I think this is kinda technically a win for Beeper. I would've expected another 100% lockout to be Apple's priority. They were instead only able to block 5%, which sounds like a heuristic being applied, and possibly not even an intentional block of Beeper (in the sense that some anti-spam service may be identifying some Beeper users).
They can certainly escalate with protocol changes, but they still have to contend with older Macs, iPhones and iPads which are out of the support window losing access-- so if they want to update the protocol they either have to issue out of band patches for these devices or cut them off too.
This is assuming you can actually iMessage on iDevices that are out of software support -- maybe our iOS friends can let us know.
My father has an iPhone 8 which did not receive the latest iOS update. I can iMessage him just fine.
There are millions of people out there running old iPhones like that. If Apple just decided to cut them all off iMessage they would do far more damage to their brand than Beeper could possibly manage.
I started using a 5s as a temporary replacement phone for a while a couple of years ago, and I couldn't register to iMessage, but I didn't dig really far (it was a generic "registration failed" iirc). It might have been a fluke and not old phones can't register anymore.
That doesn't seem hard, people like your father can be allow-listed, he's not signing-up out of the blue. (I'm wondering if this "works" because the early adopters were hackintosh types who were already on imessage and not abusers. When the H3rb8l V18gr8 crowd shows up, that is the end.)
Now then.. if I am a professional spammer (which I am not), what stops me from buying a second hand mac or a second hand iphone (for $150 each) and start 'doing business' with iMessage?
Unless it's an issue of 'iPhones can't be JB-ed like Androids can be rooted to run all shorts of malware/spamming softwares'.
I get Apple's "this is our toy, you won't be making $2/month/user on us".
But "keeping the spammers out" it's a bit.. weird..?
Can someone please describe the WHAT is the technical advantage of Android users to spam over iPhone/Mac users to spam.
I have never received a single spam message through iMessage, but regardless. If they have to keep buying new phones all the time as they get blacklisted, in order to keep spamming, the economics of spamming changes.
That does raise the bar a little bit but it's probably mitigated by the combination of targeting higher spending users and the additional trust iMessage provides.
The difference between being able to send unlimited messages for free, and having to get a new phone every hundred or so texts is pretty large. Free vs 1 dollar per spam text.
I’m not talking about your father but I really doubt that the millions of people running 6+yo phones would care a lot about this. They could still send SMS, it’s not like they would became suddenly unreachable.
Apple could even be generous and still allow group chats or whitelist existing accounts.
Also, you have to take into consideration that iMessage is pretty US centric, the rest of the world wouldn’t really care about this.
The whole point is moot, even though I agree with your take.
There were plenty of confirmation from other users in this thread having their out of the most recent iOS version iPhones (someone mentioned their iPhone 5 currently running iOS12, with the most recent one being iOS17) working just fine with iMessage.
i believe that thus far it's a win for apple - all they need to do is introduce the perception that beeper is not 100% reliable, which is the kiss of death for something as potentially important as a messaging service.
the alternative is just continuing to sms people from your android because at least you know the messages are definitely going through, green bubble or not
Is this really a problem? I seriously doubt many people are going to leave someone out because they use an Android phone. I certainly won't because I like communicating with people and people are far more important than technology.
That's nice of you, but by all accounts from the US (where iphone is dominant): Yes, it's a problem. The visual marking and decreased integration/service towards users of non-iphones is pretty obviously part of why Apple has such a big phone market share in the US - if not, they wouldn't fight tooth and nail to keep those anti-features. There's plenty of examples of Apple being quite open and friendly to integration when it benefits them, and here they aren't, so it isn't.
It’s not just about market share. In Scandinavia about 90% of middle class people use iphones, but this whole blue-green bubble nonsense is a total non-issue. We have group chats in whatsapp, fb messages or sms, nobody cares.
This makes me wonder, what’s the iMessage situation in Japan? Their smartphone market is also majority iOS, sitting at above 60% (while it is only a little bit above 50% for the US)[0].
Despite that, I am yet to hear about their version of the whole “blue bubble exclusion” controversy. It could definitely be just due to the japanese users not being super active on western internet, and not necessarily due to that controversy not being a thing in Japan. But it could just be a non-issue in Japan.
Yeah, I was familiar with LINE and Kakao, and I like how similar the setup is for SK and Japan.
Thanks to your point, this way we can easily see that despite SK being android-dominant and Japan being iPhone-dominant, both are not heavily into iMessage and prefer their native super apps instead.
Which provides a solid data point in favor of those claiming that the iMessage proliferation and dominance don’t necessarily have a direct causation stemming from iOS/Android dominance in a given market.
Interestingly enough in Korea, the iOS market share is fairly high among some demographics, especially young professionals with enough disposable income. Android (Samsung, at this point) phones are seen as an option for boomers or younger kids.
So in practice my wife uses FaceTime quite a bit with her siblings, and falls back to KakaoTalk when needed. Her iMessage usage isn't zero either, but mostly 1:1, group chats happen over KakaoTalk, since you know everyone will be there.
I don't know if similar patterns are seen in Japan.
Yeah, I suspect there is indeed something special about Kakao compared to LINE as well.
Out of my friends who moved to Japan, pretty much not a single one of them uses LINE aside from rare one-offs. But with Kakao? Hell, everyone I know who even traveled to SK uses Kakao on regular (not even talking about those who moved there) pretty much as the main app in general for so many different things.
EDIT: oh wow, this sent me down a pretty interesting rabbithole. Apparently 85% of people under 30 in SK had an Android as their first phone, with 53% of those people having switched to iOS since then[0].
Well in Europe Android is dominating the market (but with a very fragmented experience depending on Android version).
The result is that as an iPhone users I feel sometimes feel left out because different friends circles on Android turn to different secured messaging services (WhatsApp, FB messenger, Telegram, Signal, etc...).
I firmly refuse to give my personal ID to all theses companies just to keep in touch so I often default to sms/mail (or I get left out of group chat).
iMessage is not perfect but they did get the sms fallback right and with upcoming RCS support maybe it'll be easier to bypass theses competing closed and incompatible walled gardens.
So from my point of view, the whole "blue bubble" tyranny look like a joke. Apple kept conformance with SMS/MMS standards from the beginning and added a secure layer on top. I wish others services just did the same.
>Apple kept conformance with SMS/MMS standards from the beginning and added a secure layer on top.
iMessage is not a "secure layer on top", it's a totally separate proprietary protocol and it requires an Apple account to work. It just happens to run in the same app as SMS/MMS messages, which has its pros and cons.
“The “magic” is that you don’t have to sign up for an account, or create a new username or account identifier. You just send a message from your phone number to another phone number, and if both numbers are registered for iMessage, the message goes over iMessage instead of SMS, even if you don’t have an Apple ID. Beeper had that working last week. Now, Beeper users need to have an Apple ID, and sign into that Apple ID within Beeper. (Beeper should actively encourage users to create and use an app-specific Apple ID password[1] for Beeper.)”[2]
And yet here we are, in a thread about a service abusing Apple's servers to make something available to the opposite crowd who feels left out because they refuse to use messaging apps that are available for their phones.
Look I think Beeper Mini and the whole thing is silly, but no, Android users are not refusing to use the apps available for their phones. iMessage is not available for Android.
I can understand not trusting FB, but you have to give out the ID you want people to be able to find you by. What you give to Signal is probably less than what's in the phone directory.
> I wish others services just did the same.
Signal did, then someone convinced them that the risk of accidentally sending an SMS which you thought were an encrypted message, was bad enough to break messaging integration on Android.
I wonder if whoever convinced them of that maybe didn't want it to be so convenient to use.
Signal is strongly focused on secure communication, so it never made any sense for it to support SMS/MMS.
I think bundling different protocols in the same app is a bad idea in general. Besides the security and functionality problems, it just creates confusion. The whole iMessage/bubble-color mess wouldn't exist if Apple made it clear to their users that the iMessage protocol is different from SMS and incompatible with most phones.
Well imessage does the exact same thing. It doesn't seem to confuse the users. More basic protocols as a fallback mechanism can be a good idea, if you understand the risks (and of course, if you allow the recipient to use the better protocol!)
Signal always warned me very clearly if it was forced to send a message via SMS, and even pushed me to invite the recipient to Signal. It made sense to support it still, because it's the second most basic service in the Android world (after calls), and now that Signal doesn't offer it, it can't be the default service any longer.
Signal's task as I see it isn't just to protect your communication, but encourage widespread use of strong encryption so that you don't stand out for using it. For that, there are tradeoffs. I think being able to handle the forced insecure communication for the user, clearly marked as such, was a great tradeoff for the sake of wider adoption.
>Well imessage does the exact same thing. It doesn't seem to confuse the users.
What % of iPhone users do you think understand the difference between SMS, MMS and iMessage protocols? I bet most don't. But if iMessage had its own separate app, they would know it's an Apple-only protocol. And that would make them less likely to exclude non-iPhone users and more likely to use cross-platform alternatives. It's not like all iPhone are jerks, they're being mislead on how "texting" in the default iPhone app really works. That's what I meant by confusion.
This is a problem, out of band communication is always a second titer and always overlooked, always incomplete. We as developers see this every day with documentation running out of date in relation to code. The same way the out of group communication falls behind the primary channel.
One Android user means you can no longer send images, video, gifs, or emoji. You can’t react to messages. Sending and receiving no longer works on wifi, so it doesn’t work well in many workplaces.
SMS is a disaster, so it’s best just to leave out the green bubbles.
iPhone users can react to messages when Android users are in a chat. Also, I would not call SMS a "disaster". It works well for text messages and images. These are the two most important things for most people. Also, I have sent images to Android users and they have never complained about image quality. I really think some people are overstating the importance of iMessage. Does it add some nice features? Yes. Is it amazing? Nope. Also, I suspect that the discrimination problem is more of a people problem. Basically, the people who discriminate will find something else to discriminate on if they did not have iMessage.
Just to add to this, iPhones send potato quality video to Android. I am constantly reminding my family that uses iOS that they have to send an iCloud link.
The videos are genuinely useless, I don't know why Apple bothers. It sends like 240p "90s security camera" quality video. I can't tell who anyone is, I once thought a bear in a video was a wolf.
Iirc, Android pops up some kind of "this video is too large, do you want to share it with Photos instead?" modal that converts it to a Photos link instead of sharing directly. That's not perfect, but it's a damn site better than sending a video that you know is useless.
If you're (iphone) sending a message to an imessage user (beeper, or someone switched off iphone) with their phone number, and they're enrolled in imessage, an SMS will not be sent and they will not get it.
This is hearsay based on prior threads, but I haven't read a word against it.
Yes, there's an error message, but if you close your phone, it won't notify you that it failed to send. Hours/days later, you might reopen the message thread to find the message was never sent.
Just pointing out that effectively, it is the same "problem" that SMS has with dropped messages that happens quite rarely (both are rare, actually).
This could easily backfire. Given the blue bubbles it's not possible to know if you're talking to an Android user, which means from the iOS user's perspective, iMessage is just less reliable.
> They can certainly escalate with protocol changes, but they still have to contend with older Macs, iPhones and iPads which are out of the support window losing access
This is what people were saying before Apple cut Beeper off the first time. It would be great if there was just one mistake that they made and fixed, but I'm not holding my breath.
Well they didn't cut off Beeper in the way that would block access to older Apple devices. It seems likely that they found a pattern of access performed (or looked at the identifying information provided) by Beeper in order to target it specifically from the server side.
Those were not protocol changes. The iMessage protocol remains unchanged as far as I know. What I'm referring to above is changing the protocol and updating all clients to use the new protocol so that Beeper is left catching up. This could involve adding new DRM mechanisms or even adding cryptographic remote attestation requirements.
Note Apple does not fix all security issues on unsupported devices. They only fix really bad issues. I do not think it is safe to use an iOS device which does not have the latest version of iOS.
Honestly they could just choose to disable iMessages on older devices. For the vast majority of people using those old devices, it would just change the bubble color and Apple wouldn’t fear any backlash.
I’m not saying they should, but knowing Apple, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they decided to do it.
Apple owns the delivery mechanism. I don’t believe that a third party using their ecosystem will last long. Nor do I want it. There are plenty of cross-platform things out there. Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp. Why does everyone care so much? Google can paint their Android robot blue. Then maybe all this silliness will end?
Because Apple embraced texting by supporting SMS, then extended it by forcing all the text conversations that they could into their own proprietary infrastructure, and is extinguishing it by using punitive product design to create pressure on communities of people to all use their products so that everything goes over their proprietary network.
I don't want an over the top chat app, I just want to text people.
Making iMessage which handles SMS, but by default transparently upgrades you to another protocol is the first two parts of EEE. Realistically, no normies flip that switch.
How do you want Apple to tell iPhone users whether their messages to someone are being recorded by that person's telco and made available to other plan holders on that phone plan?
How do you want Apple to indicate if this chat participant is costing you money by the message or free?
Everyone's concerned about teens. Presumably teens know that T-Mobile and the other carriers give the family plan adults the ability to read their dependents text messages. As a teen I would want to stick with the encrypted bubbles your parents can't read and tell my parents about, thank you very much.
It's not punitive product design. It's seamlessly integrated and meaningful, both on chat leaks and on costs of messaging: Blue sky, text safely. Green could literally cost you.
I have recent experience talking to non-techie younger people recently about this very issue and none of them were aware of the security differences of SMS vs. iMessage.
Teenagers know that blue = iPhone and green = non-iPhone/SMS and that blue offers significantly more features and functionality vs SMS (delivered/read receipts, group chats, stickers, rich media, memojis, etc), which is the overwhelming reason why blue is preferred.
Plus the cost. Over here in the EU, back in 2010 (?) SMS was an expensive thing, you would pay dearly for each or have to buy a "50/100/500 SMS package" or similar.
So lowering the cost of 3G made it more economical if your friends had iPhones as now you could spend €20/month for '1GB' (which was mostly iMessage & web browsing at the time) and avoid spending that simply on SMS. (excuse the price inaccuracies if any, it's been a while since I had that iPhone 3GS)
Back in 2010 iPhones were expensive status symbols in the EU, approximately nobody bought them to save money on SMS. In some markets the really heavy texters bought Blackberries for a while just for BBM, but that got killed pretty quickly by Whatsapp.
It doesn’t anymore, but it used to for pretty much all phone carriers in the US.
And even now, on T-Mobile (as that’s the one I use, so the only one I can verify myself), if you have an account with multiple lines (e.g., a family plan), you can go into your account, click “Usage”, then “Text messages”, and it will show you all text info for all lines on the account (but no actual text content). And not just for “kid lines”, but for all regular lines as well. You can look by individual line or download that data as a bulk file.
I just checked my t-mobile account, and despite it not showing the text content (which t-mobile certainly has access to, unlike imessage; t-mobile cannot even track metadata for those individually), it shows an entry for each text with the phone number with info on who was the sender vs receiver, timestamp, and other metadata.
Luckily, T-Mobile only shows that I had 8 incoming messages (all of them were just automated verification code texts) and no outgoing messages this month, because pretty much all my messaging these days is either on discord or imessage.
Even without the actual text content though, that metadata is still some very sensitive info that teenagers almost definitely wouldn’t want their parents to track. Hell, I am not a teenager, have nothing interesting in that data (doubt anyone would care to know about existence of those 8 automated verification messages, and neither would I be embarrassed if someone did), and still absolutely wouldn’t want anyone else to be able to see that info.
I've been with T-Mobile for twenty years and in that time it has never released messaging content to account holders. Their cybersecurity record may be trash, but misinformation isn't really helpful.
I'm not convinced that handing everything to a different company is a solution, but I'm glad you found a plan you're comfortable with.
Just to be clear, I wasn’t trying to criticize t-mobile. Been their customer for the past 8 or so years, and I wouldn’t have stayed if I had some serious reservations about them.
I stand corrected though, you are right, i don’t think the content of messages has been ever obtainable. At least not since 2006 when it became explicitly illegal for carriers to provide that info to anyone (including the customer paying for the phone line) outside of special circumstances like a court orderc subpoena, etc. (so practically it isn’t an option for the heavy majority).
However, it is factually true that i can get metadata (datetime of each text, phone numbers of both parties, who sent who how many messages, etc) about texts being exchanged from my carrier by just clicking through a couple of menus in the app today. I checked that right before posting my earlier comment. And it is also factually true that despite the carrier not being allowed to disclose to me the content of those messages, they themselves indeed have have full access to the content in plaintext.
All your messages have been recorded by the government, since the government has been collecting all push notifications on iPhones, and iMessage runs over push notifications
Actually no, the end to end encryption on iMessage is envelopes inside the push notifications. The message content is not readable, even if you intercept APNs messages.
