely disengenious.
>As a result, I don't understand why people are so mad at iMessage that they need it crippled. You're not forced to use it. Apple doesn't block other messaging applications
First, apple is not perfect with SMS integration. I was on android for many years. My mom (an apple fanatic) would constantly complain that her messages wouldn't go through, or my messages wouldn't come in. Apple has some SMS issues that, while rare, are either intentional to some degree or they refuse to fix. It got to the point that my mom literally wanted me to move to an iphone simply so I could message her properly.
THIS IS WHAT APPLE WANTS. You are absolutely a fool if you don't acknowledge that.
They have half the market share and create a walled garden to the point where people feel they must move to their platform simply to properly communicate with people.
That being said, I did move to iphone recently. Not just for this- I was sick of android because I want a phone that just works. However, even I felt compelled to just make the switch since everyone I know does use an iphone and iMessage will make it easier for me to communicate with everyone. It was definitely a large factor, even though I hate myself for doing it.
Apple is not innocent at all here- it's an objective fact that they have half the market share and specifically do not open up their messaging platform in order to get more people to switch over. It's a flagrant abuse of their power.
How is your entire comment not a mere assumption that the issue is within iMessage itself and not other logically possible factors, such as your carrier, your reception, or your mother using her phone incorrectly? Also, allowing alternative messaging apps to be installed in your OS is exactly the opposite of “flagrant abuse”.
>How is your entire comment not a mere assumption that the issue is within iMessage itself and not other logically possible factors, such as your carrier, your reception, or your mother using her phone incorrectly?
Because it's not an isolated incident. I've heard many people complain about the exact same thing online over the years. Just google it and you will see. Is it rare? Sure. But it's also not uncommon.
You point to "logically possible factors", but I never experienced ANY issues with SMS to SMS on android where a problem would be invisible. With SMS <> iMessage, the problem would be invisible: looks sent from one side, but the other has zero indication of an issue.
And Apple is under no incentive to 'fix' this or guarantee it never happens because they have a blatant interest in everyone using iMessage by getting iphones.
Is this slightly conspiracy theory talk? I agree it borders that. But I also think it's 100% realistic.
>Also, allowing alternative messaging apps to be installed in your OS is exactly the opposite of “flagrant abuse”.
Apple SPECIFICALLY does not open up iMessage to non-Apple platforms because they want you to buy their phones- something they share a duopoly with. That is the very DEFINITION of market abuse.
If Microsoft had some Windows-only messaging platform, most people on this site would be all up in arms about it.
> Apple SPECIFICALLY does not open up iMessage to non-Apple platforms because they want you to buy their phones- something they share a duopoly with. That is the very DEFINITION of market abuse.
I don't think that's the definition of market abuse at all. Apple created a device and bundled a free "good enough" messaging service with it. If you want to use something else, there's nothing stopping you beyond inertia. Apple clearly isn't going out of it's way to hinder adoption of alternative messaging services.
You misunderstand—it’s not a mystery that scale attracts regulation. The mystery is in why people think that OS engineers should have no freedom to make design choices. Where, even, is the disrespect in being a mere option amongst many? It’s not like Apple is forcing people to buy into their ecosystem.
And to your point about comms infrastructure—how does interoperability across messaging apps even look like, and does the idea even make sense? It’s not specified within the article.
> The mystery is in why people think that OS engineers should have no freedom to make design choices.
Are you employed or vested in this industry? This rhetoric is disingenuous and can be seen as bad faith argumentation. We are, rather explicitly, not talking about mere design decisions. We’re actually discussing the functionality of one of the largest messaging providers in the world with one the largest valuations in the world. You should keep the facts of the topic in mind and not detour into baseless hypotheticals that are antithetical to TFA.
> Where, even, is the disrespect in being a mere option amongst many?
We’re not talking about a guy in his garage. When a company, as large as apple, provides a service they enter a social contract to provide a reasonable quality of service for all users. Apple is willfully and repeatedly violating this contract. Hence, they are being held to account by the governments comprised of their users and enacting the will of said governments constituents.
>It’s not like Apple is forcing people to buy into their ecosystem.
By deliberately differentiating between customers and non customers in the quality of service experienced by their customers and those non customers their customers communicate with they are exerting market force. TFA is about the EU responding to this force with force.
> how does interoperability across messaging apps even look like, and does the idea even make sense?
This is likely the purview of an organization like ISO. If this is such an alien idea to you, perhaps you should expound on your perspective because at first blush it seems to me that you don’t understand the history of how modern communications were developed and implemented.
No, we're not talking about messaging apps in my comment tree. We're explicitly (without your dishonest "rather") talking about the design of OSes in consumer-facing hardware, and whether or not a messaging app comes with that is moot. Discussing hypothetical OSes matters, and always when it comes to regulation, because you don't want to recklessly regulate new entrants out of the market. Or do you just hate critical thinking?
Feel free to provide better data, but Apple's platforms do not even have majority market share in the EU---not enough to backup anything that you said of entering an unspoken social contract when a company reaches a certain undefined scale: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/europe/
You should know that the Messages app works with SMS so you have to specify where the difference in quality of service is when an Android device can't receive an iMessage.
So, again, what exactly is the interoperability issue? Is it that iMessage chats can't be read from Telegram, and that WhatsApp chats can't be sent to a user's Signal account? Or you just can't think of a specific use case because underneath all that snark, you really know nothing about how software is made?
If you are starting to corner the market and are able to use your leverage to block competitors in a way that threatens to undermine their business, then the EU (and to an extend the USA) will regulate you.
I can flip your question around and ask "should you have the right to play dirty?". Which is what Apple has been doing, there's exactly zero good reason to not license out access to the protocol.
I don't own Apple, I am a consumer. If this leads to me not having to install 5 different chat clients, I am grateful. It was the exact same with all the proprietary charging plugs for smartphones.
> there's exactly zero good reason to not license out access to the protocol.
There's at least three good reasons:
* Keeping the protocol private is a competitive advantage
* Licensing a protocol and managing those licensees is not free
* A shared protocol dramatically decreases Apple's ability to innovate on top of that protocol
I would argue that it'd be worth while to ignore these issues if Apple was hampering competition in the messaging space, but I just don't see it. I can easily use any messaging app I want on my phone, the only thing stopping me is that iMessage is good enough.
