I hope cell providers get the option to bundle a secure messaging service that's compatible with all of their customer's devices.
Right now a Verizon iPhone customer can't securely send a message to a Verizon Android customer without forcing their customer to download a third-party app and agree to its terms, and the carrier has no recourse to change that on their iOS devices they are selling to their customers.
Vaguely reminds me a little bit of the web browser antitrust days. Regulators will catch up soon. At least Apple is planning to adopt RCS finally, even though they missed their chance to be part of the formation of the standard.
Edit: Or Apple could release iMessage for Android and for web.
If 1 and 2 happen, that might motivate Apple to implement a secure open standard that bypasses the carrier solution to "all of our customers can securely text each other with just their phone number." Apple will call it an innovation and sell the hell out of it.
> the carrier has no recourse to change that on their iOS devices they are selling to their customers
They can just not sell those devices? I find this argument pretty twisted. It’s also based on a false premise. Verizon is also free to implement whatever they want on top of their @vtext.com endpoint.
If they stopped selling iPhones (lol), what would they do for all of their current iPhone customers? Boot them off until they trade-in for an Android phone?
How is the @vtext.com endpoint any more secure than MMS? Default, secure transfer using your carrier phone number through the built-in messaging app on Verizon iOS devices is restricted only to Apple's servers, and the recipients MUST be Apple users.
Nonsense. Apple does nothing to prevent you from installing WhatsApp, Signal, FB Messenger, or any one of dozens of other messaging services which also don’t allow third-party interop with their protocols!
There’s nothing anticompetitive or even out of the ordinary going on here. You can install competitive services on an iPhone at any time.
WhatsApp, Signal and FB Messenger are all available with feature parity on both iOS and Android devices. Beeper is able to sell subscriptions by reverse engineering entirely due to this not being the case with iMessage.
Considering that Apple has opened up third-party apps to do autofill for things like passwords (I autofill password fields from Bitwarden on iOS all the time), this seems a lot less like an advantage they're gating to their app and more like a potential feature they just haven't shipped yet because it has no use case at the moment (since right now nobody sends 2FA codes over any platform other than SMS). If it became widespread to use WhatsApp, Signal etc. for sending 2FA codes, I'm pretty sure Apple would add it.
There's not really much other system integration with iMessage either, other than some Siri stuff I doubt sees much use. It's surprisingly disconnected from the rest of the operating system.
Apple also does nothing to warn you about the insecure nature of sending sensitive messages via the SMS/MMS protocol the default messaging app uses to reach non-Apple hardware.
Yes I did. You'll notice Apple doesn't have any IaaS offerings on their product pages. So they're in no way a public cloud and I wouldn't expect to use any of their services as if they were.