You seem to both care about it, and also wonder why other people care about it ?
Otherwise, looking from the sideline it's fascinating seeing Apple fighting this battle that they brought upon themselves and have no chance of winning.
I think Apple will almost certainly win on a purely technical game of cat and mouse.
I think you need to adjust your definition of winning. Blocking 5% of messages is a 'win' for Apple. I won't use a messaging service with a 95% success rate. I won't migrate from iMessage to Beeper. I will submit, Apple would have liked a more decisive victory.
My definition of a win for Apple would be to have the problem go away and the attention dissipate. That's how it went for Nothing's attempt for instance, where it was instantly ridiculed and everyone forgot about it.
Right now, they blocked a part of Beeper mini, and nobody expecting a rock solid service would join Beeper Mini so Apple's won't be losing any of their core customers.
But the news cycle keeps going on, Beeper Mini is still there for those the group of users that wants it alive, and I wouldn't be surprised if next week for instance actual iMessage users came out to complain about getting kicked out of the service as colateral damage from the whole additional filtering.
And of course this whole publicity for Beeper is a door opened to any other company to give it a shot, as Apple is playing the cat and mouse game, and not taking any more drastic option.
Apple isn't losing either, but they're now dragged into guerrila like battle with no upside for them.
> so Apple's won't be losing any of their core customers.
They won't be losing _any_ of their customers. For the most part[^], nobody using Beeper Mini has paid Apple for anything... otherwise they wouldn't need to use Beeper Mini.
[^] Yes I'm sure there's at least a few people with an iPhone and a Windows PC or something that see this as "iMessage on Windows".
Beeper mini is not ready for regular use, so it's not even a question, but I think there's many potential use if it was any good.
For instance if you have a mac and an iPad but use an android phone, iMessages will go to both Apple devices but not where you want it the most, on your phone. That's the kind of pain point that pushes a group to fully move to another service if the android members have enough weight, but would be fine if there was a reliable android client.
based on the history of tech-related cat and mouse games, then Apple will probably lose.
Just like Sony could not prevent people from pirating Playstation DVDs, Apple itself could not prevent iOS jailbreaks, music labels could not prevent CD ripping, etc etc etc
if there are enough people who are strongly motivated to bypass whatever protection, eventually they will probably bypass it.
Your advice was "There are plenty of cross-platform things out there. Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp", but you don't seem happy to take it and move away from iMessage either.
This tension is at the center of the it all, and why Beeper Mini exists in the first place.
What? I pay for iMessage. You’re just arguing for the right to use products for free, and in Beeper’s case to create monetized products that use others’ products for free.
I doubt that. iMessage is a free service if you have almost any Apple OS product (iOS, iPadOS, macOS). You aren't making ongoing payments for the iMessage service.
You could say you paid for iMessage in that you bought a device that worked with it. But you do not pay for iMessage.
I'm arguing that the crux of the issue is a lot more than just "why don't they use something else ?" The same way you see value in iMessage, other users also see value in iMessage. You may want them to go away, but to my eyes that's the same weight as other users wanting to be there. I'll be standing in the corner with the popcorn to see how it turns out.
On what is paid and what is free, Beeper mini is free, iMessage is free (as we've learned from the whole saga, you don't even need an icloud account). Using someone else's public facing API without consent is rude, but hey, our whole industry started with kits to plug into the AT&T network with unauthorized material, and as of now no money is changing hands.
Beeper Mini wasn’t free. It became free the first time it was shut off.
Yes I’m sure “can anyone use other services as their product backends for free, directly against the TOS of said service” is going to be a really interesting and complicated legal question…
Happy to explain. First thought, why do you care so much?
> Nor do I want it.
Why? What about exclusivity makes the world better? Why shouldn't I be able to communicate well with someone using an Apple device? Why should someone using an Apple device not want someone to communicate well with them?
Sure there are other systems. But switching costs are so high. Especially with iMessage, folks are going to use what's provided them out of the box. It doesn't seem like a reasonable ask to get everyone en masse to agree to & switch to a lone cross-platform system. What's really needed is standards & interop. You should be able to use what you like, be that iMessage or RCS or Signal or XMPP. But none of these options should be locked out of working with others.
I'm so baffled by the strident defenses against possibility. From someone whose name is @unstatusthequo at that, going to bat for status quo lock in seems like a low and dark comedy. Un status quoer, un status quo thineself. Don't triple down on the fixed & limited!
Yes. They switched to that ~2020/1. You can no longer make a Genius Bar appt by browser on an Android phone; you used to be able to. Seems grossly unreasonable to assume "user has an Android phone" indicates "possible spammer".
No, I described it the way Apple implements it; I'm aware of the Bayesian ridiculousness. Anyway, I object to Apple enforcing "all users of non-Apple phones as of 2020/1 can no longer make service appts [for an MBP] from the Apple webpage".
iMessage is apples system, we live in an app world, you don’t have to use it, most people use WhatsApp so just download that, Google users have to download it too because it’s a third party service. How is downloading a free app a high switching cost? You can use it alongside iMessage. Most people use
There is plenty of freedom of choice without a third party app hacking into another system. Get a grip.
It's easy for individuals to switch, but that's good for nothing when your friends and family use other services.
> most people use WhatsApp
I only know of one person who uses WhatsApp and it's to keep on touch with folks in Brazil. No one uses it here, from what I can see, and no one has offered to share WhatsApp ever.
The ease with which you suggest yeah everyone can just use an obvious easy to agree upon other central alternative is so facetiously ridiculous and painful. Everyone has a mish-mahs of preferences & existing accounts. It not just that you've deeply shirked what the actual switching costs are (since everyone will pick different things), it's that having these crazy anti-cirumvention laws is stupid, that not having adversarial Interoperability like what Beeper is doing is a sad corporate lichdom sucking the lifeblood of what should be the most vibrant sector of our age: communications technologies. Babel fell, and these merchants of disconnection have been keeping us from communicating with each other ever since, to make a couple more sales. Vulgar pieces of anti-human garbage, just disgraceful.
I agree with you. This obsession with iMessage does not make a lot of sense. Apple created a better messaging experience because they wanted to add features to SMS. This is good and it makes things better when both people have iOS.
That being said, the reactions in this thread are way over the top. A lot of Android users in this thread seem to think there are a huge number of Apple users who refuse to talk to Android users or that iMessage is some sort of messaging nirvana. Both are not true.
The other elephant in the room is Apple created iMessage, Apple pays for the service's costs, and therefore Apple has the right to decide who can use it. Third parties do not have the right to use it. It's sad that sone non-Apple users feel entitled to use iMessage.
As I mentioned in the previous discussion[1], users are going to have to put up with the system going down... and I just don't see that happening. From the article: "It was losing messages during the outage and never being entirely certain they had been sent or received. There was a gathering on Saturday, and she had to double-check with a couple people about the details after showing up inadvertently early at the wrong spot."
Interestingly, if you break your iPhone on vacation and buy a phone that is not an iPhone so that you can still be contacted until you get home to your favorite Apple Store, you are also losing messages, assuming you forget to go through Apple's iMessage deregistration system. Really the design of iMessage is the problem.
If you register your phone number to iMessage without any other iMessage receivers and then turn off that iPhone, messages sent for an extended period of time will continue to be queued for delivery in iMessage. In order for other iPhones to start falling back to SMS you need to manually deregister. In Google Messages and other RCS clients, by default it will give you a "Message not delivered" message indicating your message never made it to the handset. You then have an opportunity to manually resend that pending message via SMS. You can disable this behavior though if you prefer to use the two-check delivery receipt information to determine when your message hits the handset.
While neither mechanism is perfect, the RCS model treats lack of delivery to the handset as a potential problem, whereas iMessage ignores it. iMessage assumes your phone is just off, which for most people you are texting, is an unlikely scenario.
For users who actively turn off their device for certain activities, you have the opportunity to just wait, and when it arrives the error will clear, or send it as SMS and it will pick it up when the handset does turn on. But while the message is in flight for any length of time, the UI treats it as "something is wrong".
This means whenever you return to the conversation to check for a response or text more, you'll be reminded strongly that the message never arrived for them. And you always have the opportunity to resend on SMS during that time.
Not OP, but I believe it falls back to SMS if there isn’t a response from Apple’s servers, not the end user’s device. In this scenario the iMessages are sitting there waiting for a registered device to check in to send them to. (Same thing that happens if your battery dies. iMessages go into a void until some place to deliver it to.)
Yes it does fallback. There are two situations where it does so
1. The sender cannot connect to the imessage server
2. The receiver does not connect to the imessage server, on any of the devices registered to receive at that particular address.
I know both methods happen since I didn't used to have data and I would receive SMSs when someone sent me an imessage and I was out and about.
I think that's if iMessage can't reach Apple's servers. Otherwise that wouldn't make sense; simply being without a cell/wifi signal, or having your phone off, for a few hours, would mean anyone messaging you would be sending a bunch of SMS fallback messages.
It is how it works, after a certain timeout where it can't be delivered to a device it will fallback to SMS. The exact length of the timeout is not public.
No the idea is that you forgot to deregister yourself while still on vacation and using a non-iPhone, the Apple Store bit was the "get a new iPhone" part after your vacation is over.
And what you link to is what I meant by
> assuming you forget to go through Apple's iMessage deregistration system.
Doesn't bother me at all. I'm ok with losing a text or two to help bring regulatory pressure against Apple to un-wall the garden so I can use it again.
Apple's iMessage implementation loses messages all the time. It happens about once every month between my girlfriend and I.
I have also had iMesages be sent to the wrong recipient. In one ongoing case, my aunt and uncle frequently receive each other's iMessages, suggesting it's related to their group carrier plan but it's hard to say. The extended family all knows to use SMS instead, which reliably goes to the intended recipient. They are both retired and always together so they haven't reached the point of getting a new plan.
iMessage is routed through apple's servers over TCP. So this is like saying: sometimes I go to google.com but it randomly loads bing.com... must be related to my group carrier plan
What data made you make that association? Seems unlikely. If that happens, then apple would have to be routing messages incorrectly, but that would be a massive bug/security issue... especially considering how E2EE works.
Yeah, who knows? I am only brainstorming. Ever since I discovered the abysmal state of Apple's customer service after having my iphone stolen last year, I feel confident we will never know.
For a stolen phone with AppleCare+ insurance that has been paid for every month since purchasing the phone, they should at least offer a way to file a claim.
The only way to submit a claim was to click on a button in my icloud account that did not exist. I live in a big city and visited 3 Apple stores and spent about 15 hours in them in total, but none of them were able to help me get the claim filed so I had to give up. One of the supervisors did refund the ~$15/mo that I had paid for the AppleCare+ insurance, but I had to buy a new phone.
I could believe losing messages. I cannot believe wrong recipient. One of these is a service reliability issue and the other is an insanely unlikely bug.
And what are the chances that the actual recipient ends up being the spouse of your expected recipient? Sounds more like they logged into each other's phones or something.
> suggesting it's related to their group carrier plan
Extremely doubtful it has anything to do with their plan. iMessage is over the top: only the first SMS activation message has anything to do with your carrier -- after that it's all sent through Apple's servers.
Adding my own datapoint: I’ve absolutely had this happen on iPhone to iPhone where the message appeared to be sent on one device but the other received nothing
If I was being asked to debug this for someone I know, my first two questions would be “did your phone say delivered?” and “does the recipient have a Mac/iPad/etc that could’ve received the message?”; do you know the answer to either of these?
I worry that sounds accusatory but that’s not my intention, I’m curious and too tired to attempt to reword it.
I shouldn’t form an opinion based on my own experiences because it might upset you? That’s a pretty self centred view of things.
I could’ve expanded, I’m pretty much de facto “IT Support” for a lot of the friends/family I’ve spent those years communicating with using iMessage so I can pretty confidently say it has never happened to any of them either. I could go on to say that if it was a widespread issue this wouldn’t be the first we are hearing about it, and it absolutely would’ve been covered in some sort of tech news - possibly even the regular old news.
That's not how experiences work. If someone says "I saw X" and you say "I didn't see X", that doesn't necessarily mean X doesn't exist, it just means you didn't see it. Sure, the person who saw X might have been hallucinating, but you don't have enough information to know either way.
It's a little weird to so strongly believe that a rare, intermittent bug (no one suggested it's "widespread") couldn't exist with a messaging service that gets a ton of traffic and has to support nearly a billion and a half people across the globe. May want to examine what biases lead you to having such a negative response to something like that.
Also consider that even if you have 1000 friends for whom you are "IT support guy", you've still interacted with fewer than 0.0001% of all iPhone users. You are several orders of magnitude off from a representative sample, especially if we're talking about a rare bug.
You misread me: if something didn't happen to you that doesn't invalidate the GPs experience, it just means that your experiences differ. Now you have to figure out why they differ.
Doesn't feel like some rare issue. Googled it by curiosity, and there's a ton of "help" articles and support post on people randomly seeing messages disappear or not getting delivered.
I use iMessage regularly, and have done so since it was first released.
I have never, to my knowledge, had a message sent to me lost (which I would have found out because my family members, who would have been the ones to try and fail to send it to me, would have mentioned it), nor lost a message I sent (except for obvious cases where I had insufficient signal, and the app clearly notified me of it).
I have never received a misdirected message, had mine misdirected, nor heard of anyone else doing either.
In all the criticisms of iMessage I've seen recently—in this Beeper situation, and a little longer ago when Apple decided to support RCS—I have seen no one else say that they've had issues like you describe.
Obviously, this doesn't mean that these things can't happen. But it does suggest that Your Experiences Are Not Universal.
The most common case I know of for what looks like misdirection is having one contact with multiple iMessage phone numbers, especially if multiple contacts share one or more of them. Real world example, my wife and I each have both a work iPhone and a personal iPhone. If both are listed in a single contact, iOS will “helpfully” merge the iMessages from both on a sender’s device, but not on the receiver’s. It’s very difficult to tell which device you’re sending to in this case, and can be changed by the other party if they send you a message and you reply. If you didn’t know what was going on, that would look a whole lot like a message going to the wrong device or even recipient in some cases. As a result I literally have separate contacts for my wife to avoid the problem, the UX is otherwise really abysmal.
This is how iMessage works, not contacts, and as a user of the iPhone since its launch in 2007 this is surprisingly unexpected to me. I would expect each separate email/phone number to have its own conversation.
No, that’s only what happens in iMessage or iOS messages. In almost every other context you get one set per number or email, possibly with an option for a combined conversation. That’s really the issue, there’s no indicator in the conversation of which number or email you’re communicating with, or which you’re sending to, and no interface for separating or combining them. It happens non-deterministically at some point after adding multiple to the same contact, sometimes. That’s why I say the UX is poor, it’s unpredictable and uncontrollable even for someone that knows to look.
I am not trying to argue with you. The method of separating or combining emails/numbers to me lies within the contact.
Because imessages can be sent from both emails and phone numbers (e.g. iphone as well as ipad without cellular connection) i’m not sure if there is a way to handle it while also accommodating your preference
Again, this has nothing to do with contacts and everything to do with the interface of the messaging app, as I and the person you responded to said. Also, the person you're replying to literally described a way to handle it while accommodating everyone (offer an indication in the UI of what's happening, and present the option to combine the conversation).
I don't think anyone's claiming the GP's experience is universal. A quick search suggests that there are just under 1.5 billion iPhone users in the world. That's a lot of messages going back and forth. Anyone who's ever worked with distributed systems can tell you that the idea that a message never gets dropped is just hilarious and absurd.
I expect message loss is actually a pretty regular occurrence, in absolute numbers. I wouldn't be surprised if thousands or even hundreds of thousands or millions of messages are dropped every year. But in the end that means that the delivery rate would be something like 99.99999999999%, which is actually pretty damn good (and it probably isn't that good; I'm just throwing around numbers here).
Youre being downvoted but I also lose a message every few months between my girlfriend and I. We both have relatively new iPhones and exclusively use iMessage so I do think its some rare protocol bug.
Ya I think most just would not notice between friends. But we’ve compared our iMessages and we aren’t doing anything weird like sharing apple IDs. Not a huge deal so it’s whatever, but if any Apple engineers read this: plz fix
>Apple on Wednesday appeared to have blocked what Beeper described as "~5% of Beeper Mini users" from accessing iMessages
>Apple previously issued a (somewhat uncommon) statement about Beeper's iMessage access, stating that it "took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage." Citing privacy, security, and spam concerns, Apple stated it would "continue to make updates in the future" to protect users. Migicovsky previously denied to Ars that Beeper used "fake credentials" or in any way made iMessages less secure.