Wait, there must be more to it. If this is open to the competition to build on, what exactly is the EU forcing Apple to open up?
I'm too lazy to research why exactly Microsoft can't use this API to interface with iMessage and instead opting for a half-baked bluetooth solution, but there must be some hurdle.
They aren't banning a company from seamlessly integrating their apps with the OS. They are essentially banning companies from preventing the seamless integration of 3rd party apps into the OS. Additionally, this law only applies to major companies.
It could well be, remember the state (police) have the monopoly on the evidence gathering process for criminal prosecutions. I sometimes think the fictional authoring skills of the Police is highly under estimated, certainly their criminal ingenuity and sexual depravity as undercover cops is all state sanctioned.
This is one of those things which sounds great on the surface, but isn't going to work out like they assume it will. It just seems like it'll end up being SMS 2.0.
For example Meta's Instagram chat doesn't even have feature parity across devices. Let alone into their other properties, so the idea that they'd be able to telegraph features into some interoperable standard isn't realistic, however I can imagine them slashing features until they meet the required level of interoperability.
At its core the problem is that governments write tech legislation under the wrong assumption that these companies will take it then innovate from that point onwards - but that's not how it plays out. Developers aren't mind readers, so the moment the government says they're interested in legislating how some kind of service should be run, development freezes in wait of the final legislation (and if need be, any court cases that may stem from that legislation.)
From this point development is focused on meeting the legislative requirements and the usually short timelines imposed by the EU (Because bugs never happen and testing is just something we do for lolz.)
Depending on the wording of the legislation there are limited opportunities to differentiate the product and there is the constant risk that the EU interprets any new features as an attempt to circumvent the legislation. So the best thing to do is just put the product out to pasture.
I'm also entirely of the mind that this is simply not needed. What is so hard in closing one chat app and opening another? The majority of people in the EU are using whatsapp, and new entrants are constant. This just seems like such a non-issue, especially as the mac notification system allows for immediate replies regardless of where the message came from, that is totally abstracted.
It's the same every time. When Apple gets called out for monopolistic anti-consumer behaviour, an army shows up to defend Apple with a bunch of FUD.
No, it won't hurt you or your grandma that you can choose app store, choose browser engine, choose payment provider, that you can charge with usb c, etc., and in this case that non-apple users won't be mocked with different colored bubbles and other limitations. Every concern is either blown out of proportions or can easily be solved with the slightest bit of willpower.
Choice leads to better competition and thus better products whereas lock-in leads to complacency and stagnancy.
On the other hand, why is such a tiny, tiny fraction of people so insistent on invading the Apple ecosystem?
I made my choice for Apple in part because of its relatively closed nature compared to its only meaningful competitor. But it was a choice. I used to be the biggest anti-Apple person, too. Until I used their products. The quality is just superior in every way that consumers actually care about. Hypothesis: a substantial fraction of current Android users would switch if they could afford an iPhone (either by a price drop from Apple or an increase in their disposable income).
Wow, what a sanctimonious, holier than thou attitude.
I can easily afford an Apple phone, it's weird that you would even mention the price because they're not expensive compared to top end Android phones. But I wouldn't touch one with a 10ft pole.
I'm a power user who customizes everything and needs to do lots of nerdy things like use dvorak keyboard layout, ssh to my home server, use apps connected to services on my home server, use an offline password manager, "sideload" all kinds of shit that would never be allowed in their crappy dongle-addicted consumer-hostile "ecosystem", write my own apps, etc, etc. I prefer to have local backups/encryption keys, and as little cloud profile as possible.
I'm already irritated even just thinking about being forced to use an iPhone. "Quality is superior", HAAHAHA. I've actually worked supporting macOS stuff before. HAHAHAHA.
Yes I know I'm not the target market for Apple crap but Apple's success encourages other corporations to do the same bullshit.
I love computers, always have. I always thought Computers should make human lives better, more enjoyable and more connected, not be a mechanism to segment society and shovel more disposable dongles and earpods.
So I'm insistent on the government "invading" the Apple ecosystem because the Apple ecosystem is an anticompetitive cancer that infects other corporations, normalizing terrible behavior and creating arbitrary limits on the usefulness of computers where there should be none.
Of course it's more lucrative to milk your victims... That's why when corporations step over the line, governments need to step in. Yes I know how rarely that works properly.
Fuck Apple and fuck Apple apologists. They're ruining technology one dongle at a time.
We can’t have choice if bodies like the EU (led by appointed, not elected, politicians) decide on technical standards.
It’s egregious that the EU will force a lowest-common-denominator implementation of messaging on independent private companies who, up to this point, have all been innovating in this space.
The EU desperately wants to compromise end to end encryption, so we KNOW that that the EU is not acting in the public interest when it comes to legislating messaging services.
I’m taking the leap that you’re from the US - if you’re not, then the first comment may not apply to you.
> bodies like the EU (led by appointment, not elected politicians) decide on technical standards
The president of the United States is not directly elected.They are voted by the electoral college, which introduces all the problems of gerrymandering. EU council are appointed - by politicians from each country, directly elected. You could argue it is less problematic.
> will force a lowest-common-denominator implementation on independent private companies who, up to this point, Havel all been innovating in this space
I prefer to see this as “they will mandate a minimum interoperaability standard on a public, regulated, communications service, which is conceded by the nations. And colouring bubbles green or blue is not innovation. Neither is refusing to work with others that have at least as good implementations just to keep your walled garden.
> the EU desperately wants to compromise end to end encryption
Not “the EU”, some council members. A sufficiently large number of EU countries are adamantly against that proposed legislation, it has more chance of not passing at this point.
I’m from the U.K. which is why I care deeply about representative democracy. Our system has stood the test of time.
You criticise companies for “refusing to work with others” on messaging. Why should companies be forced into a cartel-like relationship with each other? Surely innovation absolutely depends on companies independently creating new technologies and benefiting from that R&D directly? How can consumers have choice, and how can innovation flourish if companies are required to collude, rather than compete, on developing products?
This proposal is not intended to force Apple to work with anybody else. It’s intended to stop them from actively preventing others from working with them.
The example given in a few other comments is allowing anyone to build an iMessage capable app for Android. There’s no requirement that Apple builds this themselves, but it’s currently impossible and/or restricted by Apple. I don’t know enough about the How to comment on that part.
Do you understand how Apple does true end-to-end encryption with trusted enclave device keys? Or how they can now allow you to prevent Apple themselves from being able to see any of your data?
Do you follow why e.g. third party password vault companies can enable certain key protocols on newer Macs and iOS devices they can't on most other devices?
Apple's not just software. It's not just hardware. It's an experience built from logic expressed in both bits and circuits that works together to provide a solution.
Clamoring to be let into the middle of the stack misunderstands the nature of Apple's product offering, which is a trusted curated experience.
Passing rules against this effectively removes this option from the consumer marketplace, depriving consumers of the full-product (software and hardware seamlessly united to offer a capability impossible when separate) choice.
To be clear, nothing stops anyone else from also offering a comprehensive product with stronger guarantees and richer experience. But it's easier to be mad that Apple's users stay in the walled garden (they are lovely places, btw, there's a reason wealthy people build them!) instead of wanting riff raff to come in hawking their wares strewing litter everywhere. It's easier to incite the pop pitchforks and "we're doing something here" government critters.
The UK’s “democracy” is a joke. Between an unelected head of state, first past the post and the most corrupt financial system on earth, almost any country does better.
The UK has an elected Prime Minister who acts as the head of state in all meaningful functions. The monarch has held a merely ceremonial position since 1688 (the Glorious Revolution).
Regarding electoral systems, I'd choose PR over FPTP, because PR suits my political aims at the current time.
Despite this, I understand the benefits of FPTP as a system, and I can see why a country with a long-running and mature democracy (like the UK) would want it. It's important that political parties are forced to develop a long-term record, and credibility. If we ditch FPTP, then single-issue parties will come and go frequently, allowing bad politicians to go somewhat unchecked.
In terms of corrupt financial systems, I think you need to read up on some history if you think the UK has the worst. Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, North Korea, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Russia. And of course, the US, whose regulatory failures, speculation and novel (AKA sketchy) forms of debt caused the World's largest economic shocks in both the 20th and 21st centuries.
It does hurt as far as payment for me. Subscriptions with Apple Pay is where it’s at, one place to manage all subscriptions way outside the control of developers is peak use ability imo. I can personally get behind a different browser engine and maybe App Store but I hope they leave Apple Pay alone.
I think you mean app store subscriptions. Apple Pay and app store subscriptions are two different things.
But I do agree with you; I see three likely scenarios:
1. An application offers two payment options: app store and standalone, with a "discount" given to standalone.
2. They change nothing
3. They remove app store subscriptions and force you to their website/app for managing payment/subscription.
If an app chooses option 3, this is where the user is "hurt". I don't see this happening often because I would wager that a service's subscription numbers would take a massive hit. Too many users are accustom to the simplicity that has been offered by in-app purchases/subscriptions.
Green bubbles are limited in terms of contents too. iMessage allows uncompressed video and images whereas the regular messages are limited to smaller compressed videos and images.
Making iMessage available to android would be nice, but there’s no way Apple would make it convenient.
The Digital Markets Act [0] was voted, published, and parts of it will be applicable as of beginning of May 2023.
Some technical workshops [1] are being organized with interested stakeholders to receive their views on specific issues and questions that may arise in relation to the specific implementing measures by gatekeepers that are to ensure effective compliance with that legislation.
If stars align right for Apple, this can at least with some probability that they can kill WhatsApp in a few countries. If they implement a few features.
Lmao. How? This just means that msging apps on Android will finally be able to break the blue bubble problem. There will be even less incentive for ppl to switch to iphone to enjoy the 'privilege'
> it's not a thing here in the Netherlands at least. People use Whatsapp.
Then you have a super blue bubble effect if everyone uses WhatsApp then you don’t communicate with people who aren’t on WhatsApp.
My understanding of the blue bubble isn’t that the color matters it’s that iMessage functions only work with other iMessage users (eg, delivery is slightly different, sync with other devices, special emojis, reactions, etc). So if there’s one “green bubble” (ie, non-iMessage user) then the entire group text is downgraded to not do iMessage stuff.
There is no bubble because literally everyone has whatshapp. It's even available on "dumb phones". I've never met anyone of any age who doesn't have it.
Hello there, nice to meet you. Life without Whatsapp is not easy in the Netherlands, but is possible. The "super bubble" exists though, and it sucks. Most problems come from the "literally everyone has whatshapp" crowd like you, by the way, the people who deny the existence of the bubble.
Could you please stop making my life harder? No, not "literally everyone" has Whatsapp: I don't. Agreeing to T&C of some foreign corporation should not be a precondition to participating in the society, don't you think?
Yeah can confirm that I'm another one in the boat of "would drop WA since Facebook owns it", but it's just borderline unviable to do so if I don't want to make my life much more difficult/put extra stress on all my IRL social connections.
It's hard to understand it if you don't live in NL just how extremely omnipresent WhatsApp is. People use it for everything, from casual family chatter to highly serious conversations to quite literally business-related conversations. Not having WA will absolutely result in things like missing crucial information because "we send it in the WhatsApp group" and that of course in turn will be used as a mark against you when you're say, seeking a job.
This occurred before Facebook bought it and their recent T&S change that allows them to use WA usage to improve their algorithms basically was a case of "enjoy being forced to share your data with no recourse". There was tons of social pushback about it but nobody could do anything about it because the app is so entrenched.
I am thoroughly looking forward to the DMA and its impact on WhatsApp.
I think you're misrepresenting (or misunderstanding) the matter.
WhatsApp can be installed on any device. iMessage requires specific hardware, i.e. an Apple iPhone.
It is always possible not to use either and just communicate by SMS (which I prefer myself, but as I understand it WhatsApp came to be used here in Belgium because phone plans are expensive and SMS are still limited/paid on most plans) but that's a different matter.
> I think you're misrepresenting (or misunderstanding) the matter.