Not commenting about the ethics of all this, just wondering why technically Apple can only block ~5% of Beeper Mini users instead of all of them? Could this potentially be tied to the use of an email id as the iMessage handle?
> Not commenting about the ethics of all this, just wondering why technically Apple can only block ~5% of Beeper Mini users instead of all of them? Could this potentially be tied to the use of an email id as the iMessage handle?
Apple could block 100% of the people using Beeper and throw Hackintosh users into that as a bonus as well.
The reason they’re not doing that is because it could have unintended consequences as some are using someone else’s actual device serial number and those people would be inconvenienced.
It’s nothing that can’t be easily solved, the moment they reach out to support either in person or via phone/chat Apple can immediately verify if they’re using a legitimate Apple device, but even if it boils down to a small percentage of users you still need to prepare for the influx of support requests.
To do this, Apple uses a scoring model to determine if they can access iMessage and historically they’ve been pretty generous by allowing clearly spoofed serials if the Apple ID involved is in good standing and has a positive history, think of it as a credit score.
They can tweak the threshold score and probably are testing this out as we speak to find a sweet spot they’re content with.
Apple could also push out an update tomorrow that would end this once and for all by utilizing device attestation and leveraging Secure Enclave, but this would potentially lock out older devices, something they were willing to do when they upgraded the FaceTime protocol a couple of years ago, but they might not want to do that this time around.
>Apple could also push out an update tomorrow that would end this once and for all by utilizing device attestation and leveraging Secure Enclave, but this would potentially lock out older devices, something they were willing to do when they upgraded the FaceTime protocol a couple of years ago, but they might not want to do that this time around.
Just give it a couple more hardware generations to ensure the largest % of older hardware upgrades. Anything pre-secure enclave chip would need to be in the low digits I'm guessing. Then again, if they are going to block Messages, that might be the incentive to get these older device users to upgrade.
Are you talking about the iOS 6 to 7 transition where the security certificates expired and Apple wouldn't issue a new one and said you needed to switch to iOS 7 if you wanted Facetime to work again? That was my last iOS device.
I don't remember that as I just upgraded the OS. Why would an OS upgrade be some thing you wouldn't do? Seems to me like you have bigger personal issues than some technical one with this situation.
> The reason they’re not doing that is because it could have unintended consequences as some are using someone else’s actual device serial number and those people would be inconvenienced.
One is supposed to try to find a plausible (follows certain rules) but invalid serial to use for hackintoshing and not use real serials, but of course in practice there’s always some number of careless users…
Yeah, that's what they're supposed to do, and to the credit of the Hackintosh community, that’s what most tutorials suggest.
But like you said, there are always people who don’t care about others as long as they have theirs.
There is, so far anyway, no reason to go against this best practice because, even though Apple can instantly detect a bogus serial, their currently used scoring threshold still allows you to use iMessage provided you’ve got a non-fresh Apple ID in good standing.
This is interesting. How do you define "invalid" and why can Apple not also detect such invalidity?
There's been some talk that blocking this for Beeper will also block this for Hackintosh, but are we just talking about iMessage?
Because I have a hard time believing that (A) Apple can't just block this for iMessage without affecting whatever other system services rely on it and (B) That Apple would care if Hackintoshes lose iMessage.
If those two are true, and assuming Beeper Mini also tries to find plausible but invalid serials to use, then Hackintoshes definitely aren't the reason they aren't blocking based on this.
My understanding is that the serials represent information, including model and date/location of manufacture. It’s therefore possible to create correctly formed but impossible serials, for example one that represents a pre-touchbar 2015 MBP manufactured in Ireland in 2018.
Apple should easily be able to tell when someone has done this.
iMessage seems to use quite a lot of information from the hardware aside from the serial number. See https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush/blob/main/emulated/data... for the data that is used to calculate the "validation blob" to activate iMessage. Several of the keys (not values!) are random-looking gibberish like "kbjfrfpoJU" and "oycqAZloTNDm", while others are normal things like "product-name" and "IOPlatformUUID".
Apple can detect this, but they’ve allowed it in most cases when it’s done with an Apple ID in good standing and some history.
Why they allowed it is anyone’s guess, but the leading theory is that they valued not hindering established customers over locking iMessage completely down and perhaps the bad PR that comes with banning someone’s Apple ID over this.
Well they could block the client itself, independent of blocking the Apple ID. It's the client that sends the serial information. Your Apple ID only gets associated with it indirectly.
> The reason they’re not doing that is because it could have unintended consequences as some are using someone else’s actual device serial number and those people would be inconvenienced.
As far as I know, it's not actually known what model numbers, serial numbers, and disk UUIDs Beeper Mini is sending (and no the POC repository doesn't really tell us)-- if you have a source that talks about this I'd love to read it!
I’m pretty sure Apple could figure this out pretty easily by running it on an Android device themselves, considering they control the endpoints it talks to
This assumes that all Beeper Mini users are spam, and that's a weird take.
More charitably, perhaps you are saying spam will increase over previous levels. From what I understand, Apple does not have any spam prevention technologies in Messages at all, neither for incoming iMessages, nor for SMS messages-- so the only thing keeping your iMessage conversations free of them is the obscurity of the protocol. Perhaps they should just add anti-spam tech like other texting clients have had for years.
When you get an iMessage from a new contact, there's a "report junk" option; I'm assuming Apple does some kind of spam detection with that (ie if a particular Apple ID gets enough reports, it gets blocked). I've never seen any public documentation of it though.
The same technology Beeper Mini uses to get onto iCloud can also be used by spammers, crooks, etc. to get onto iCloud. You either get both or none. Frankly, as a paying Apple customer, I want them to close this because I hate SPAM. Also, the obsession of iMessage seems very strange to me.
You are incredibly selfish. Neither of those are more than a mild inconvenience. On the other hand, loss of personal freedom and privacy are major issues with real world consequences.
Both of those are issues that can be solved server side if the company actually cared. They don't, and instead want to steal your freedom so they can push DRM.
I know of no messaging platform using remote attestation for antispam - and, as far as those platforms continue to support web registration, they can't use remote attestation[0]. Even if they could, it wouldn't help. Remote attestation verifies that your client code is running without modification. What you care about with spam is keeping the spammers from registering large numbers of unrelated accounts, which doesn't require modifying the client at all.
I will give you that remote attestation does help anticheat. However, the current state of anticheat in games is so invasive now that you have to install special kernel drivers, and that kernel has to be on bare metal (no hypervisors allowed). This only happened because a specific genre of fast-twitch first person shooter has a lot of closet cheating going on. But it also gets blindly applied to things like rhythm games that absolutely do not need kernel-level anticheat[1]. So every game gets more invasive because of one hyper-competitive game genre triggering an anticheat arms race.
[0] Or at least, for as long as Web Environment Integrity stays dead
[1] Altering the client isn't even the most common way of cheating rhythm game records. For example, a good chunk of the rules for, say, Pump It Up's online leaderboards is "don't have other players play on your A.M.Pass" and "don't hook up a hand controller onto an online cab". Neither of which would be stopped by an anticheat system (and yes, PIU being an arcade rhythm game, there's shitton of encryption on it).
Remote attestation does more than ensuring code is not modified. It definitely can be used to prevent spammers from registering a large number of accounts.
And no, web registrations as a must have is an extremely antiquated concept.
Seems like a chess move. Apple blocks a small percentage of users instead of all of them, which casts uncertainty on using Beeper Mini at all. It also allows them to A/B test various methods of blocking or honeypotting Beeper Mini logins without giving away any big secrets.
From Beeper's perspective, they now have to figure out why only those logins were blocked and if they need to patch something or not. Apple could be wasting their time and blocked random users out of spite.
Ugh, it is beyond depressing to imagine Apple bigwigs sitting around discussing ways to make absolutely certain teens keep getting ostracized until they buy their overpriced product.
If someone is ostracizing you because you do not own an iPhone, you probably want to avoid that person. I have never met anyone who would do this and frankly, only an extremely nasty person would do this. I am mean seriously, why ostracized someone because they use a different type of phone?
It's not simply a MeanGirls experience of not being cool enough. Most Americans don't use or have 3rd party apps like WhatsApp, so most people will fall-back to SMS, which is objectively a much worse experience. I feel like the adult equivalent is getting group dinner with a friend with severe allergies or dietary restrictions. You care about your friend, and you want to invite them, but the effort to include them is high and sometimes you want to try a restaurant you know they can't eat at, so you skip the invite. I'm a vegetarian, and I know my friends skip me outright in the steakhouse dinners.
50% of Americans have an iPhone, and that is even higher for teenagers (almost 90%). That means >50% of people have this superior group functionality built-in (can't beat defaults). That means for teenagers, most of your friends will have iMessages, and most will be able to do effortless group chats, and its a statistical dice-roll to see if someone doesn't have an iPhone. You become "that guy" that causing disruption, and you'll 100% be ignored sporadically.
Again, the issue isn't "I don't wanna see green bubbles", the issue is "I don't want to bother with a third party app for this conversation". Since most people don't regularly use 3rd party messaging apps, there's a coordination issue to be solved picking the app and confirming everyone has it, OR falling back to SMS which is pretty messy. The alternative is to skip one friend and just fill them in later. Sometimes it's easier, it's not an elitist attempt to ostracize.
This is an adulting problem. Most of my adult friends use WhatsApp around me. So, our kids use WhatsApp because that is how they communicate with us. So, the "actual" solution is to start using WhatsApp (or whatever) and get your friends to do it. Then force your kids to do it ... then bam, iMessage no longer matters.
First of all you forget what it's like being a teen/young person I guess, or perhaps your personality is different from most, but that sort of social pressure is quite tough on people.
Apple also relies on the path of least resistance as well, if someone is having a poor experience in a group chat with their iPhone friends...it just becomes "easy" for them to choose an iPhone the next time they change phones.
Look at other companies, Microsoft porting Office etc to MacOS, Google services like maps gmail etc available on the iPhone. It's only Apple that walls their tech in so that it's only on iPhone - they don't care about profit lost to not expanding their reach because they reinforce their own platform.
> I am mean seriously, why ostracized someone because they use a different type of phone?
Your current lived experiences may not be in sync with people in their teens or twenties. This is a well-known phenomenon called "green bubble bullying" that Apple has masterfully orchestrated to make people force other people to buy their phones.
You don't think Apple brass is doing everything in their power to convince non-iPhone users to switch to an iPhone? Every excluded teen is another potential customer and to pretend they don't know that is beyond naïve.
Do you have data about that or are you assuming you and your friends are representative of the majority of users?
It seems like one side of the debate says "I have experienced this, and the product features seem to encourage this behavior" and the other side says "No one really does this, you just have a few insane friends who happen to use iOS".
Feels like gaslighting when you've experienced this sort of behavior yourself, and not even from tweens who aren't well adjusted to the world, from your middle aged and up friends and family who are bought into that ecosystem.
That said, I've only seen this green vs blue debate reported on in the context of American teens. Even if it is accurate in that group (questionable), that group make up a tiny portion of global smartphone users. Even if the actual group who care are double that, it's still tiny.
As such, it seems unlikely this is such a critical thing that Apple bigwigs are sitting around discussing this group.
My bigger question is how are any Beeper Mini users getting through (aka how is Beeper Mini's backend getting around the fact that... I thought you needed a valid serial # to an Apple device specific to you to log in + use iMessage)
Apple doesn't have predictable serial numbers anymore, they're all just random numbers corresponding to rows in a database. There's no way to generate them.
It wasn't a serious idea. The fact I mentioned it along side Serial Box should have been a clue. Maybe you're too young to know what Serial Box was, or the 90s cracking culture. Shh, the adults are speaking =)
You have to de-register the device with Apple when you sell it. Otherwise you retain the ability to remote wipe and brick the device and the buyer has no recourse.
After you de-register it the buyer can register it with Apple under their Apple ID.
I have Apple devices that are allowed to use iMessage including some that I don't use. If my computer can impersonate one of them to allow me to message from my workstation that's success.
> If my computer can impersonate one of them to allow me to message from my workstation that's success.
But Beeper Mini isn't asking users to bring-their-own valid hardware registered Apple hardware ID tied to their Apple ID, they're doing something different/unknown behind the scenes
> Migicovsky previously denied to Ars that Beeper used "fake credentials"
As far as I know (I could be wrong), in order to log in + auth to Apple's various protocols that are involved to make iMessage work, you need a valid Apple ID and some sort of valid hardware ID.
If you don't have either of those, how would you be talking to Apple's services?
If their POST /login requires email + password + valid registered serial # of device sold that isn't flagged stolen and not shared across 100 accounts... how does Beeper Mini expect to work?
AFAIK, and I could be wrong, beeper mini registers a new HWID with apple for each phone. Which is why they thought it was unpatchable, at first, as they would need to determine which phone is in fact an iPhone.
There's much more to the validation protocol than just HWID/serial. See https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush/blob/main/emulated/data... for a list of the data that is pulled from the platform and used for validation. I would assume that Beeper registrations either use data from a pool of real devices, or made-up data that Apple might "permit" (because hackintoshes) but can definitely detect and block at any time.
Might be intentional. Unreliable service is probably worse as a user. Never know if the system is down or if it’s just you. Plus probably harder for beeper to work out how/why they are getting blocked.
> Not commenting about the ethics of all this, just wondering why technically Apple can only block ~5% of Beeper Mini users instead of all of them? Could this potentially be tied to the use of an email id as the iMessage handle?
I wonder if it might also have anything to do with govt action. I believe a US elected rep recently tweeted in favour of Beeper. Apple cares much more about PR than they'll admit, and server costs for them are negligible.
The rep was Senator Elizabeth Warren, who was once pretty popular during the Obama years when she helped create the CFPB. She sadly doesn’t hold much sway (e: in the senate) anymore.
This seems to be Beeper's insincere attempt at dressing up their grievances to appear as if they were in advantage of the [Apple's] customer.
Apple has made it clear that they won't bring iMessage to Android. People who choose to invest in Android phones know they won't get access to iMessage.
It seems a bit entitled behaviour for someone to feel like Apple should be forced to bring iMessage to Android for any reason besides Apple's own choice, and that they know better than Apple on how to run Apple's business.
What's entitled behavior is big tech thinking it can dictate how and where we use technology and services. Why should we be roped into serving Apple's interests and ignoring own own? Beeper can pursue their own interests while benefiting users, that's hardly a negative.
I'm sure if Ford dictated how and where you drove your car you'd be outraged, but we should kowtow to the likes of Apple?
What if Ford made it so that their vehicles drive worse when non-Ford vehicles were on the road, and then when confronted about it told all of their customers that they should convince their neighbors to buy a Ford to solve the problem?
It's not entitled, it's pushing back against a gigantic company exploiting network effects to create user lock-in, because that's easier than competing on the merit of your products.
Speaking for myself, I think iMessage is a good product, and it's one of the (many) reasons I use Apple devices as daily drivers.
You make it sound like people only use iMessage because of the network effect/lock-in, and clearly aren't considering that perhaps said network effect exists at least in part because iMessage is just...good.
People absolutely do buy Apple devices purely because of the lock-in. Many people in my own family have. Obviously there are others that just prefer iMessage on its own quality, that goes without saying (which is why GP didn't mention it).
If the product is so great why doesn't Apple make it available on more platforms? The answer is because it's not a product, it's a marketing tool. And a very successful one based on the widespread bullying it has caused.
If Zelda is so great why doesn’t Nintendo make it available on more platforms? Being able to run Nintendo games is a prime feature of the Switch product, and being able to run Apple software and services is a prime feature of an iPhone product. By your definition anything useful about an item is simply a marketing tool?
It’d be a very different world if nothing was allowed to have unique access to anything. It might even be better, but it would be a long way from this current version of capitalism.
Give me a fucking break, “bullying” for Christ’s sake!
They invented a nice thing, made it available on their hardware, and now people like yourself who refuse to buy their hardware for whatever reason are salty you can’t play on the platform so result to juvenile arguments like “I’m being bullied” to try and get your own way. It’s fucking ridiculous and you need to grow up.
It's fine to use it if you think it's good, hell it probably is. What isn't nice is when I get forced to buy an iphone start using imessage because everyone else is when I don't want that, which is what is happening.
If iMessage is so good, why do so many people want to use Beeper instead? If I thought my Keurig were a good coffee machine, I wouldn't go out of my way to install a different coffee machine.
Now apply this logic to any other company product, maybe even your own or the company you work for and tell me if this sounds as ridiculous to you as it does me.