The matter here is that the commenter I was responding to says I don't exist. My experience is that folks with that attitude also treat me as if I don't exist. I object to both of these things.
Selling your first-born rights for a lentil soup, or agreeing to adversarial T&C of a foreign corporation should not be a precondition for participating in a society.
You have my Respect (although the person you're responding to probably doesn't mean it like you take it). I probably could only do it while feeling good about it by self-hosting some Matrix bridge. Actually, I'd still feel bad because I'd support the system.
Well, as a parent it really is difficult, you constantly have to explain yourself and arrange alternatives. Some context: Texting (SMSing we call it) is f-ing expensive here, ridiculous (25 ct/message? Unless you buy a plan, but why should you? There is Whatsapp... Nobody is going to use SMS with you, any parent will probably think: "Are you making me send an SMS [to come pick up your kid], really?").
Take heart, times are a-changing, even in sophisticated and freedom loving Netherlands. Its been a long oppresive period where the lemming mob would simply bully you: "I don't recognize your concerns, I don't care, I can't be bothered". But nowadays you definitely see some inroads of e.g., Signal.
But its a steep upward slope to climb. Lots of data-siphoning apps are painted on buses or splash on city ad "walls" but whatsapp is actually a permanent fixture of the urban landscape in so-called "neighbourhood watch signs". A creepy dystopic image if there was one.
> There is no bubble because literally everyone has whatshapp
Given how much Europeans bitch about America and American corporations, I continue to be dumbfounded by the tremendous love for Whatsapp. It's made by Facebook FFS. I am pretty amazed at the number of people who are happier with Facebook managing their private communications than they are Apple.
Or, it's just network effect and a lot of rationalization. That's the simpler answer.
Definitely not, we got lured into it by the original WA owners under (later) false pretenses. Back when we would just pay a euro one time, or every year with a big focus on privacy.
Now it's just everywhere, helpdesks, schools, classes, parents, sportsclubs. All WA groups sadly. We even have this: [0], like it's some government sanctioned platform. Disgusting.
I am getting more and more people into Signal though. Some geeks on Element.io.
Hey, my neighborhood also has a sign like that!
The WhatsApp dominance is the network effect in full force.
I have WhatsApp, SMS, Signal, Telegram, Element/Matrix. Telegram is used just for some nerdy international group and the API from my smart oower meter, the rest is WhatsApp only.
It’s our government endorsing the use of an (in my opinion) horrible and closed platform. It’s public money being spend to promote a commercial company that’s not even Dutch and has a horrible privacy track record. Our local pirate party seems to agree, I’m always glad I voted for them when I read stuff like this: [0], what’s perhaps more crazy is that in that piece it is argued that WhatsApp is just how we call group chat apps :s.
And I bet in classical Apple style, they would definitely gimp the Android iMessage app restricting some features, just to spite Android users and try to force them to buy iPhones.
Android users will still be second class citizens so the transition off Whatsapp or Signal will not happen.
Now that would be the stupidest thing to do, why would they want Android users to think that Apple services are broken? Shouldn't they do the exact opposite and have a really good app giving Android users a glimpse of the holy iPhone land?
That's what I was thinking but no, that was never the case with apple.
If iMessage was as good on Android as it is on iOS, why would Android users switch? Or why would people buy iPhones in the first place?
Internal documents from Apple prove that they had builds of iMessage ready for Android but never released them because Apple knew iMessage was one moat that kept the userbase loyal and annoyed Android users enough through the bubble color discrimination to make them switch to iphone. Like parents heading down cheaper iPhones to kids instead of buying them android phones so they can all use iMessage.
FaceTime is currently available for Android users as well but the experience is shit to prove Android is poor and that iOS is the only way to go for the full experience.
I'm not making all this UB but tech YouTubers extensively covered Apple's iMessage moat with proof and arguments and how this works in their favor so I won't go into all the details.
It's a messaging app, you can either pretend people will give 2 flocks about not being able to message you "in the right color", or you know, install Whatsapp or any other competing messenger
This isn't at all aimed at Apple, it's aimed at Facebook. Apple already has SMS messaging integrated, it just has a green bubble and there's nothing in the proposal that would force Apple to change anything about how the messages are presented.
There's nothing in the regulation saying Apple has to make everything look the same, they're free to put whatever color they want on third party integrations.
Its a joke that people here seem not to get because I did not add /s at the end. Obviously there is no superiority, but its pretty clear that green bubble design makes it unpleasant to look at [1]
What do you mean by kill WhatsApp? This wouldn't make iMessage available to everyone. It would just enforce iMessage users being able to talk with others. Which, if Apple actually implemented it in non-malicious way, would let people who use an iPhone mostly because of iMessage migrate away.
They probably won't, and even if they did, I won't hold my breath.
As it is the difference between sending photos via iMessage vs sending photos via WhatsApp is like night and day. I don't know how Apple managed to f. that up but if I have to send more than 2-3 photos the app asks me to do horizontal scrolling, which is not optimal, to say the least.
Plus the very process of sending and receiving the photos themselves seems very clunky in comparison.
I don't think that will be enough, yeah sure compatibility with Android will help imessage but they will also need some big marketing change, right now it's marketed as an SMS app and SMS is pretty much a dead platform in the EU
I don't see how they could, iMessage is severely lacking in features compared to WhatsApp and users don't like change, iMessage doesn't need to have feature parity but it has to be massively better - and so far it's not
you don't need whatsapp desktop app, just go to web.whatsapp.com in browser, why would anyone bother with app (which can't be even installed on work computers)
I like the desktop app better as it’s integrated better and thus easier to use. I have notifications set up for many different apps not just messages so I want them all to function the same.
Also, I just think native apps still perform better than web apps.
The WhatsApp desktop beta for macOS is built using Catalyst, and it's pretty nice. Catalyst is when an iOS and macOS app share one codebase, but can have different interfaces. I've been using it for a few weeks and no complaints so far. I believe the stable version app is Electron (or some web technology). The beta is full on native now!
Not sure how it can be easier to use than already supereasy web app, notifications work same via browser and you don't need to install anything, these are really no arguments for desktop app.
If you would say desktop app can do voice/video calls which you actually use (I don't, not gonna open laptop with closed lid and external display for that) I can understand using the desktop app, but for someone who doesn't need voice/video calls on computer and is fine with better camera in phone there is no benefit in installing additional dedicated app.
I understand it very well, that's why I asked for explanation why/how is desktop app easier to use than already very easy web app and how are notifications in desktop app different from web app. But thanks for your valuable input which provided me with definite explanation, although I didn't ask for it and I asked user I was conversing with.
As a ThinkPad Linux user, how can I run this iMessage desktop app you speak of?
There isn’t even iMessage functionality in iCloud.com despite the breadth of other Apple products and services being there. Kinda odd how they left that one out, no?
Does anyone know whether there's any implication for Signal? Will they have to comply as well and make their app interoperable with other messaging apps?
No, because the regulation would only apply to market-leading "gatekeepers", with thresholds for revenues after which it would apply, so Signal are safe.
I read a while ago that the regulation will require them to build an API that other apps can access it, so you could use an alternative app if you want to. I'm not sure if they will force them to receive messages from other services.
I don't get it. Isn't SMS the cross platform open standard to send text messages? Why force a proprietary product to open up? Feels like a big overreach of governmental powers.
SMS is currenty being undermined by Google's RCS on Android.[0] Some SMSes sent by Google Messages already don't arrive at non-RCS clients. So that also should be forced to open up. In fact, this is a large part of why Signal is dropping SMS support.[1]
Wouldn't the world be a better place with interoperable messaging standards and needing only a single messaging app for global communication?
Yes.
Is this happening organically via market forces?
No. That's why.
If there were a common standard that was widely supported and cross-app compatible, these regulations wouldn't have happened. Email doesn't cut it for real time messaging. Governments will pursue no brainer policy like this if the private sector doesn't reach the conclusion on their own.
A common protocol doesn't prevent progress or evolution. Look how far browsers have come over the past 20 years, all while working off common HTML, CSS, and JS specs. Would the world be a better place if there were the Apple internet, and the Google internet, instead of a common one?
If there's a vested interest in making something better, it gets better. Walled gardens for basic messaging communication has 0 societal benefit, and there's effectively no downside to adopting a common protocol. Societies are now demanding that obvious problems with easy solutions be solved, and thus the various governments will.
Perhaps some think that the internet would've been better as a series of distributed walled gardens under various single private entities... I can't contend with people who hold that belief. Having easy and common ways to interact with the rest of humanity that anybody can participate in freely seems a far better outcome.
Unfortunately far too many Apple zombies out there that will contort obvious logic to defend them at every opportunity. The distortion field is really something to behold
As nice as interoperability (and the accompanying possibility of something like a modern-day Adium) is, I worry that this will introduce SMS' rampant spam problems to iMessage and the various other messaging services that will also be required to open up.
Part of the reason spam is so rare on iMessage is because it requires an iCloud account on an Apple device, which not only raises the barrier to entry significantly but also means that spammers are easily dealt with via account and device serial bans.
Interesting, I've received maybe a single digit number of the course of a decade and some change. SMS spam on the same number and on a number only used on an Android phone is much more frequent.
The source article [1] claims that " the largest messaging services (such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage) will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms"
I am very intrigued to see how the various platforms will enable such features in software terms - WhatsApp recently allowed the usage of proxies via their platform, and there is talk of Apple maintaining the Made for iPhone program when they roll over to USB-C which is allowed under the "USB-C for phones" law they passed recently. So expect some creative applications/interpretations of the DMA.
I think it'll work similar to telegram, they'll "open up" without the E2EE aspect and basically enable a "compatibility" mode. Otherwise, and being more cynical, this does feel like a 'ploy' to get around E2EE by making large, privacy-focused platforms such as Signal 'open up' (I do wonder if Signal would be classified under the rules for turnover etc). Suppose it depends on the final text of the law and how lawyers interpret what "opening up" means. Haven't really seen much about what the EU is going to expect there.
But if we are cynical, expect the end of E2EE messaging apps entirely.
The actual law does say they have to keep E2EE enabled.
>The level of security, including the end-to-end encryption, where applicable, that the gatekeeper provides to its own end users shall be preserved across the interoperable services. [0]
As for forcing them to open up, I think Matrix has a good response to it [1]. As well as their follow-up technical implementation article [2].
Like most approaches to antitrust enforcement, this one is probably meaningless at best, and might also result in the loss of choice for customers.
Apple will probably make it very, very challenging to access this "open" iMessage outside of EU, and/or will make it very uncomfortable to use (especially for competing developers, but we've already seen this with the blue/green imessage bubbles)
Microsoft responded to a similar 'integration' sort of scenario with neutered versions of Windows (such as Windows N/Windows KN) that almost no one outside of the targeted areas would choose, which is almost certainly similar to how Apple will respond.
They might also release different versions of hardware with different components missing. In fact, Apple has already responded this way already, with regional iPhones:
* Japan iPhones have an obnoxious shutter-click sound because that's required for all cameras, so people know when they're being photographed.
* Chinese iPhones have no option to make Audio Facetime calls, only video.
* United Arab Emirates (UAE) do not support Facetime at all.
So, I don't see that this will likely result in much change at this point. Apple has proven itself to be smart, wily, and very aggressive about flouting laws or regulations that might reduce its stranglehold on its customers.
I love this idea. I've always been a proponent of the idea that a base protocol for a "thing" should be implemented and supported by major companies, so that it's interoperable across all devices. Then if they want to layer some custom stuff on top and disable it if one device doesn't support it then fine.
For iot it would be amazing; government should mandate that all iot devices have a common communication method/channel (local where possible) so that they're totally interoperable.
Everyone cries about innovation etc etc but think about Apple: they love their custom stuff like this, iMessage, Lightning, AirDrop etc, they always come up with such nice marketable names. But where would they be without supporting _standard_ bluetooth/wifi as well, hmm?
Tbh I think if Apple _could_ get away with it then they'd create their own "AirConnectProMax" wireless communication standard and force everyone to buy new routers that only work with iPhones and MacBooks.