Most companies don't have network effect with lock-in, and especially those we depend to live our everyday lives: I can send money to my buddy who uses a different bank, I can send emails to gmail users from my yahoo account , I can also refuel my car at any station and not be tied to one brand. Imagine being locked in to any of those.
There are of course a lot of companies with lock-in out there, but none with such big network effect deeply intertwined with peoples' communication and personal lives (in the US).
The thing is: it is not locking in. At the moment through SMS and it will support RCS next year.
And RCS will solve it all. If group chats and high quality media work, people will only complain about the one thing they hate most:
The bubbles will still be green.
But I am from Europe, we don't care around here and I don't like iMessage that much. Compared to Telegram/Whatsapp, it's slow at loading old messages, has sync issues and only gut swipe to reply this year.
1. You cannot opt to use SMS on Apple Messages when talking to someone. If they are registered on iMessage, you are forced to use it. This happens transparently, automatically, and for the most part, silently. This helps to create the illusion that Apple devices are just better at texting, and anything else is old and shitty. When in reality, Apple itself only supports their own proprietary messaging system, and an ancient texting protocol that is bad.
2. I hope you are right that RCS will solve everything once Apple implements it, but I don't have confidence it will. The biggest problem is how they handle group chats: If iMessage group chats cannot seamlessly convert into RCS group messages (without duplication or splitting) then it will solve it well enough. This is unlikely to happen unfortunately
You absolutely can disable iMessage for yourself and text anyone using regular texts (SMS) only, you are never forced into iMessage. You can deregister your phone number on Apple's website without any Apple device.
Also, where is the "illusion" about "being better at texting"? Apple is literally coloring the bubbles differently to tell you that _iMessage is not the same_. How much more explicit can it get?
If the deployment is anywhere close to how it went in Australia, RCS will be a bumpy road with many people turning it off to get messages delivered. My usual experience for months now is: send a message, get a "can't deliver" notification an hour later, resend by SMS, next message delivers through RCS and switches the conversation, repeat.
We're talking here about literally the most valuable public company in the world and a product (iPhone) used on average dozens of times and several hours daily by nearly 50% of the US population. I'm generally a free market kind of guy but even I admit that at this scale it is OK to apply different standards.
Speaking as a life-long Apple user who mostly thinks the rampant attacks on Apple are basically the same as the ones people have been throwing for 30+ years, just with "Apple is dying, no one should use their stuff" replaced with "Apple is too big/tyrannical, no one should use their stuff"...
I agree.
But.
The solution to that is to get antitrust regulators to step in and use the force of the law to change things.
Not to cheer on a third party using security vulnerabilities to piggyback onto Apple's service and charge a subscription for it.
There is no security vulnerability, that is FUD. They're charging a subscription to fix Apple's bugs that intentionally cripple communication communication with Android phones for Apple's own benefit and nobody else's.
Ok...third parties should be able to sell ink that works in your HP printer, or coffee pods that work in your Keurig, or tires that work on your Ford.
tell me if this sounds as ridiculous to you as it does me
It sounds not ridiculous at all. The only difference with Beeper is that there is some marginal cost to handling messages, but we all know that's not Apple's real problem with it.
That doesn't seem right.
People can also push back against Apple by voting with their wallets.
Apple has been able to create their ecosystem by exerting control over it. If someone doesn't like it, they can start their own business giving people what people want. Now, that's another way of pushing against any gigantic company or Apple.
> It seems a bit entitled behaviour for someone to feel like Apple should be forced to bring iMessage to Android for any reason besides Apple's own choice, and that they know better than Apple on how to run Apple's business.
It is simultaneously possible for it to appear entitled, while also recognizing how extremely restrictive, anti consumer and anti competition Apple is. And in this fight of a trillion dollar company vs something a little bigger than a startup, it's fun to root for the small guys who are hitting back at that restrictedness, sometimes even successfully.
It can be agreeable to an extend that Apple seem like an extremely restrictive, anti consumer and anti competition. But, the other side (Android), which has been positioned open, pro-consumer and pro-competition doesn't seem to be true to its roots or any better anyways. Android is mostly dominated by Samsung and Samsung is heavily pushing their own ecosystem of apps, just like every other company, and most brands want to lock in their users too.
You can push your own ecosystem of apps and still allow your customers to replace them. I'm not aware of a Samsung app or service that cannot be swapped out. And I struggle even more to find a Samsung component that is designed to create network effect lock in like iMessage is. And Apple Messages can't be swapped out, it is the only texting app on iOS. You can install Signal or Whatsapp or whatever, but you can only talk to other people who have those apps installed. You cannot use them to talk to any phone number like a texting app can.
Out of curiosity why does this matter? Do iPhone users not use WhatsApp or Messenger? Is this a USA specific thing? As a UK Android user I've never used iMessage and don't see any reason why I'd need or want to.
Ah so do "free texts" in the USA include MMS? That might explain the continued usage. In the UK MMS often aren't included, if anything they're charged stupidly high, so you'd never send a pic via text message.
To give you another perspective, I’m UK based too and use iMessage daily to stay in touch with my family and close friends. Every now and then I’ll have bad signal (or maybe the recipient does? I’m not entirely sure…) and whatever I’m sending will be sent as an MMS. It happens so rarely it doesn’t really register, and I’d wager it costs me less than a quid a year (on EE, but I assume most MMOs have similar MMS pricing).
They are two completely different protocols, with iMessage's featureset being a superset of SMS's. If you are conversing with someone else with iMessage (either through an iPhone or another Apple device), Messages will automatically use iMessage; otherwise, it will use SMS. (If you prefer to use SMS, you are welcome to disable iMessage on your phone or other Apple device.)
iMessage goes over the IP network, not a side-channel in the cellular system the way SMS does—so you have to have either Wifi coverage or cellular data available; if you don't, as a matter of fact, it falls back to SMS within the same conversation, provided you are conversing with someone else who is identified by a phone number, and not just an Apple ID.
I'm not sure how universal that is, but it doesn't really matter when data plans are almost always unlimited. After all, iMessage also goes through cellular data.
I guess egoism is so entrenched in the USA that choosing a platform that all your friends and relatives can use to communicate to is just too much for them.
People use Beeper Mini because the Apple users they text with want them to. There's zero reason for two Android users to talk over iMessage using Beeper Mini. RCS provides nearly all the same benefits. But when the social pressure is for you to buy an iPhone that you don't want, it's sure tempting to just install an app so that Apple friends can stop complaining, and stop cutting you out of group chats.
If no one used iMessage, the value of Beeper Mini is zero. The value is smoothing the interaction with people who assume everyone is using an iPhone, and treat it as an annoyance when they don't. So effectively saying "just buy an iPhone to use iMessage" means "just buy an iPhone so you can talk to your iPhone friends".
You're still advantaged should you ever make friends with an Android user in the future, or at the very least you're not disadvantaged since you would not have had any difference made to you.
There are reports of kids being bullied (this [1] is an example from a Tell HN post), but I have anecdotally heard similar cases because they were "different" for having a "non-blue bubble" phone.
When there is broad agreement that apps like Tiktok and Instagram are toxic for teenagers, I have no idea why this aspect of Apple's lock-in hasn't received as much attention. It's way more serious than just some users wanting blue bubbles when your applications are common enough that they can cause social isolation and bullying in schools.
Entitled behavior is Apple dictating what code I can run on my non-Apple servers and devices. They can keep blocking it, and people will keep finding workarounds. That's the nature of DRM. It's not a battle they can win.
Reread what I said. I did not say "you are wrong" or "RCS is iMessage". I said "Apple might disagree with you" and "RCS is pretty much iMessage". Why don't you stop trying to make me seem wrong by putting words into my mouth.
‘Apple has made it clear that they won't bring iMessage to Android.’
This was your reply:
‘Apple might disagree.’ and you then proceeded to supply a link to 9to5Mac about Apple interfaces iMessage to RCS.
TFA states:
“But at the same time, iMessage isn’t going anywhere. It will continue to be the messaging platform used for all communication between iPhone users. RCS will simply supplant SMS and MMS and exist separately from iMessage when available. SMS and MMS will also continue to be available as a fallback when needed, Apple says.
This is not Apple opening up iMessage to other platforms. Instead, it’s the company adopting RCS separately from iMessage”
The very link you supplied disproves your point.
iMessage is iMessage. RCS is RCS, and SMS is SMS.
Sorry, but iMessage is not RCS.
Base RCS for example does not support E2EE. iMessage does.
You can claim they’re the same as much as you’d like, but their only similarities is that iMessage will send messages to RCS and support the native carrier chosen RCS features.
> This is not Apple opening up iMessage to other platforms.
Which I never claimed.
> Sorry, but iMessage is not RCS.
The only person who keeps repeating "iMessage is RCS" is yourself.
> You can claim they’re the same as much as you’d like, but their only similarities is that iMessage will send messages to RCS and support the native carrier chosen RCS features.
Less than 1% of iphone users even know what e2ee is. Less than .01% disable that icloud backup thing that makes iMessage e2ee useless for them and their contacts.
If iOS has a messaging system that is capable of things imessage today is capable of and is interoperable with android then the only people for whom the separation between imessage and RCS matters is pedantic nerds, no offence.
SMS is not end-to-end encrypted (E2EE). The purpose of Beeper Mini (not to be confused with Beeper Cloud, which is not E2EE) is to allow Android users to send encrypted texts to Apple iMessage users the same way iMessage users can send E2EE texts to each other.
An Android user and an iOS user could both use a third-party app like Signal. But Beeper Mini's main feature is maintaining encryption for chats between Android users and iMessage users, saving the Android users the need to convince iMessage users to switch to a different messaging app. 1. The benefit of E2EE applies to the users on both ends, including iMessage users. 2. With Beeper Mini instead of an E2EE-dedicated multi-platform app like Signal, only one side of the communication pair needs to install something.
Beeper Mini Apple doesn't want to make an iMessage implementation for Android.
aside from the magic features not working; SMS costs money.
On some mobile contracts it's pretty close to free these days, but international SMS's are certainly not. - not sure it's a common use-case but it definitely is a common use-case for me.
Ironically, iMessage not being available on Android causes the other messenger apps to be more appealing. Whatsapp/Facebook Messenger. -- because they can be more ubiquitous across friends.
Beeper CEO, from the article: "If there's enough pressure on Apple, they will have to quit messing with us." "Us," he clarified, meant both Apple's customers using iMessage and Android users trying to chat securely with iPhone friends.
"That's who they're penalizing," he wrote. "It's not a Beeper vs. Apple fight, it's Apple versus customers."
Not really sure how this is anti-customer. Apple customers have ample access to iMessage, after all. And as has been noted many, many times, there are many means of accessing secure cross-platform messaging.
Apple has customers who want to use iMessage. Those customers are not able to use iMessage to securely communicate with Android users.
That's pretty clear. If Apple's customers want to be able to use iMessage for such communications then (1) the Android user buys an Apple product, (2) a third party makes a cross-platform iMessage client, or (3) Apple open iMessage to other platforms.
> Apple has customers who want to use iMessage. Those customers are not able to use iMessage to securely communicate with Android users.
I as a Signal user want to communicate securely with Facebook Messenger users. Therefore Facebook must allow me to reverse engineer their services and make unauthorized systems to allow me to create a service to send messages to Messenger users from Signal.
> I as a Signal user want to communicate securely with Facebook Messenger users. Therefore Facebook must allow me to reverse engineer their services and make unauthorized systems to allow me to create a service to send messages to Messenger users from Signal.
That's precisely what Signal started out as :)
Before Signal existed, it was common to use Pidgin or Adium with OTR to send encrypted messages through SMS, Google Chat or Facebook Messenger.
TextSecure – the original name of Signal – was created to improve upon OTR by allowing it to better handle situations where one user was offline while the other tried to send messages. Originally it only supported sending messages via SMS, not via their own servers.
Sure I do too, but I'm against this ridiculous notion that Apple MUST allow others to integrate and use their services for free.
My point is nobody has any problem with the myriad of other messaging platforms that are completely closed, but all of the sudden iMessage is the bad guy because you don't want to have a green bubble with iPhone users?
A proper thing is for the EU to require apple to implement an interoperabile message api and force that to be used as the default, rather than being able to use a non-interoperable messaging protocol as the default
I don't think anyone's saying apple must allow them (though such people admittedly exist on the internet, in retrospect). I think its more of disappointment at the speed at which apple is "patching" this.
As an Apple user, I'm glad they're patching this fast. It's a security issue and privacy one. Sure Beeper may be using it in a non-nefarious way, that doesn't mean bad actors aren't gonna use this to spam the heck out of iMessage users.
You know, I have been getting constant scam texts from "Amazon" for a $289 vacuum that I'm supposed to call a number to cancel the order and it's coming from an email address, or a phone number. Never really got them before in that way.
> My point is nobody has any problem with the myriad of other messaging platforms that are completely closed
That's entirely wrong. A lot of people are angry with every closed messaging platform, which is why people are still maintaining the matrix bridges to Discord, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Signal, all of which are still a cat-and-mouse game, violating the ToS of those services.
Those bridges are actually what Beeper Cloud, their primary product, later was also based on.
And these bridges originally are based on the libpurple backends for Slack, Teams, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, AIM, ICQ, Google Chat, Skype, etc, all of which were created through reverse engineering.
So, yeah, fuck those closed services, messages want to be free, and enough people will care that we'll break all of those services.
Blue sky, text freely. Green could cost money by hitting your SMS message bill.
This color difference matters even if you don't care about security at all.
. . .
Second:
> That's pretty clear. If Apple's customers want to be able to use iMessage for such communications then (1) the Android user buys an Apple product, (2) a third party makes a cross-platform iMessage client, or (3) Apple open iMessage to other platforms. Apple is blocking on (2) and (3).
Option 4, run any other app that's on both platforms, which is what most of the world does anyway, including any iPhone user I know in the US who chats regularly with anyone International. For EU it's WhatsApp, China WeChat, and in USA it's privacy minded Signal, PTA parents Facebook Messenger, etc.
Given no cross platform is blocked, you'll see many iPhones do not have Messages in the launch bar, but one of those others.
> Those customers are not able to use iMessage to securely communicate with Android users.
Well, they can't now as a result of blocking Beeper. But they could — using Beeper.
It's one thing to argue that you won't open the platform because it's additional work to support that. But that argument degrades when they're willing to do the work to shut out unexpected uses of the platform.
If they want to ensure safety, they should do the extra work of making it possible to interoperate with iMessage safely. But safety isn't the priority and everyone knows it.
That's how I view it as well, this is a security issue. Beeper is gaining unauthorized access to a service and Apple doesn't like it. The fact that they are not technically breaking anything is kind of like going into a business after hours because the door wasn't locked. You still aren't authorized to be there.
The better analogy is using a fake ID to get the locksmith to give you a copy of the house key.
The house is Apple’s servers
The fake ID is spoofed device serials and UUIDs
The copy of the house key is the authentication blob
Nobody would blink twice if a prosecutor threw the book at someone like that. Still, somehow, I’m sure many here would complain if the DOJ would prosecute Beeper for violating the CFAA by committing computer trespass or if Apple would sue them for violating the clause prohibiting reverse engineering in the OS license.
The analogy is off in a meaningful way: you're using a "fake ID" to get the locksmith to give you a copy of your own house key because the locksmith won't accept your real ID. No prosecutor is going to throw the book at someone trying to access their own house.
Apple claims I'm in control of my messages. They're on my devices. Apple refuses access to Android. Why can't I use technology to make my messages work on Android? They're my messages!
You might respond that this impacts someone else. For example, me using Beeper means that anyone messaging me is impacted. My counterpoint is that the user is always the weakest link. I can share messages sent to me with anyone I like, and that's legally fine to do. So why can't they be shared with a different software service that I trust? (People use all kinds of 3rd party email clients which could be untrustworthy, and yet we still mostly trust email.)
Pretty sure you’re mixing up Beeper Cloud with Beeper Mini.
Beeper Mini is based on pypush, which they’ve bought, and is clearly using spoofed data in the data.plist[0].
I’ve searched, but I’ve found no mention of them purchasing Mac Minis en masse to support the $2/mo Beeper Mini customer’s texting habits.