> For iot it would be amazing; government should mandate that all iot devices have a common communication method/channel (local where possible) so that they're totally interoperable.
Honestly this is suprisingly close to how it works for a fair subset of devices. I.e. I can get basically any zigbee enabled device and expect it to work with my home assistant setup.
Is that a problem worldwide or more localized to the US? I am using Signal, Threema, and WhatsApp and never received spam on any messanger, only occasionally via SMS.
I live 10,000km away from the US and can confirm that I get more spam on androids than when using iMessage. It wasn’t the main reason I switched back to iOS with my newest phone but it was a reason.
Maybe it depends on the Android vendor, but my OnePlus' "Messages" (the SMS app) automatically blocks a lot of spam messages automatically and it's quite good at it. On the contrary I have friends with iPhones who get spam/phishing messages.
Via SMS like everyone else with a mobile phone here, and especially around election dates. Apple’s done a few things recently to mitigate this and last election I reported a lot of phone numbers for spam to my carrier using a mechanism Apple built-in; so we’ll see if it starts to make a difference within a couple of years time.
To add my own: I've received one, maybe two spam SMS messages in my entire life, none at all in the last few years. I have received one or two spam messages in WhatsApp.
Ok but I was talking about dedicated messenger apps, not the messaging feature of what are basically social media apps. Those are all full of spam if you've got enough contacts and liked enough things.
No I don't have data to back it up. I say this because I vaguely recall reading somewhere that the reason why apple/google cooperation broke down was because apple insisted on banning spammers and google didn't want to. I have no idea where I saw that other than it was mentioned in a HN comment somewhere.
I remember that it made sense and seemed plausible to me at the time because I've also actually never received a spam iMessage in my whole life. It never even occurred to me in that moment this was the case until I read that comment and was like, "O yeah, right, I've actually never gotten spam on iMessage come to think of it." I just assumed that to spend spam via iMessage required apple hardware or that for one reason or another it just wasn't very viable.
On the other hand, I have gotten a lot of sms spam in the past, and I continue to get spam on WhatsApp.
As a side note, my sms spam has decreased dramatically after I ported my mobile number to google voice vs. when my carrier was T-Mobile. It's anecdotal but still telling.
There are people in this discussion posting opposite experiences from you, so it's probably all anecdata either way. But I think it's a convincing argument that SMS is significantly more vulnerable to spam because the price of entry is negligible and it lacks the traceability that comes with a requirement to have an Apple ID to use iMessage.
I hope you're reporting the spam you get to Apple, because the fastest way to stop it is to have the offending account terminated.
Android tablet, that is. If it's an iPad, you're SOL completely.
Even funnier is that the new native app for macOS [0] (i.e. not using Electron) is made with Catalyst… a tool made for porting iPad apps to macOS.
Somewhere, someone at WhatsApp works on a version of the app for the SOLE PURPOSE of porting it to another platform, while NOT releasing the original. It's completely baffling.
They have changed it now. You can have first class clients on both a tablet and a phone. At least, that's how it is on Android (have WhatsApp installed natively on a phone and a tablet, also use it via web client on desktop).
When an application has ideas for enhancing the messaging experience, who governs those changes? What if an application refuses to incorporate those changes, or refuses to make those changes interoperable?
And who decides which application(s) are forced to implement those enhancements?
For example, iMessage supports iMessage apps. I imagine providing interoperability for those would be a monumental task, if not impossible. Would Apple now be forced to abandon its iMessage app store due to lack of interoperability?
Or does this new law apply only to the core tenants of a message application? That a message app must only be interoperable with other apps/services in the sense that it can send and receive basic text?
Of course they are. Another step toward making sure they are able to harvest every message that flows through the system. Using "consumer choice" and "anti-competitive practices" are strong, useful levers to get what they want.
I don't need Apple Message to work with Facebook or Android.
Who wants that? All it means is spammers from Facebook are going to find me on Apple Message. Oof.
Why do we think having government mandating what tech can do, or how tech can work, is a good thing?
Apple has made two dumb decisions in 40 years... the touchbar on the MBP, and all the dongles on the last-gen of MBP. Everyone is allowed to fail, but jumping straight to, "We need government to tell companies how things should work..." No, that's fucking cringe.
This just comes across as super anti-American. "We don't like that American companies doing stuff, let's penalize them!"
Hey, it's only been 12 years, wait a few more decades and a few more billions of dollars and it will surely happen, when a VP there wants to get fired.
I don't care about Messages (somehow most of my friends have an iPhone and noone use it), but it would be nice to have at least basic interoperability between the biggest chat software. I mean it's very annoying to have some apps like X, Y, Z for a few contacts while most of the other are in A and B. A nice feature of Windows Phone 7 at release was it's consolidated chat app that allowed to send SMS, chat with people on Fb Messenger, and people on Skype.
It's disgraceful that Apple has been able to fragment/break something as fundamental as "SMS with extra sprinkles" for so many years.
I know people who are trapped on iOS because they will become second-class citizens within their social circles if they "downgrade" to an android phone.
Opening up iMessage is a decent move, but we also need to get RCS well-supported everywhere so that we can all share a reasonably modern communication foundation.
Horrible idea. Really what the regulation states is that iMessage must be interoperable with other chat apps.
In order words, if it wants to improve its service, it will need to get buy in from a committee of its competitors.
This is a solution in search of a problem. Consumers today can choose from iMessage, Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack, Google Chat. There's competition, and there's so many great options for each person. This regulation can only make things worse.
As someone who benefitted greatly from the era when thirdparty MSNP clients were extremely common, I think they need to do the same with Microsoft Teams.
The seems to be an organized slow and steady push to turn computers into consoles for the vast majority of users. They use "privacy" "security" "protect children" etc etc as methods to move closer in this direction. I worry we will end up with one (or two) unified "approved" messaging platform and all sorts of tech will be added to your device as binary blobs that run scans on your device.
Looking and ChromeOS, iOS, and even direction taking by Windows 11.
I’d argue that is already the case, with the secure enclave. They don’t need to ‘make it so’.
Allowing other apps must not cause the protocol to be less secure
iMessage is an exclusive Apple application/service that differentiates them over others and they should not be forced to open it up at all (and I don't even use it). This is clearly overreach and I don't see Apple doing anything of the kind.
How ridiculous. A big reason I buy Apple products is because of the walled garden. This feels like Europeans interjecting theirselves into my personal life and personal opinions. Hopefully Apple decides to just drop iMessage support for Europe instead of ruining a great product that Americans want to keep.
Looking at the amount of applications I have in the messaging folder on my iPhone, it doesn't seem to me that opening up iMessage is that necessary. From what I understand in the US it's more common for people who have iPhones to stick to iMessage but in Europe not so much.
I think it's more about the prevalence of iPhones amongst young people. If most of your friends don't have iPhones, then it makes more sense to use a messaging system everybody can use. US has ~60% iOS market share, European countries have 20-40. Especially for group chats, if you have 10 people in a group, there is very little probability everybody will have an iPhone.
Another way of seeing it is that Europe maintains a standard of living high enough, that US companies are interested in the European user base. Then the EU is legitimate in demanding whatever for access to that market. I find nothing wrong with that.
Since they seem to be determined to legislate every detail of the product, from ports used to software protocols, maybe they should indeed just skip the middleman and acquire the phone makers.
> Since they seem to be determined to legislate every detail of the product, from ports used to software protocols, maybe they should indeed just skip the middleman and acquire the phone makers.
And in every case where they don't legislate it, companies don't give a crap.
Silly example. I went to buy a broom/mop stick to use with broom/mop heads I had at home.
Guess what, they stopped making the original, and 3 different supermarkets had slightly different stick diameters, so they weren't compatible with the other brands.
I really need that level of innovation in my life...
A 40 billion dollar fine if you don’t do as the EU says… at some point tech companies are just going to pull out of the EU, right? For most (but not all!), GDPR was worth complying with (and had benefits for citizens). This is likely to also be worth complying with (and also has benefits for citizens), but I imagine the EU is going to run out of ideas that legitimately benefit users long before it runs out of desire to levy huge fines.
If you pull out of the EU you've now created a unified market of half a billion consumers that need a alternative to your product. That seems like a good way to kickstart a competitor.
If Apple just pulls iMessage from EU, nothing changes, the competitor already exists, is already dominant, and is a US Silicon Valley social media company.
Except EU is not a single market: there's 27 countries, speaking multiple languages, having different laws, so to serve the EU you need at least a dozen versions of your app.
Also, EU has just decided that this half billion of consumers will be downgraded to the third world standard of living (google "Fit for 55"), so they won't really have much money to spend on tech toys anyway...
The only way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55% is to push everyone into poverty, basically. Make the car ownership too expensive for common folks, as well as meat consumption, buying new clothes, heating your apartment in winter, air travel, and more.
Why wouldn’t massive buildout of nuclear energy plants allow hitting that greenhouse emission goal while simultaneously tripling the amount of power used per person?
That's an extremely uncharitable and snarky answer given the open-ended nature of my question.
Thorium reactors don't use either and a fusion reactor wouldn't involve any isotope of uranium. Others may disagree, but I don't think it's a forgone conclusion that all R&D in nuclear energy grinds to a halt.
I disagree with the GP's claim that poverty is "the only way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55%."
No scifi nuclear reactor concept is going to be mass deployed by the early 2030s. The only nuclear fuel source that has ever been used in commercial application is U235, with a little bit of Pu239 to boost yield. There is no viable source of U235 for even a fraction of current energy use.
OP's claim is garbage (insulation, ending car dependency, and legislating products that aren't landfill help the poor rather than hindering them), but the constant nuclear shilling and shilling for growth is much worse.
> (insulation, ending car dependency, and legislating products that aren't landfill help the poor rather than hindering them)
That's not at all what "Fit for 55" program is about. I agree, those things, over long enough timespan (say, 20 years) could be net positive. Instead, "Fit for 55" means imposing additional "carbon tax" on many industries, and on goods imported from China, based on how much carbon was emitted when producing them. And given the short, 7 years time frame the net result of those policies will be what I originally claimed: pushing everyone to poverty.
EU politicians say it quite openly really, that in order to "save us from the climate catastrophe" we need to sacrifice the standard of living.
Problem solved. It won't hurt anyone but anybodybwho is already doing the right thing will be far better off.
If people who choose to drive (and it will be a choice because non-car infrastructure is part of the plan) pay more, then nothing of value has been lost.
When was the last time in history of mankind when taxes were actually distributed to the poor? I mean in significant amounts, not as a lame attempt to win upcoming elections.
The EU doesn't exist for the purpose of giving fines to companies, if they "run out of ideas", they just keep doing what they're already doing most of the time. The whole 'fines' thing is just a small part of a much bigger thing.
The EU is a 17 trillion dollar economy. It's the second largest market in the world for most of these companies, they'll never pull out. It is simply hot air. They'd never even leave China unless the US gov. forces them at gunpoint.
Google never really had any traction in China to start with, their search results were useless for Chinese content, so then they pretended to leave for some noble cause. Same with Amazon who tried for much longer until it gave up after decade.
That's assuming sites/users in China use statcounter, completely misleading data.
According Wikipedia and at least 2 different sources they quote, Google peaked in China at 29-35% and even that seems way too optimistic, if you ask anyone who used search in China back then or have been there. By my experience from years ago was Google search in Chinese language useless.
Happy to go by your numbers, that was just the first search result. 35% is still very significant, so your initial claim about it having no traction and this being just a face-saving gesture was not correct.
Do you think the EU is a capitalistic entity, with a board room of members that party with the fine money because they can buy themselves a few new yachts?
Strange how you don't seem to realize that all these "ideas for fines" come years or decades after the "efficient and self-regulating free market" ends up what it will always end up: entrenched monopolies, moats, little competition and high barriers of entry.
The basic message from EU to innovators is: don't bother. If you manage to create a successful business out of your innovation we will punish you.
You created an advanced easy to use connector for your line of phones? Fuck you, you have to change it to a plug that came later and has a different set of trade offs that may not align with your product.
You created a messaging service that was way ahead of its time, and it basically took a decade for others to catch up? Fuck you, provide the fruits of your innovation to everyone for free, erasing your competitive advantage.