Besides, it wouldn’t make sense anyway because they used to tout you didn’t need an Apple ID and instead could use your phone number, and non-iPhone IDs don’t allow for iMessage activation on phone numbers, only email addresses.
dont forget to incude that a lot of folks do not realize that iMessage uses a different protocal for texting than simply texting; folks dont really always know or care about the program, they associate "icon" or "new version of icon" as texting, and use it to simply "send a text message"; not everybody is able to comprehend the difference between a simple "text message" and "imessage" vs other apps, ect
the advertisers/carriers also dont use "send an imessage" - its simply "unlimited texting" that gets stuck in folks brains (albeit i have not watched tv ads in some time, maybe its been updated to exact app names lol)
> Apple has customers who want to use iMessage. Those customers are not able to use iMessage to securely communicate with Android users
Of course they do. There's Signal and Telegram and WhatsApp. My principal benefit of iMessage is its relative lack of spam. (And when I do get spam, it gets stomped out fast.)
Apple Music blitzkrieging Spotify is bullshit. The lock on subscription payments is bullshit. I happen to think the App Store is fine, but I'll concede that there's a real debate to be had there. But this isn't a material issue.
Same experience with signal, but SMS phishing is a very large issue, at least in my country. Maybe your phone number was just never leaked and you're not present in the spammers databases?
email and phone spam would be a bit easier to mitigate if places-we-enter email+phone (websites that want this info) would give us a list of Emails and Phone-numbers it uses to contact us with, and even email-subject prefixes; it is no different than when you meet an old friend and you each, mutually, exchange phones/emails/physical addresses; why are the UX of all the websites so poorly designed that we consumers do not get to see, proactively, the address they intend to talk to us from?
Spotify launched on iOS. Apple saw them competing with iTunes and basically stole their idea to compete with them. That, alone, would be okay. But Apple Music is privileged within iOS and Apple's marketing in a way Spotify cannot be.
a) Spotify didn't invent music streaming. There were many services e.g. Pandora that were doing in the years before. It was a pretty obvious idea once devices had faster bandwidth.
b) Apple didn't steal their idea. They acquired Beats who had launched a similar service soon after Spotify.
c) Apple Music isn't privileged. It comes pre-installed but otherwise you can delete the app and use Spotify, Youtube Music etc.
Apple Music is privileged when it comes to Siri. I currently have both a Spotify and Apple Music subscription, and one of the main reasons I prefer Apple Music, aside from shuffle not playing the same 20 songs in a 2000 song playlist, is the great hands free functionality. I can add songs to playlist, play a song next instead of adding it to the end of the queue (which is more of Spotify STILL not having deque support), and I know there are other things I've run into Spotify can't do on Siri, but I'm blanking at the moment.
Oh, I would apply that to any number of things Apple integrated, for example dropbox/icloud drive.
Google does the same thing. Unfortunately, with the near zero marginal cost of software, I do not see any way around vertical integration unless the law started arbitrarily segregating businesses.
Also, Apple Music came out 5 years after Spotify, so it had a pretty healthy lead. But regardless, any non Apple vendor competing with Apple's bundled products is going to face an uphill battle.
> Apple customers have ample access to iMessage, after all. And as has been noted many, many times, there are many means of accessing secure cross-platform messaging.
In fairness, i am a 5+ device apple customer and i can't use it on my two primary desktops. I use Beeper to write texts on my primary computer.
Apple feels anti-me. I pay for products and unless i'm 100% into the ecosystem they fight me. Sure, they don't owe me an app on every platform i like - but they're also fighting me developing my own, too.
I discontinued using Apple products primarily due to their ecosystem-centric design philosophy. Many features appear tailored exclusively for users fully committed to Apple's ecosystem. While it's common for platforms to have exclusive features, Apple's approach feels more pronounced. In contrast, Google, for instance, offers Android-specific features, yet their services function well across various platforms, including mobile and desktop, and this compatibility extends to Apple devices as well.
Yeah. I’ve got all sorts of Apple stuff in the house. One apple ecosystem piece I adore is being able to copy paste between my Apple devices. I’d love it if that worked from my Linux workstation too. C’mon, Apple.
Speaking as an Apple customer, there are many times I wish iMessage was more open. My partner and some friends prefer Android. Would be great to use Messages with them. Plus, I'd love to have Messages on whatever desktop I'm using. Sure, I spend the majority of my time in MacOS. But, I've got Windows, Linux, and Chromebooks here in the house. Would be so much more convenient to have Messages on all platforms.
As an Android user I'd rather use iMessage than WhatsApp, if I have to choose between proprietary messaging apps. Meta isn't a company I want to rely upon, but I'm forced to because of almost everyone using WhatsApp where I live.
Absolutely nothing. I already use alternative services for Android contacts. I just like iMessage and wish it was available on non-Apple hardware. Would be immensely more convenient.
I'm an apple customer but I don't agree that I have ample access to iMessage. I use a MacBook and have an old iPhone lying around, but I use my android phone for daily messaging, including my family who use iPhones.
Agreed on there being access to other encrypted messaging apps. But that doesn't account for "app-fatigue" where people are fed up with getting yet another application (think Zoom, Meet, Slack, Signal, Discord, etc) and thus you have friction on getting people to use a new app.
For example: I've tried to get friends and family on Telegram and only succeeded in getting a fraction of them. I also feel that they're using it just to appease me and don't use it with others.
SMS/MMS/RCS/iMessage have default apps on phones and people tend to not seek replacement or simply can't (iMessage) This is what Beeper is trying to fix by introducing an app just for Android users to connect with iMessage users, thus challenging the Apple walled garden.
I haven't jumped on the Beeper wagon because I don't know the consequences of this tug-o-war. Would I lose secure messages if the iMessage rug gets pulled out while my number is registered? It seems I would unless I deregister my number. It just seems too volatile to me but I'm a fan of Pebble and wish the Beeper team+founders the best. I'll be keeping my eye on this.
> Any chat I'm in that has at least one Android user is annoying
Is this still the case since they stopped sending the "gmm1990 hearted XYZ" messages, and instead integrated the tapbacks? I really don't see a difference unless I'm in the air (and so cannot connect to the cellular network).
I have seen comments from iMessage users, and it is also logical to assume that they would prefer if there was a way to chat with their Android friends via iMessage while having most of the nice features. An Android iMessage app would only be bad for Apple, since they will no longer be able retain and convert users based on them being or not being able to comfortably message their friends.
1. Yes I would love if iMessage went Android and all my Android friends were able to react, thread convos, and all the other perks that iMessage allows, BUT the color of the message doesn't matter to me. I'm ok with the green bubbles too.
2. If iMessages was available on Android, I and every iPhone user I know wouldn't be like "finally, I can leave Apple!" iMessage is a perk not the main draw. The wider ecosystem and walled garden that non-Apple users apparently hate so much is not-surprisingly lovely to those of us all in on it.
2. This might be the case for most people, but I have heard people did or do switch obly due to iMessage. To be clear I don't think there would be a huge exodus, but it is a major lock-in feature in the US. Or at least that is what I have read.
> Not really sure how this is anti-customer. Apple customers have ample access to iMessage, after all. And as has been noted many, many times, there are many means of accessing secure cross-platform messaging.
The point of a secure instant messaging protocol/app is to be able to communicate securely with people. If the company providing said app make it on purpose difficult for its customers to communicate with people, it is penalizing them.
We are not talking technical difficulties, we are talking unwillingness to let a secure channel stay open and making so that communication with people is less secure.
It's definitely a weird fight, especially when you consider Beeper wants to make money off of Apple's service without any compensation going Apple's way. It's hard for me to tell if the Beeper CEO is delusional or simply doing PR speak.
"Interoperability is picking apple's pocket by allowing people cross-platform secure communication in a way that's usable to them" is a take that is bending over backwards to lick corporate boot. I get that part of apple's marketing is extreme brand loyalty, but your communications with non-ios users being less secure harms you as an ios user too, and the loss to apple is one of control over its customers' behavior more than anything else
> Apple customers have ample access to iMessage, after all.
It's not really fair that Apple gets to build snares around owning the most successful and important platform in modern civilization. This isn't an automobile where there are 50 alternative manufacturers, this is the "everything" device that handles your bills, employment, connections to loved ones, etc. And there's only one other choice of vendor in the United States.
Apple shouldn't be able to exercise their position (nor should Google) to own every aspect of human life built atop this connection. Mobile internet shouldn't belong to anyone. It shouldn't be taxed by anyone. And yet here we are.
One of the first rulings from antitrust I would expect is non-proprietary messaging protocols.
> This isn't an automobile where there are 50 alternative manufacturers
No, it’s exactly this. There are a ton of manufacturers all providing this product. It just so happens that Apple’s is one of the best, if not the best. And as has been mentioned, there are tons of secure messaging alternatives. It’s just that people prefer iMessage. This is not illegal or anticompetitive.
Imagine if someone claimed they should be let into an airport lounge of an airline they aren’t flying on, simply because their friends are there.
Both tax everything in the world now. They're even becoming official government document providers. They're sinking their claws into all aspects of life and taxing and controlling them.
> It just so happens that Apple’s is one of the best, if not the best.
I don't think you can explain it that way. Network effect is a thing and instant messaging preferences are very regional.
Also:
- With same products and quality Apple probably would probably have lower share in the USA if it was a chinese or iranian company.
- Regardless of its qualities the iphone has long been and is still a social class status symbol.
- The conversation on hn is skewed because iphones have slightly higher than 50% of market share in the USA, not 90% yet commenters on hn mention that their social circle is almost entirely made of iMessage users, which means the average hn commenter is of a much higher income and social class than the average US smartphone user. Using hn is mostly like entering a fancy suburb and only discuss with a limited subset of the population.
> It's not really fair that Apple gets to build snares around owning the most successful and important platform in modern civilization.
On the flip side, Apple spent a lot of effort into developing their ecosystem. It doesn't seem fair to Apple that other companies get to piggyback on Apple's investments without Apple's permission. I'm not an Apple fan, but, that kind of sounds illegal. Imagine if you were to develop something useful and then someone comes around telling you that they deserve access to your awesome thing just because, even to your own detriment - even when they haven't spent the time and effort building it or contributing to the development process.
> It's not really fair that Apple gets to build snares around owning the most successful and important platform in modern civilization.
When did Apple take ownership of the internet? Or are you referring to iOS? Which is actually not even the market leader at all?
My question is, if their ecosystem is soooo much better... Instead of fighting them to make it available on other devices why don't you, I don't know... Buy their devices?
> One of the first rulings from antitrust I would expect is non-proprietary messaging protocols.
So not sideloading or App Store Alternatives, or setting a limit of the App Store fees, or advertising alternative payments?
(edit: I'm not suggesting any of there are or are not valid reason, just that it's laughable to suggest that messaging will be at, or near the top of the list. Especially from a 5 Eyes government!)
It seems like the effort Apple is putting in stopping this is an indicator of how many people buy iPhones just for being in their iMessage circles. Which is only possible as long as Apple keeps snubbing RCS and making messaging painful to non-iPhone users.
If, say, a random cheap Motorola with Beeper could keep them in the same groups as before, Apple would probably lose a (small) chunks of its clients.
The thing that bothers me is that Apple’s actions hurt iPhone owners. Making it harder for them to communicate with non-iPhones is a bad experience. Intentionally making their product worse to encourage lock-in is anti-user.
I’m oddly surprised that iPhone owners are ok with this.
Most iPhone owners are unaware that it's intentional on Apple's part, and are lead to believe that other devices just aren't sophisticated enough to make the bubbles blue.
> how many people buy iPhones just for being in their iMessage circles
This is news only in the US. Literally everywhere else in the world (where iPhones don't have a supermajority market share), third-party apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, etc have been used for the past decade, with no problems whatsoever. My own WhatsApp account has been active for a decade, with chats going back exactly that far.
My experience is that third party applications are the norm in the US, too. Everyone I know uses Facebook Messenger or Discord, and that situation has been the norm for at least a decade (and Discord itself is nearing a decade of existence now). Facebook Messenger is easily the default multi-platform option.
90% of my Messages app is SMS threads, and the vast majority of my messaging activity is Slack, Discord and Facebook Messenger.
I would probably go as far as saying that this is only the "norm" on HN or in crowds where they think people spend $1200+ on a device just for the color of text bubbles.
My teenager and his friends don't even use iMessage, they use Snapchat almost exclusively to communicate. Someone messages them on iMessage they read it and then respond on Snapchat.
Which ones? I have friends (young and old) all over Europe and everyone uses WhatsApp. Everywhere I've been in Europe defaults to WhatsApp, even for business communication.
Like, it's n=1, but still, my experience is quite broad.
EU: I'm trying to get everyone i know onto signal. Hard fight.
I tried whatsapp for a month and it was so facebooky (that I also got rid of yeeaaars ago, after trying for a month) that I deleted it.
Whatsapp is very common, though and I am gradually being pushed out of various communications (my doctor, for example, pharmacies).
At least I don't have to bugger about with Teams which is the requirement for my kids' schools. Amicable divorce, but I don't have that on my phone, unlike my ex (who hates it).
If any company with a restricted service exposed to the internet found someone illegally gaining access by spoofing device IDs or API keys, the engineers who noticed would immediately shut down access and inform management, so they can run it up the chain to legal. There need be no other motivation beyond preventing illegal access to a computer system.
I doubt Beeper Mini is on the radar of anyone high up at Apple. Some engineering team responsible for the services that back iMessage is just spotting and dealing with one of probably many malicious actors.
RCS support has also already been announced by Apple for 2024.
This is simply not true. Frankly, my first instinct would be to let it go if they're not causing issues. I certainly wouldn't start swinging the ban hammer around without knowing that the hell the traffic is.
It could be a bug in our client code, and I could be cutting off paying customers. It could be some weird and/or poorly written software by a customer. It could be some bizarre WAN accelerator issue at some giant company with real devices.
I would presume that at least someone at Apple knows that the traffic is from Beeper, and what Beeper is. I would expect that it hit the desk of a mid-tier Director at least (would you or your manager be comfortable implementing heuristic blocking without telling a director?).
It still may not be a strategic decision, but I wouldn't assume that decision makers aren't aware of what's going on.
These comments mention spam a lot as a reason to stick with iMessage.
What kind of spam are people (presumably in the US) getting outside of iMessage? I’m in the EU, I get very little SMS spam (mostly for telecom’s clumsy attempts to find more ways to monetize me).
I also have Viber, Telegram, and FB messenger, and the spam is virtually zero on Viber (less than an “offer” a month, and it’s from the likes of Coca Cola, not herbal viagra) and literally zero on the others.
(from India). We have huge SMS spam. Significant spam for me ismarketing SMS from companies. They automatically sign your number up for example when you make a purchase/at POS. No opt-out - its eternal
We do have facility for DND with Deparatment of Telecom but seems to come up short as mine is in DND but receive several messages and calls through out the day.
I don't have hard numbers, but I can say that spam on both sides of the ocean exist. In the US, we get a lot of SMS spam targeted at homeowners, pestering them about selling their property, since there's a lot of open data about property ownership. In Germany, there's frequently spam pretending to be one of the major shipping companies (DHL for example) or the local customs office (Zoll) saying you have a package that couldn't be delivered and to click on a link. I've found the source for this data to be customer data leaks.
So yes, spam is a serious concern. WhatsApp spam exists as well, but since there's a central authority, unlike with SMS, it's a lot harder to avoid being shutdown.
I don’t see how it would make a difference anyway; iMessage will still display the regular SMS messages, so iMessage users are still susceptible to spam. (I checked and as an iMessage user I had about 10 in the last month)
I think everyone's spam experience on the various platforms just tends to vary a lot. Some people see iMessage spam, while others swear they haven't ever gotten one. Ditto for all the other services.
I see SMS/MMS spam in spurts; I'll get one or two spam messages a day for a week or so, and then nothing for months. On Whatsapp, I get a few spam messages a month. I've never seen spam on GChat or FB Messenger. I don't use Viber or Telegram, so can't speak to those.
I'm getting somewhat noticeable (once every few weeks) phishing attempts on Telegram and Instagram, less frequent on WhatsApp. On Instagram they sit unobtrusively in "requests" and disappear after some time, in Telegram and Whatsapp they do pop up and have to be deleted.
On Android, I get dozens of spam political texts a day.
Luckily Google has added anti spam features to Google Messenger for years now and it filters out 99.999% of them. Once in a blue moon, a txt will slip by and i have to mark it as spam.
MSN Messenger played a similar cat-and-mouse game with AOL Instant Messenger long time ago. Unlike MSN Messenger which used this publicity to grow their own market share, I am not sure what's the end game for Beeper.
attention? this has brought beeper _tremendous_ publicity. i think it’s naive to think that beeper didn’t expect this—its win-win for them no matter what.
Win-win no matter what? An extremely likely scenario is that Beeper becomes completely defunct, and Apple has no legal or regulartory pressure applied to them. What's the win for Beeper here?
Beeper (Beeper Cloud) is a cross-platform stack that supports multiple messaging systems (not just iMessage) and has been in development for years.[1] This is different from Beeper Mini, which is a recently launched Android-exclusive app that only supports SMS/MMS and iMessage.[2]
The release of Beeper Mini certainly gained publicity for Beeper Cloud, and I don't see why Beeper Mini would cause Beeper Cloud to go defunct.
I suspect they're angling to be bought out. Whether they maintain it, or kill it, they're likely just hoping to survive long enough that Apple decides buying them out is easier.
Completely uninformed question, doesn't this fight just push people to WhatsApp?
I never use SMS, and no one in Mexico does either. My friends in Europe seem to largely use WhatsApp as well. So it really seems like Americans are outliers in their choice for iMessage / SMS.
I think what happened is that Americans got unlimited SMS plans meaning they got used to just communicating by SMS. Europe got WhatsApp to deal with wild SMS pricing. So Europeans moved over to WhatsApp etc. Americans continued using SMS. Apple took advantage of this with iMessage silently upgrading stuff to their protocol. On top of this iPhone penetration in many places in the US is much higher I think.
In Switzerland, free texts to non-Swiss numbers is expensive/rather uncommon. Instant Messaging is free to anyone the the world. Thus, SMS are dead (except for 2FA).
Most people who use iMessage here have literally no idea this is even happening and would not care if I told them. It's still just as hard as it's always been to get all of your friends/contacts to "just switch to WhatsApp".
Also, pretty sure the overlap of "would ever want to use Whatsapp" and "cares about iMessage at all" is zero. Either you have Apple Status Symbol people, or you have "Meta can die in a fire entirely" or "idk, I just use SMS and some people have iMessage". The first and last groups aren't gonna switch, and the middle are probably only ever going to use Telegram or Signal.
I think the problem is that you do understand and have explained it perfectly, but some people can’t handle the truth. These threads have brought out some ludicrous opinions (as anything Apple centric tends to on HN).
A lot of people don’t understand the absolutely insane (and totally stupid) power of “blue text” in social settings, especially among teens. “Green text” is social suicide, largely because a lot of reactions and emojis and stuff don’t work. It’s also a status symbol… even though high end Android phones cost about what higher end iPhones cost and refurb iPhones are cheap.
The iMessage platform is probably the strongest lock in on iPhones. Break that and the phone market gets competitive again.
I was at a company holiday setting with some coworkers and one of them mentioned how the green/blue text thing genuinely factored into their dating decisions, on the basis that texting with someone without iMessage made the conversation clunkier and harder to build rapport.
So... I don't think this is just among nerds and tech elitists.
"Green text" will get you turned down for dates and ostracized from friend groups, especially in middle and high school but even (for dating) into adulthood in some cases.
Yes it's stupid, but people have turned far dumber things into status symbols like gigantic massively overpriced pedestrian-crusher trucks.
The fundamental issue is that there are no readily-available iPhone emulators that can send iMessages, and this is a good thing that people pay for.
The benefit of the Apple walled garden is that the spammers are kept out, because they can't get fifty SIM cards, plug them in to a "SIM box"[1], and start sending hundreds of thousands of scam messages via iMessage. This is easy in an uncontrolled, open-source ecosystem, but is prohibitively difficult in Apple's ecosystem where you need a physical device with a unique cryptographic ID that can be locked out by a central authority.
Yes, it's an "exclusive club" where members pay to keep the general public out. The general public doesn't like this, but that is what it is. Inherently, allowing "anyone" in would void the exclusivity and invite an unrelenting flood of spam.
At best, Apple could open up iMessage to other vendors that have similarly well-controlled devices with good hardware cryptographic attestation, but there aren't any.
This argument doesn't make any sense from a user standpoint though. It would only make sense if users insisted on only using iMessage exclusively and didn't accept non-iMessage SMS messages at all. Getting an iphone and using iMessage doesn't make you less susceptible to spam text messages than Android users or people using other texting platforms, *because everyone uses SMS*. It's impossible not to.
Isn't there? You can use iMessage via the Messages app on a Mac and tools like BlueBubbles already have hooks to send and receive iMessages using the official client.
How so? You can easily automate sending messages on a Mac, and you can easily change the IDs on Intel based Macs. Ultimately, the only solid line of defence is banning your phone number and Apple ID.
Technically speaking, Beeper can keep working for a long time. That is, Until apple starts checking if the client is on a official apple device. This may or may not be feasible for Apple to implement, mostly depending on if they even have the resources/method to know if every device is legitimate or not (they may not- especially for older devices)
If they do have a way to enforce 'authentic' devices, the only step after that for beeper to take will be to ask users to purchase the cheapest iphone that still works for imessage and to extract its serial/key/whatever to import into the android client.
Same reason PS messenger can block third party clients.
Is it ethical? Not in my opinion. Facetime and iMessage were introduced under the guise of becoming open at some point, however that was because they lost a patent lawsuit iirc[0]
it's worth focusing on the differences between iMessage and Internet Explorer (which was the last monopoly battle that anyone cares about).
The truth of it is: across Apple devices, while iMessage is installed, the alternative message systems are just too successful to argue. The overwhelming majority are using facebook messenger or whatsapp anyway. So there's no evidence that Apple is curbing another industry.
Apple is also not in a monopolistic position except on their own hardware, which is true for everyone (including Blackberry with their messenger).
I am struggling to see how this is comparable. Allowing iPhone users to talk to Android users through iMessage is a benefit to iPhone users. iPhone users get more end-to-end encrypted messages.
Why do people continue to think that you have to have a monopoly to be monopolistic? Also, Apple does have a monopoly. They have a monopoly on all devices that can communicate through iMessage.
If that should be taken up by the DOJ or some other body is up to your interpretation of the law.
You know all the drm-y attestation b.s., yeah, don't be surprised when stuff like this accelerates apple and co.'s adaption of it. They can require the cpu to cryptographically verify imessage for it to talk to other clients. I hope the reverse engineers have a lot of fun though.
I don't oppose it but I do wonder why people can't just use a different client? Same with the usb-c nonsense, walled garden lawsuits,etc... when alternatives are viable, is it right to be intolerant of what you don't like? If I want to start a closed source proprietary crappy messaging app and I don't want other clients to talk to it, why would someone have a problem with that? But again, I think beeper's work is cool, I just have a hard time understanding the whole anti-apple sentiment. I mean, why support apple at all on your messaging app if you don't like them? Does apple or do apple users owe everyone else participation in their ecosystem?
I just can't reconcile the attitude with the attitude of liberty for all.
This ongoing saga reminds me of that famous story about how Microsoft engineers played a similar cat and mouse game to make MSN messenger interoperate with Yahoo's despite multiple efforts by the latter to block it.
It seems fairy obvious to me that the simple solution here is for Apple simply send a cease-and-desist to Beeper to stop using their network in an unauthorized manner (and I mean that in the literal sense of “you don’t have permission to do this”)
The only reason I can think of that Apple is willing to let this go on is to plug holes in their system shown by a relatively benign opponent.
I'm your typical Whatsapp on iPhone user from Europe who's here just for a good drama, but blimey if this guy's rhetoric isn't sooo repetitive and cringey now.
Like, my dude, it was an impressive technical hack, and you really pulled the tiger's whiskers when you went to prod with it, but dressing it in politics and greater mission and "freedom" with bald eagles and shit? Meh.
I miss the days when chat wasn't fragmented across apps and platforms or could at least be unified in apps like Adium. Having to have a different app installed for myriad different contacts is, at best, irritating.
A brief period (~2008-2015) when XMPP had momentum and federation was trendy, if incomplete.
Apps like Trillian, Pidgin (Gaim), Adium actually allowed chatting across many platforms on the client side. To some extent they still can, with add-ons.
That's precisely what the primary Beeper Cloud and the old Element One product are for. Just connect to your Signal, Discord, Facebook, WhatsApp, iMessage accounts and chat with all of them in one single app.
Beeper Cloud and Element One do this through matrix bridges, but Beeper has been trying to move this entirely into the client again, which is what Beeper Mini is an experiment for.
If Beeper Mini succeeds, it'll soon also support Signal, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. If Apple succeeds, messaging will remain fragmented.
> Back in the day there was ICQ, Yahoo Chat, MSN Messenger (and no doubt a dozen I forget).
Yes, and you could combine them all into a single multi-protocol messaging app like Adium, Trillian, Gaim, Pidgin, etc. to provide a single convenient unified experience.
2001, when Adium launched. It pretty much had every messaging app that anyone was on.
I used it exclusively for years. It supported all those things (or I should say if someone had multiple ways to get to them, Adium supported at least one of them).
Adium was a total lifesaver on Mac since there was never an official MSN messenger client there.
Back then a lot of services also used XMPP but that has been readily abandoned - Slack used to do XMPP, doesn't any more. Google used to do XMPP, doesn't any more...
I think their switch away from XMPP predates E2EE and some of them still aren't using E2EE, so that's not the real reason. XMPP has good E2EE now with OMEMO though.
Adium was a very well-designed mac app that I used for many years. All of its messaging connectivity was due to its use of libpurple (formerly libgaim).
Probably when e-mail was the primary form of digital communication.
Or maybe referring to RL. You know, actually talking to someone on phone or in-person. Although then you have to deal with different accents, dialects, languages, and even regions specific lexicon.
Yes, and there was Trillian, which was compatible with all of ICQ, Yahoo Chat, MSN Messenger and others.
But because Apple decided to make their messaging system a marketing tool instead of an interoperable app, we don't get to have a Trillian equivalent today.
It's interesting to simultaneously see takes complaining about fragmentation and apple having monopoly power in this thread. In sympathetic to the fragmentation take honestly, apple doesn't stop you from installing Whatsapp, but it's an interesting situation where it's folks who opted into a closed system that are complaining about the system being closed
> It's interesting to simultaneously see takes complaining about fragmentation and apple having monopoly power in this thread.
They are both issues! Fragmentation in messaging is a real problem in the US, and iMessage has for a decade been the closest to a solution for iPhone users. Users' frustration with fragmentation pushes them into the app where 1) they know the message will get there, and 2) there's a 50% chance the experience won't suck. iMessage's existence in a fragmented market and refusal to interoperate all but guarantees the fragmentation will continue.
If clients supporting multiple protocols become popular they could default to a sensible open protocol. Which, as the default in the popular app(s), would become the most widely used protocol. People can switch at their leisure because the app supports both, but over time the users transition because it's the default.
Since the old and proprietary protocols are only sustained by the network effect, they lose users, and eventually support for them gets dropped.
It's a method of transitioning from a collection of proprietary systems with their own network effects to an open one, by temporarily supporting both. For obvious reasons the operators of the proprietary systems don't want to be subject to that competition, which is they same reason they shouldn't be allowed to shut it out.
The end result will likely be a few apps that do the legwork to beat the various messaging platforms into some common denominator feature set and give you a single pane of glass.
Unsiloing messaging isn't some quick fix. It would be like saying "we have all these forums like HN, Reddit, Twitter, SpaceHey, Facebook they should all share a global identity system and be able to be used all by a single app with the same APIs." Like we can't even make a generic ActivityPub client.
Pidgin supports a good number of chat clients :) They lost the battle for a while there when walled gardens went up, but then won later on and regained support.
The main services iChat supported - AIM and Yahoo Messenger are gone. Google Chat no longer supports XMPP. I don't know anything about Facebook Messenger. Increasingly messaging services became siloed.
Couldn't you have said "compartmentalized", or "dominated by hostile silos" or anything else that doesn't involve comparison of the state of online chatting with wars that have killed humans? I agree things were nice with adium.
Wth are you talking about? My comment had nothing to do with trigger warning or any kind of sensitiveness, which you seem quite eager to hit on. I guess i'm not used to this kind of americanization of the debate and i must've said something very wrong to say without realizing. Point is the phrase is completely excessive in this context, we're talking about exchanging text messages. Yes aim and gtalk was funny but there is some romanticizing about "the old web".
>My comment had nothing to do with trigger warning or any kind of sensitiveness
Yes it did. Here it is, reproduced:
>Couldn't you have said "compartmentalized", or "dominated by hostile silos" or anything else that doesn't involve comparison of the state of online chatting with wars that have killed humans? I agree things were nice with adium.
In this comment, you have nothing of value to add to the conversation. Your comment could be replaced with "adium good" and it would retain all its utility. Yet, you felt it was necessary to police the language of someone else using a benign and commonplace term ("Balkanized") because it offended your particular sensibilities.
Welcome to the internet. People say things you disagree with regularly. If the term Balkanized offends you, please do not visit 4chan, reddit, twitter, or mastodon.
Your comment quoted above is of the absolute lowest quality, adds nothing to the conversation, and serves only to drag the quality of conversation down into the muck where the rest of the faux-intelligentsia strive to find new things they can be outraged about.
Thanks for lecturing me about the web. As is pretty evident in this subthread, there are definitely people here on hn that seem to be overly sensitive to self-proclaimed policing. Once again one last time: my response was calling the parent hyperbolic and actually imprecise. I couldn't have provoked this kind of reaction had i wanted to. TIL
> the rest of the faux-intelligentsia strive to find new things they can be outraged about.
Just wow. Which would be who exactly in this subthread? The amount of fact reversal to get to this conclusion is quite amazing.
FYI "TW" is outdated language and shouldn't be used any more. The phrase can elicit stress about what's to follow, and the t-word is associated with violent imagery.
I think that's essentially their point. The root of the term "balkanized" is war and the person they're replying to could have used a word with less violent connotations like the ones listed.
When Ma Bell didn't let people use third-party phones with their service, the government made them change their ways. Why is the government letting Apple get away with the equivalent?
Because Ma Bell was a regulated monopoly, and iMessage is not a monopoly. People routinely use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, SMS, FB Messenger, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I love that these guys are poking the bear. I wish Apple would do something to let me send high-quality photos and videos to my Android-owning friends via "text". But I don't think the government has a place to force that issue. Plenty of alternatives exist.
"Jury Rules Google App Store Operates as Monopoly" is in the headlines this week. So it seems maybe there is some risk to Apple with regards to iMessage.
Network effect? The whole value of it is that it lets you use existing networks (iMessage and SMS). Otherwise people could just switch to WhatsApp or any of twenty Google messaging services.
No I mean a beeper alternative that uses the iMessage backend. The tricky part with beeper is that they have their own notification server that gets the notifications from Apple and turns them into what android understands. That should be self-hosted by each person because it would contain the FairPlay key.
It’s a trivial cost that people don’t want to pay. Sadly it can’t be run as some kind of ala-carte computation that can scale-to-zero like a Lambda function can, because it needs to be an active connection-oriented daemon that keeps per-connection state — i.e. something that always maintains at least one real OS thread, holding open real OS sockets, on the same machine (so that those sockets don’t break at the TCP level.) In other words, for an individual to deploy their own push daemon, it would necessarily need to live on a $5/mo VPS or something. And people don’t value iMessage at $5/mo.
(…which naturally leads to the question: why is there no Lambda-like serverless compute substrate that allows your function to speak a connection-oriented protocol, by externalizing the connection-hold-open and per-connection book-keeping state into the routing layer, such that your own function in the system could scale-to-zero? Exactly like Pusher did for websockets 15 years ago, but routing to a vertically-integrated serverless compute layer rather than a “passive” PHP/CGI-ish REST backend. Seems like an obvious extension for Cloudflare Workers…)
> why is there no Lambda-like serverless compute substrate that allows your function to speak a connection-oriented protocol, by externalizing the connection-hold-open and per-connection book-keeping state into the routing layer, such that your own function in the system could scale-to-zero?
Not generalized, AFAICT; from reading the docs, Fanout just does websockets, no?
I'm talking about a routing layer that could allow a serverless function to be the backend for an arbitrary stateful TCP protocol, e.g. IRC, SMTP, FTP, PGSQL, etc; where the service doesn't need to add support for a new L7 protocol for functions to use it; instead, the support for the L7 protocol is part of the function, the same way it's part of a regular network daemon.