This is such a wrong take. As an "innovator" who also worked on one of the largest messaging apps: I'm VERY happy about this change. Very long due. If properly executed, this gives a very large advantage to startups against those established network effects. And for late stage founders this is not an issue anyway and also makes them shift their focus back to product.
If everyone would release their own incompatible version of TCP protocol, internet would have never happen to be. This is just same interoperability on higher level.
Interoperability undoubtedly has advantages in the long run. But there's a delicate balance to be struck at what point in product evolution to standardize. I'm fine with standardizing on USB-C (even though the cable situation is a mess). But IMHO USB micro would have been inferior to lightning, and forcing Apple to standardize on that would have set back the industry. And imagine laptops if the EU had decided to solve the conference room projector problem by mandating VGA ports in every laptop.
I also can't help shaking the feeling that the EU is so happy regulating cell phones and internet services because they have no major players in that field left anymore. Conversely, they seem to be incapable of mandating a unified standard for grounded AC power outlets, although that would surely be equally beneficial.
> With respect to charging by means other than wired charging, divergent solutions could be developed in the future, which could have negative impacts on interoperability, on consumer convenience and on the environment. <<Whilst it is premature to impose specific requirements on such solutions at this stage, the Commission should take action towards promoting and harmonising such solutions to avoid future fragmentation of the internal market.>>
Unlike the US Constitution, EU laws are not set in stone and they <<are>> updated.
> I also can't help shaking the feeling that the EU is so happy regulating cell phones and internet services because they have no major players in that field left anymore. Conversely, they seem to be incapable of mandating a unified standard for grounded AC power outlets, although that would surely be equally beneficial.
Hotels and many other places have started offering USB A and USB C ports. I think we're close to the point (5-10 years away?) where you could go to the US from Europe with just a laptop, for 2 weeks, and you'd be able to charge it just by using USB C ports available in restaurants, hotels, bars, offices, etc.
On top of that, for wall outlets the EU is mostly standardized except for Denmark, I think.
> Hotels and many other places have started offering USB A and USB C ports. I think we're close to the point (5-10 years away?) where you could go to the US from Europe with just a laptop, for 2 weeks, and you'd be able to charge it just by using USB C ports available in restaurants, hotels, bars, offices, etc.
Yeah, but I don't think there are USB C razors yet.
> On top of that, for wall outlets the EU is mostly standardized except for Denmark, I think.
France and Germany have different outlets (although there are plugs that work in both), and as far as I can tell, Italy has a completely different outlet from either of them.
> Yeah, but I don't think there are USB C razors yet.
Give it a few years :-) I have a hair clipper that uses micro-USB.
> France and Germany have different outlets (although there are plugs that work in both), and as far as I can tell, Italy has a completely different outlet from either of them.
In continental Europe in practice you only care about 2 standards: the German one and the French one. Those cover something like 45 out of 47 countries in Europe.
On top of that, the narrow connector actually works in all of continental Europe and for the big one, almost everything sold since at least 1 decade works with both the German and French standards.
Sucks to be Italy or Switzerland, I guess :-)
> And the UK never stopped using their own system.
The UK is still doing its own thing with many things, we don't talk about them anymore...
>Hotels and many other places have started offering USB A and USB C ports. I think we're close to the point (5-10 years away?) where you could go to the US from Europe with just a laptop, for 2 weeks, and you'd be able to charge it just by using USB C ports available in restaurants, hotels, bars, offices, etc.
I know EU is very nonchalant about sex, but sticking oneself into random USB ports is a bridge too far.
There have been no laws towards fostering competition within walled gardens in either the US or EU until now.
Apple had no app store competition until now. Do you contend the app store will not see material improvements in the future now that it finally has within bundle competition?
Why has Apple suddenly started investing so heavily in Safari over the past year, now that they will soon be forced to allow competing browsers?
Apple has plenty of competition for their product that includes an App Store. If you don’t like their product, you’re free to get an Android device like 85% of the rest of the world and 2/3rd of the EU.
The nuance of anti-competitiveness through bundling or the merits of competition at more granular levels appears lost to you.
If products have to compete on their own merits, rather than leaning on other aspects of a larger bundle, then software and products get better for all of society.
For example, if you were allowed to install any car OS you wanted, rather than forced to use the manufacturers, car OSes would improve significantly. Some people will buy a car for the hardware, despite terrible software. This is bad for the evolution of car software. If a manufacturer was forced to compete, they would have to invest more heavily in improving their software... or simply cede control of the OS to a better implemented third party one, and focus on the hardware. Both outcomes are better for consumers than allowing anti-competitiveness via bundling
No one wants you to be able to install any CarOS. What you can have on a car info system is strictly regulated for safety reasons. For instance you can’t have video showing where the driver can see it while driving. On my old car with Ford Sync, you couldn’t even pair a phone with your radio while the car was running.
A “product” is a combination of software and hardware.
My opinion is that both Windows is worse than Macs and Android is worse than iPhones because they aren’t an integrated product.
GlobalSuperMegaCorp has plenty of competition for their company town that includes a grocery store. If you don't like their company town, you're free to move to another town like 85% of the rest of the world.
Oh and BTW there are only two countries in the world, one of them is entirely comprised of GlobalSuperMegaCorp's monolith city-state company town, and the other is entirely comprised of company towns run by franchisees of OtherMassiveGlobalCorp.
This only applies to the very biggest companies. It is about preventing companies using their scale and dominance to prevent innovation in OTHERS. It opens UP the market.
>> Fuck you, you have to change it to a plug that came later and has a different set of trade offs that may not align with your product.
Quick reminder that Apple was literally one of the companies that invented USB-C and already uses USB-C across many lines of their products. You're making it sound like EU is making them use HDMI for charging or something.
Isn't this going to kill features that only some apps have or offer? What if one day Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp want to implement something "different" that could make messaging better but this policy is making things harder to implement because it would be impossible to make it interoperate with other messaging apps?
I don't get why you would regulate such a thing. I get the feeling that people here enjoy seeing big tech companies "owned" by big governments without actually realising that it is actually going to make things worse, that's what regulation does in most cases.