I would imagine that this would work like the following:
- the logic for the L7 protocol's connection state-transitions lives within the stateless function;
- each call to the stateless function is handed the pre-transition L7 state, and returns the new post-transition L7 state, with the routing layer persisting this state between calls. (Compare/contrast: Erlang gen_server state management, between the gen_server module [routing layer] and the user-supplied delegate module [compute layer].) Any arbitrary compute node can then handle each "step" of the computation... but only one compute "worker" at a time will ever be tasked with handling messages for a given connection, because each call requires an input L7 state, which depends on the output L7 state of the previous compute-step;
- the function declares in its metadata what L4 protocols it accepts (TCP/UDP, maybe SCTP or DTLS, or TCP+TLS, etc); the routing layer then manages flows for these as portable persisted state-machine-state resources on virtual IPs owned collectively by the routing layer mesh — similar to how a distributed wireless AP or eNodeB manages established flows across its listeners;
- likely, the L4 state lives in the same persisted (distributed KV?) store as the L7 state, but just isn't passed back to the serverless function — except for maybe SNI info in the case of TLS. (This would make sense to me because you're never going to update the L7 state without also updating the L4 state. I can imagine a connection-listener state machine that touches the "L4 part" of a backing data-structure in response to most L4 packets, but then, when it's built up enough of a buffer to have a complete L4 message†, it would pass the message to the L7 and get an L7 update in response, and then commit a new L4+L7 state together.)
- And yes, the †ed part above means that another required part of the serverless function's metadata, would be a definition in some language of a lexer/parser for recognizing+extracting toplevel L7 messages from the carrier stream, such that the routing layer would then use this lexer/parser to know when it has one or more lexically-complete messages in its buffer to be pushed down atomically to the compute layer. (I say "lexer/parser" because mostly this code wouldn't have to parse messages — the L7 is still receiving just a stream of bytes it's expected to parse itself; but it's required to be "just a stream of bytes" sliced to consist of exactly one L7 message per call. So for most protocols, this would be cheap: most stateful protocols are either "newline is always toplevel break" or they're binary length-prefixed, and these can both be delimited by a dumb lexer, or even a fixed-buffer DSP-alike. Sadly, though, some stateful protocols require full parsing to know where each message ends. So the routing layer would need to support both — probably with a lot of "function compilation time" grunt-work put into recognizing when the routing layer can apply less than a full Turing-complete parser to the task.) Probably for most protocols this could look like an abstract-DSL version of something with capabilities equivalent to a Wireshark dissector definition or eBPF bytecode; and that in turn could be abstracted over with something like a "buildpack" / "cloud-init" sort of strategy, where instead of supplying the code yourself, you supply the URL of a repo that contains the code.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. What you describe sounds awesome, and in fact some of these concepts are present in our stack but not fleshed out to this level, so maybe we could get there someday. The challenge is making it practical.
Currently, Fanout supports HTTP in addition to WebSockets. We consider the system to be generalized, in the sense that the user can build whatever they want on top of the available primitives, and we can always add more primitives. Most people are implementing "web" protocols (REST, SSE, GraphQL, etc), so what's available today gets us pretty far. You're right of course that we don't support arbitrary TCP protocols.
I suppose the reason we don't support bare TCP is Fanout is optimized for implementing pub/sub-style interfaces with minimal compute. In that context, it is preferable to work with coarse-grained input in order to avoid per-session processing. However, with Fastly Compute now in arms reach, I think we could embrace per-session processing, in which case implementing arbitrary TCP protocols could become practical.
Your idea of supplying custom L7 parsers to the routing layer is clever, and is not too far off from some things already on our mind. For example, our routing layer supports inspecting requests using custom rules supplied by the compute layer, though this is not yet exposed to Fastly users. Relatedly, the routing layer has an internal component that parses TCP streams into messages (by known protocol) and ships them over an IPC without caring about their content. So it's not too much of a jump to imagine how we could get to user-supplied L7 parsing.
This. This is what Apple should ACTUALLY get punished for.
I don't care that they intentionally lock down their service I wouldn't use it anyway as it's not as secure Signal.
What I DO care about in that they intentionally degrade the experience for communicating outside their garden.
Maybe it'll get better with them finally supporting RCS, but I doubt it.
If only they were compelled to let users install an SMS handler app of their choice, then this whole "green bubble" thing would instead be a "geez, why is my iPhone so shitty at handling SMS" thing instead.
Why not let the government intervene here? Typically my reason for wanting government to not do stuff is because it could affect me, but none of us will never be a trillionaire corporate entity, so anything done to Apple wouldn't apply to us as a precedent. If anything, you could argue that part of the purpose of the government is to stand up to these giant businesses that the average person can do nothing to.
While I'm also in favor of Apple doing something, anything really, that's better than the frustrating status quo, I could see how blunt/incompetent regulation might weaken encryption.
I've been wondering if we can already see the foreshadows of Apple's next move, actually: CKV is already only possible between modern (iOS 17.2 or macOS 14.2 and above only) devices, and their RCS implementation will presumably not be end-to-end encrypted.
I could see them opening up "legacy iMessage" (i.e. non-CKV, non-ephermerally-encrypted) and integrating RCS, but assigning new color to "modern iMessage" exclusively. That would credibly count as opening up their service, while still preserving a distinguishing feature for Apple devices, and even nudging people to upgrade some old devices.
Why let them intervene? The government isn't there to cure all ills, nor should we want it to be. This seems like something the market can handle. Messenging systems have come and gone (ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Blackberry, etc., etc., etc.). They've been locked to hardware, semi-open, and completely open. There will be dozens more, all with their own benefits and drawbacks. Fortunately, not one is required for any part of life.
Because it would be the most sure-fire way to be certain that it actually gets done, whereas "the market" is less certain and prone to manipulation tactics such as lock-in. Returning to my original question that you kind of dodged, why not let them intervene?
Because usually precedents are not so narrow as to apply towards trillion dollar companies only, and even if they are they can be expanded upon. If you would be against a trillion dollar company forcing a small competitor to open up, you should rightly be worried about allowing the reverse, because the principles by which they justify it are unlikely to discern based on company size.
I (mostly) do favor government intervention with Apple, but you make a good point. Originally the income tax was only to apply to the uber mega rich. It didn't take long for it to apply to all the middle class too.
The trick is finding justifiable, reasonable reasons that don't cause havoc with our economic system, which IMO necessitates they they not target an arbitrary employee size or specific market percentage, or revenue. What is "large" is very relative, and not just by individual opinion, but temporally. What was a large company just 70 years years ago is nothing compared to those of today.
As much as I would like to see Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and the like not have so much power (socially, economically, most likely at the government level as well), I think the only way we'll actually make any progress towards the problems that allow large companies like that and allow their negative consequences is to attack some of the specific aspects of our current system they abuse to their benefit, and not them specifically.
For example, very strict privacy laws and control over tracking to curtail the biggest problems of the data companies, laws about control over your own devices and what you do on them (software) and with them (repair) for the hardware companies, etc. Otherwise we'll just see some other company take up the same practice and have all the same problems.
Yes, that's a fair point, but it hinges on the law being weak and poorly worded. Obviously I would not be happy with that either. But loopholes like that are a risk with any action that the market or the government would take, and ideally I would like the government to make a strong, well-worded law that accomplishes only the original intent, which can and does happen frequently as well.
This thread is about asking the government to step in to allow 3rd party devices into iMessage, which is decidedly outside of SMS, but gov won't step in because iMessage isn't a monopoly on messaging nor SMS. It's a monopoly on... it's own protocol/service?
Android users always get a message an iPhone user sends so to claim gov intervention monopoly on the basis that the end user can't change the SMS app isn't an argument.
People tend to misinterpret what it means to be a monopoly for antitrust law. The obvious example here is United States v. Microsoft Corp., where the inability to remove Internet Explorer was at issue. Being unable to set an alternative messaging app with equivalent functionality (such as Signal) on a mobile phone is at least as cumbersome to the user as being unable to uninstall Internet Explorer, despite the ability to install competing browsers. The iMessage case is arguably worse because the competing browsers had the same features as IE. Apple uses its control of the handset to disable other messengers from supporting SMS on iOS.
Also relevant in that case is that Microsoft was argued to be a monopoly not over all computers or even all desktop computers, but over intel-based personal computers. This illustrates that the scope of the market in these cases is often smaller than one might initially think.
The FTC has a page here that goes into it [0].
> Then courts ask if that leading position was gained or maintained through improper conduct—that is, something other than merely having a better product, superior management or historic accident....Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.
In this case, forcing users to use iMessage for SMS decreases the likelihood that users will install an alternative messenger with a smaller feature set due to Apple's control over the OS.
That reduced likelihood compounds quickly because the popularity of a messenger tends to scale with the square of the install base.
For discussion, using MSFT vs US as the central point, it seems as if US was arguing that Windows and IE were "one and the same" or at least inseparable as concepts while the US gov said no way.
Applying that central argument to this situation doesn't feel the same in that, if US gov tried to apply the same argument it would lose in this case.
When I think "phone device", I think phone calls and SMS are inseparable ideas to the device itself. That they are functions that belong to the phone. Probably stems from my days of owning a Nokia or Razor.
But maybe that is an out dated concept and my thinking needs to change because any program should be able to control the phone's SMS and calling function via API.
This is one messaging app on one brand of phone. Nothing stops you from using another phone, or multiple or other messaging apps. And messaging apps aren’t restricted by a “default” in quite the same way a web browser is. I have friends on WhatsApp and Signal and Instagram and I message them all without any appreciable difference in effort.
You can run that argument the other way. It's desirable for there to be only one system of phone lines installed everywhere, where anyone with a telephone number can call anyone else. It would be desirable for there to be only one e2e encrypted "double-ratchet" messaging protocol, for the same reasons.
In the case of Bell, the universal lines already existed, the problem was that Bell owned them all and wouldn't let anyone else use them. That was a "monopoly" so there was an argument for breaking it up so that everyone could use the lines.
In the case of iMessage (and others), the creators are deliberately building out many different incompatible "lines", and not letting anyone else use those lines. And now people are coming along and saying because it's not a "monopoly", we can't do anything about that. But the real goal was the same in both cases - making universal communication possible. That's what we're all frustrated about here, and the fact that there are dozens of apps trying to wall off competitors is part of the cause of that. Apple is a target because iMessage is the largest such "private line" in the United States.
What gets a bit lost in the conversation for iMessage is that the protocol/infra and implementation get merged into one. This is approached in many countries for telcos by splitting the companies providing the lines from the companies providing service on top of them. It's not perfect, but it's better than previous approaches.
As long as iMessage doesn't support federation, Apple has a monopoly on it too. If not, then Ma Bell wouldn't have had a monopoly either, since you could say mailing letters was a competitor to telephones.
Although the final determination is not yet locked in, the word is that Bing and iMessage have been found to not be popular enough in the EU to fall under the DMA.
I feel that's not right either. Apple did not physically build the phone network and nobody is piggybacking on their network, Apple isn't hosting anyone's photos or videos afaict and the user pays for bandwidth, they maybe pay for notification relay to their own users.
It's more like phone manufacturer X that accesses Ma Bell's network creates phone with slightly better call quality that only works with other X phones and is worse with anyone else's phones. And they start doing that once they have >50% market share.
What type of infrastructure and operations do you think is necessary to handle 8.4B messages per day. So far, the cost of those systems and teams has come from hardware sales. The benefit is that it is effectively a paid for service and doesn't need external support from advertisers or by selling user data.
It really depends on what stack you pick and what kind of engineers you have. What's App famously used Erlang (an excellent choice for this) and was able to scale to astronomical levels with a fairly small engineering team and hundreds of instances.
Why are y’all so intent on using iMessage? I (honestly) don’t understand the serious passion behind forcing Apple to open it to everyone.
SMS still gets through, and other apps still work. It seems weird to focus so much on this and not on just using something that fits your use case, but maybe I’m missing something.
It's because SMS is unencrypted, and this is an effort to have secure communication between iOS users and Android users (since iMessage is Apple-device-only). There's also a status factor, where Android users are lowly "green bubbles" in iMessage, which signals decreased security and questionable support for the interactions available to iMessage users.
Of course everyone can switch to Signal and this is a moot point, but millions of Apple users use iMessage and aren't likely to switch.
How many people really care about encrypted text messages? Most of the time, I’m sending my girlfriend pictures of our dogs. If I cared about encryption, we’d download something else (or use gchat or whatever). This just doesn’t seem like it should be that big a deal.
This has been discussed ad nauseam. In the US, not being a "blue bubble" can have a very high social cost and get you excluded from groups and communication opportunities. People just want to be able to communicate without ridiculous walled garden vendors throwing stupid road blocks in their way and making things artificially harder to get you to "buy your mom an iphone."
It's not just snobbery. There are real and serious usability issues. When doing group communication between an iPhone and a group member who is in Android user. The entire group chat gets downgraded to SMS, which means a lot of messages don't get through the way they were intended, and images and videos are so downgraded as to be unusable. The people that I know personally who are affected by this, it has nothing to do with snobbery and everything to do with pragmatism. People on iPhone will only use iMessage in the United States. It's stupid, it's absurd, it's self-inflicted, but ultimately it is what it is and all the advocacy of moving to something else is not moving the needle.
If Americans are this dumb, I don't see why they need any laws to protect them. Why would I want to be part of any groups that won't have me because I don't use an iPhone?
Thankfully, here outside America, this isn't an issue: absolutely no one uses SMS or cares about this stuff.
> If Americans are this dumb, I don't see why they need any laws to protect them.
They aren't. The bubble color thing is an exaggerated claim and a lot of whining from a bunch of clowns. No one actually cares in the US except for a bunch of children (who are always prone to following trends for the sake of following the trend) and a handful of immature adults. The rest of the country doesn't know or care
That's a very ignorant thing to say. Try to force yourself to live with images and video of quality to SMS so you can actually understand the problem, and let's see how long you think it's just immaturity.
We can disagree about solutions, but strawmanning stuff is dumb, and then dismissing the problem that you strawmanned is even more dumb
What's ignorant about it? MMS sucks, I didn't say otherwise. Android <-> Android MMS also sucks. That is not an iPhone <-> Android specific issue. MMS was an adequate solution in the feature phone days when the phones and displays were mediocre at best. It's been a terrible solution since mobile phones became cameras with a phone.
The strawmanning is done by the people claiming iPhone users are, as a whole, excluding Android users from their communications over it. That's what I'm rebutting, not that MMS sucks. Only children and immature adults do that. The vast majority of people don't care. They either use MMS and accept it sucks or switch to another service, they don't exclude people over it.
That’s a ridiculous reason to demand an open protocol from Apple. I get that it sucks when you’re in high school and kids are massive jerks about social standing, but this can’t be a serious use case post college, right?
Anecdotes about mean girls on Tinder dumping Android users don’t really seem compelling, either.
It is surprisingly a serious use case post college. In my personal life, if someone is going to be so stupid and immature as to not want to communicate with me because I'm an Android user, then good riddance. I don't need people like that in my life.
However, there are a lot of people who are impacted, and it's not always the case of the mean girl on tinder dumping an Android user. I know people who have group chats with family and friends, that will be left out because the iPhone is programmed to downgrade the entire group's chat if a single member is an Android user. This makes it so that messages don't work all the way, quality on images and video is garbage, and other legitimate usability concerns. Are super snooty, it's that it truly is very difficult to communicate from an iPhone to an Android phone.
I would suggest that is exactly what Beeper is doing. Not the end users ISP / WAN connection obviously, but certainly Apple's iMessage infrastructure (servers, switches, bandwidth, etc).
Unfortunately, the EU isn't going to save us with this one. iMessage usage is minimal in the EU because so many people use alternate messaging services, and the EU already ruled that iMessage won't be forced open because it isn't widely used by business users.
In the US, iMessage market share is much higher because back in the aughts we didn't have the sky high SMS rates which forced so many users to other messaging services in other countries.
Exactly: here outside the US, absolutely no one uses SMS, so no one cares about this issue at all. It's like arguing over the rights to videotape standards. So to me it's somewhat amusing reading these arguments here.
I would suggest that as often as not, when the EU intervenes in technological affairs the result isn’t that things get massively better but rather that people are forced to deal with corporations finding ways to maliciously comply with the letter of the law.
Why, when use of iMessage is a rounding error across the European Union, will the EU rule that Apple are a messaging Gatekeeper? The noises coming from the investagtiong body seem to indicate that they will not treat iMessage as such.
Because of course they did, they like that children make fun of their peers that have a green message vs. a blue, and that's exactly what they want. They're like "ew, are you poor and can't afford a $1200 iphone?"
It is now a petty, but prevalent status symbol of being better than others, namely perceived "poor" or otherwise lesser android users.
Which is so stupid when so many people have iphones that are handmedowns and many Androids users are much more knowledgeable with regard to technology and have much more impressive devices.
This is particularly bonkers to me given how expensive Samsung flagships are, but I guess Android occupying the sub-$600 range really enforces in children (physical or mental) that Android = Poor
Android users have been banging this drum about the iPhone supremacists for an actual decade at this point and it so, so goddamn tiring.
I buy iPhones for a number of reasons:
- Ecosystem which has been explained at length so often you'd have to have your head under a rock to not know what it means
- Ease of transfer of data between phones/tablets and replacements, along with constant sync
- Excellent build quality
- The OS is consistently good (not perfect, but good) and devices in general have a long life from purchase to replacement. I just recently had to FINALLY replace my gen 4 Watch with an SE, that I originally purchased in 2018. That's FIVE YEARS of daily use.
"An Android" by contrast can be fucking anything from a $20 Aliexpress special farted out with spare parts from NIGYEHO Ltd. and an ancient version of the OS that barely runs on the hardware, to a mid-tier perfectly acceptable phone that will no doubt be nearly bricked in the event you try and update the OS, to a multi-thousand-dollar premiere Samsung powerhouse that would utterly spank most iPhones at most functions and will probably last you ten years if you take good care of it. And what irritates the shit out of me is Android users that treat the last one like you get it at the price of the first one, and then call Apple users elitist for buying a very similarly priced phone.
It is truly mind-bending to me how effective Google's marketing has been to paint themselves constantly as the scrappy underdog fighting the conformist and snobby Apple fanbase, which is not to say there aren't any pricks who swing their iPhone around like it makes them hot shit, there almost certainly are, but to say that's the norm is completely outside my and anyone I know's experience of the matter.
What makes your anecdote more valuable than GP's? You may not know anyone who does the "snobby conformist" act, but GP does. Why should I care that you haven't experienced it when someone who actually has experienced it tells me so?
Moreover, since you admit those people exist, why wouldn't you support interoperability between iMessage and other platforms? It would only benefit you as a user since it would allow you to message your friends that are on Androids, and wouldn't be to your detriment at all since you're not doing the "snobby" act yourself. Where is your defensiveness coming from? It sounds like you're on the same team as GP.
> What makes your anecdote more valuable than GP's? You may not know anyone who does the "snobby conformist" act, but GP does. Why should I care that you haven't experienced it when someone who actually has experienced it tells me so?
Arguably you should care about neither then.
> Moreover, since you admit those people exist, why wouldn't you support interoperability between iMessage and other platforms?
There is interoperability. SMS texting is built into the same app. No, you don't get reactions... because that's not supported on SMS. No, you don't get replies for the same reason. However everything that is possible in the SMS standard is implemented in Messages completely normally, the sole difference being the chat color, and personally I'm fine with that because it lets me know immediately that Messages only features are going to be a no-go for this particular conversation.
> Where is your defensiveness coming from?
Implicit in the notion that iPhones are merely fashion accessories is that those who buy them are foolish. You're free to say I'm getting defensive, I wouldn't say you're entirely wrong. But if you really want to talk anecdotes, I have pages upon pages I could write of various experiences of having my credentials as an network engineer questioned because I don't have an android device or that I prefer a Mac computer.
Okay? Again, you're agreeing on every point except an unrelated anecdote. I agree that getting jerked around for using Apple stuff is dumb too. Do you even take any issue with Beeper Mini or did I misread somewhere?
Yeah I'd be willing to bet open flame on pretty much any smartphone screen is going to cause damage. I get around that by not lighting my phone on fire.
Brand new iPhones have been available for $430 on apple.com for many years now.
And most young minimum wage employees with very little money and no "status" also use iPhones.
It is not a signal of poor/status, it is a signal of weird/not weird, without commenting on the validity of that, of course.
For example, people do not opt out of dating Android users because they think Android users are poor, they opt out because they think Android users have a higher likelihood of being sufficiently "weird" such that they do not want to engage.
Discord is actually an interesting analogy because they share apple’s overall philosophy here. Discord doesn’t absolutely firewall themselves with attestation/etc but they will absolutely ban you for using alternative clients like Discord Advanced if they notice you behaving differently from an official client on the API. Some of the things the discord advanced client can do like animated smilies or cross-server smilies are things that discord has locked away behind a paywall (with no real technical basis) and that’s in conflict with how a small minority of users want to interact with the platform.
Should discord be forced to interoperate? Bearing in mind that of course forcing them open will undercut their whole business model - but that whole model is built on gouging consumers for trivial technical features that cost nothing to implement or support.
Similarly, while there is choice in the market (just like apple and android), it still doesn’t change the network-effect problem. If my friends are on discord, and I’m left in some group sms side chat, that’s not really a substitute, right?
Now layer on 30 years of brand warrior sports-team mentality and abrasive interactions in both directions, and you’ve roughly got the iMessage problem. But of course everyone likes discord…
I mean why shouldn’t I get to use discord for free like everyone else? And I also should get the paywalled features since it’s an arbitrary and abusive paywall and the environment has been designed to tacitly funnel you into using them. Isn’t that like, super abusive?
At least Discord is available on every platform I use regularly (MacOS, Windows, iOS, Android). That alone is a massive step up from iMessage lock-in for me.
Discord excels particularly in group communications involving more than a dozen people. Its ability to organize access levels through roles and topics is a standout feature, offering significant advantages over other platforms. However, these features may not be as crucial in casual conversations among friends.
This whole “controversy” is because of Americans collectively stamping their feet and throwing a tantrum refusing to install WhatsApp or Signal. It’s really quite incredible.
But I share your view about Discord, I think it’s one app positioned to be the “American WeChat” in a few years if they don’t screw it up.
No one has even asked me to install WhatsApp or Signal or anything. I'm not sure where the tantrum is happening. I mean, if someone wanted to send me a message, I'd ask them to do it with SMS first, since I already use that. But I've never seen any evidence of any tantrums.
...He's clearly talking about third-party replacements for the default messaging app, ie. apps that are allowed to interface with the SMS/MMS protocol implemented by your phone. Android has had this capability forever.
Not sure why everybody responding to him is being obtuse. If you don't understand something, maybe take a minute to think about it instead of assuming the person you're talking to is an idiot. (Not you, yours is the sanest response by far)
>t’s really interesting that so many people are defending a corporation stealing from another company
Boo-hoo, let me play you the world's smallest violin for Apple's "suffering". Apple is the richest company in the world, it has more money than God, they can fend for themselves just fine, why should anyone shed a tear that someone is stealing from them?
People are defending others stealing from Apple because Apple has a history of stealing from other companies and developers as well, so it's just karma.
Though you'll have to enlighten me what exactly it is they are stealing from Apple since Apple doesn't charge money for iMessage for there to be any theft or loss of revenue for them. Unless your definition of theft is "YOU WOULDN'T DOWNLOAD A CAR?!"
> Though you'll have to enlighten me what exactly it is they are stealing from Apple since Apple doesn't charge money for iMessage for there to be any theft or loss of revenue for them. Unless your definition of theft is "YOU WOULDN'T DOWNLOAD A CAR?!"
Apple doesn't charge money for iMessage in much the same way Microsoft doesn't charge money for MS Paint. iMessage is included as part of an Apple hardware purchase. Running a messaging system that likely handles billions of messages—with photo and video attachments—every day is not free. Apple's device sales subsidize the cost Apple pays to run this system.
Beeper using this system by exploiting a technical loophole is theft in a much more direct way than pirating a copy of an audio track is, I think.
>Apple's device sales subsidize the cost Apple pays to run this system.
And Beeper bought and paid for the Apple devices which they use to route iMessage. What's the problem? Looks fair and square to me.
Apple is legally allowed to try to block me for breaking their ToS, but legally, I bought the device, I can do whatever I want with it since it's my property now, including trying to route iMessage on my device and my account if hat's what I want.
It's still not stealing because I paid Apple for the HW, and stealing means breaking the law, not breaking Apple's ToS which are silly and worthless anyway.
> And Beeper bought and paid for the Apple devices which they use to route iMessage. What's the problem? Looks fair and square to me.
I'm assuming you're confused here and not intentionally misleading. Beeper Cloud (formerly just Beeper) uses Apple devices to route iMessages. This is legit and as far as I know hasn't been blocked or stopped in any way.
Beeper Mini (the Android app in discussion) doesn't use this system and is instead exploiting a loophole left to allow older Apple devices to use the platform.
Stealing is also not only a legal term, but can be used in a purely ethical context too. I don't think anybody's arguing that Beeper or their users are breaking the law.
They didn’t buy hardware to make Beeper Mini work. They are using an exploit in the protocols to make this work.
Be honest, if Apple was the party taking someone else’s property without permission, and then selling it for their own gain, would you still be defending this? I wager you wouldn’t.
I find it even more interesting that people are defending either corporation. Neither of them is our friend, and they do what happens to be profitable. The core problem here is that Apple has a significant market share in the US, and for one reason or another, they are inconveniencing a portion of non-iPhone users and/or causing an unnecessary divide. Does it have to be this way? I think the answer would depend on whether or not this form of incompatibility brings them any competitive advantage.
To unspin your statement, Beeper is providing Apple users with more functionality by way of giving them the ability to send iMessages to their Android-user friends. This is beneficial for Apple users, but Apple has a financial incentive to restrict their users so that the only way for other people to interact with them is to purchase an Apple device, so they are harming their own Apple device users by trying to cut off this functionality.
I disagree. Much of the value of iMessage is the high degree of confidence in its security. Apple controls, end-to-end, the delivery of iMessages from device-to-device. This includes how it handles storage of messages, attachments, app diagnostics, crash reports, etc.. Beeper is an unauthorized user of this supposed-to-be closed-system, and I think it's deteriorating the trust users have in the platform entirely.
How does accessibility hurt security? Security issues for a messaging platform manifest when messages can be intercepted. Having the option to send or receive from more users does not put a man in the middle.
If you are doing something that definitely requires E2EE that you are certain works and forces the user on the other end to comply, then maybe I could see your point. You would be in the vast minority of users and it's debatable that your use case is worth gutting the functionality for the majority of users who would benefit from being able to iMessage their Android friends, but you would still have a valid use case. I would tell you in that case to use an open source E2EE solution instead of Apple's closed source one though, given that privacy is such a concern.
There are more threat vectors than man-in-the-middle attacks. Beeper Mini does not make the iMessage protocol any less safe. It's end-to-end encrypted. Great. No problem there.
The problem is: the client application itself is a big unknown. Beeper says it's secure, and it very well could be. But we have no idea. But if it receives, decrypts, then sends sensitive information, as diagnostics, back to a a central server unencrypted, for example, that's obviously a huge problem.
In that case Beeper Mini themselves are the man in the middle... But that aside, yeah, that's a problem with all closed source E2EE services. If you are a journalist in a warring nation or are being tracked by state actors I would hope you are not using iMessage to stay safe to begin with.
> iMessage is not the leading messaging app in any market.
Really? I haven't seen anything approaching it in the US, except maybe Facebook Messenger? But iMessage is definitely ubiquitous enough across the US (I've lived on both coasts and in between) that it's surprising (and annoying) when someone doesn't have it.
Theft of services, since Apple owns and maintains the iMessage system that Beeper is trying to use without compensating them (despite charging their own users for that access).
This is where Beeper 100% loses me in this fight. If you're using a 3rd party service as the backbone of your system that you turn around and charge people for, that's just total bullshit business plan. If you're doing this as a free service, I'd be much more interested. If you have a for-profit business, you need to be paying for the 3rd party thing that makes you possible.
By allowing Android <--> Apple communication, Apple has potential "loses" as they loose their lock in ability of forcing people buying a new iPhone for Christmas.
iPhone $800, Android $200. If an Android can do what iPhone can do on the messaging front there's no purpose in buying an iPhone.
Just want to point out that you can get a brand new iPhone (in the US) for $429 (+ tax), and often times you can get it even cheaper if you trade in or accept carrier deals. I dont think that iMessage is the only sticky property of the iPhone. Things like long term support via updates is another big one. The “ecosystem” of devices and services.
Comparable devices cost pretty much the same whether iPhone or Android.
While most people may not care it’s also worth noting that the alternative OS (Android) is operated by one of the largest ad-tech companies in the world and allows for deep oem integrations of 3rd party applications (that 99.9% of its users aren’t even aware of as being installed.)
Is it common for people to use texts in 2023 in your social circle? I think I've been texted once this year. I mean obviously people care about this to some extent otherwise this app wouldn't exist but in my experience when I meet someone they'll give me insta or discord, unless they're a tryhard and then it's always signal (blegh).
EDIT: not sure i'm being downvoted? i'm genuinely curious because i never use SMS or iMessage myself and haven't for some years so this seemed very niche to me, even randos i meet out in the world all seem to just chat on discord and insta (I'm in the bay area but most of my friends are not tech bros)
SMS is very popular in the US for historical reasons. Many users in other countries (like India) moved to products like Whatsapp because their cell phone plans charged per message but US phone plans have had free SMS pricing for years so we've never had a push here. iPhone is market leader in the US so iMessageis also heavily used since its default for SMS between iOS users.
Interesting. In UK it was common (and still has I think?) for contracts/deals to include lots of free SMS texts but even then most people have readily moved to WhatsApp, Messenger etc.
In my mind texts quickly became like voicemails, something older people would use cause that's what they know but not something I'd want to use regularly if given the option.
Part of the reason UK switched over quickly is because of much higher international texting needs which these apps also neatly solve. Your average American just straight up does not need international messaging capability
I’d find this surprising! I’m probably the only person I know who frequently messages (via iMessage nonetheless) with foreign contacts. In addition I’m pretty sure cross-state comms in the USA are treated like international comms are in Europe but I could well be wrong on this point (and as per xkcd[1] I’m sure we’ll find out soon if I am)!
The UK rolled probably rolled out free SMS texts later than the US; the US was one of the first markets that rolled it out. I don't know when whatsapp rolled out there but I'm guessing it pre dates unlimited SMS being ubiquitious.
iMessage has pretty much the same feature set as Whatsapp so US users don't really have a reason to migrate at this point.
We had free texts before iPhones nevermind WhatsApp. Not unlimited but hundreds of SMSs a month was common. That said another thread here implied that carriers included MMS messages in free texts, not just SMS? If so that might explain as MMS aren't free in my experience.
Every American I know primarily uses texts and every non-American primarily uses Whatsapp. People also use Instagram and Discord but for other purposes, not when they just want to send one or two people a simple message.
I'm 28, and texting is the primary method of communication for virtually everyone I know. The only exceptions are that I know two techy people who use Google Chat and a few people who use Facebook Messenger (mostly because they don't have my number). I've never met a single person in my life who uses Instagram, Discord, or Signal for 1-to-1 messaging.
Yes. I use SMS, and don't really use any of the alternatives. Everyone I know uses it too, and I don't really have a reason to try to push anything else, which would probably require installing an app.
Almost everyone I know uses Signal regularly, then iMessage after that. Discord comes up in certain settings. Instagram sounds like a pretty awful place to remain connected with someone.
Almost 100% of my chat messages are through iMessage. The only ones that aren’t are group or individual threads with Android users (which btw have never seemed to be an issue. Reactions and gifs all seem to work fine, albeit in reduced quality compared to messages received via iMessage). Every once in a while someone will message me on Facebook, but that’s usually just to share a funny meme or something. I don’t have WhatsApp, signal, telegram, or any of those even installed.
40’s, male, Ohio, software engineer, for reference.
ETA: this doesn’t count work, where we use teams and slack, but I don’t have those loaded on my phone.
Reactions and gifs work fine for you. They work poorly for the android user. When a friend on an iphone heart emoji reacts to a text, on my end I get a text that says "<user> loved a text".
It's obviously not a huge deal, but it's pretty badly executed.
You‘ve just given multiple different text messengers that you use to text message when asking if people still text. Yes, people do. Non technically minded are very big users for the default text messaging apps.
Very much so, texting is my primary method of remote communication. Discord, WhatsApp, and FB messenger are for various group chats. Instagram is almost exclusively for sending dog memes to my wife.
Honestly it drives me insane when I keep messages out of just texting.
I have a couple friends that just want to use Discord and not everything is together in the same app on all of my devices (iMessage,including just texting is on all of my apple devices).
I remember desperately trying to fix this with… what was that big multi client app for Mac years ago? Hate chats not being in the same app.
Edit: found it. Adium! Which shockingly has been updated in 2021.
They can certainly escalate with protocol changes, but they still have to contend with older Macs, iPhones and iPads which are out of the support window losing access-- so if they want to update the protocol they either have to issue out of band patches for these devices or cut them off too.
This is assuming you can actually iMessage on iDevices that are out of software support -- maybe our iOS friends can let us know.
EDIT: This take seems more plausible (that this is intentional by Apple): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38648030