Like what? I know there is a difference in how group chats are handled, but thats a compatibility issue, not a rich chat feature. The only thing I can think of is Apples stupid push for more emojis and even worse Memojis. Otherwise, pics, gifs, emojis work between Apple and Android. Seems like its the green v blue and group chat edits that are the differences.
I can send them fine on Verizon SMS, from Android to Apple. Apple decided that sending via SMS, regardless of carrier limit, they get wrecked. When I send the same video back to Android from my iPhone, the video is shit.
I’ve tested this repeatedly across carriers. Since Verizon doesn’t seem to have an MMS size limit, it makes it pretty clear what’s going on.
Okay I’m out of the loop, why is iMessage on Android such a big deal? I know that images get compressed but it sounds like Google and Apple are finally working together to draw up a spec there. Besides that it’s… A color difference?
I think this is the primary reason. Apple only announced working on RCS support very recently. Once that’s out, I don’t really see a place in the market for this.
And it isn’t just compressed images. MMS doesn’t support reactions, replies, typing indicators, or read receipts because it’s ancient. A proper, standardized replacement has been long overdue.
Granted, I’ve heard that RCS is currently heavily reliant on Google’s own servers, so it could be argued as to how “open” this really is.
I think the currently available apps not being free software is less important than the protocol being open, which is good. It allows for the possibility of FOSS clients in the future. My bigger concern at the moment is if most/all of the actual backend infrastructure is controlled by a single stakeholder.
it sounds like Google and Apple are finally working together
Not at all. Apple was forced to support RCS by the digital markets act. While Google uses RCS, there’s a ton of functionality they build on top of it. Apple will likely implement the absolute bare minimum that they’re required to, which likely won’t include E2EE.
There’s a massive cultural thing in the US about the iPhone being the preferred phone and if you don’t have one it must be because you’re too poor to afford one. Obviously this is a result of marketing and isn’t universal but it is a surprisingly widely held view.
Given that, showing up in a group chat as a lone blue bubble marks you out as the inferior group member (in some people’s eyes). It doesn’t matter so much 1:1 but if there are 10 people the odd one out stands out.
Given that, showing up in a group chat as a lone blue bubble marks you out as the inferior group member
Not really how it works though. If there are 74 iMessage users and 1 Android user, ALL chats become green. Ergo Android users are often simply omitted from chats.
This. I was the last member of my family on Android and made the fam text chain a mess to the point there was a separate one with everyone but me and I would have to look at it on my wife’s phone.
I finally got an iPhone partly because of this. Also because the mini is just a much better size than anything that was available android wise that I liked.
The real issue here is that people in the US are tied to using SMS for real-time chat groups when so many better (and private, and well known) alternatives exist. Thankfully, in Europe, nobody so far as I know ever really uses SMS anymore – whether for single or group chats.
It requires a google account though so I can’t use it :(
I don’t really understand why they insist on that as it doesn’t seem to use google otherwise. I do have google play services, just no account logged in (which is not necessary for things like push to work!)
Because they get your profile picture, name, and email address when you click accept. I went through with it just to test, but definitely getting some data from its users.
Yep notifications require google play services installed. They do not require a google account or being signed in to one. It’s based on the device ID alone. I don’t have a google ID on my phone and push messages work just fine.
Well, Google firebase notifications do. Either Google play or something comparable like MicroG. It’s possible to run them another way too but not many app backends support that.
But yes my complaint is exactly that this app requires google.
If you use on android apps from the playstore, most apps are built to relay their notifications through Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), so they don’t have to have a background notification listeners running 24/7. It also means less overhead from multiple notification listeners from every app having its own. So yes, if an app is built on top of google play services, it requires “google play services”
If an app says it doesn’t rely on google play services, it uses an alternative notification listener or websockets, which might not be as effective, because Google is inbuilt and won’t kill its own apps, the scale of its infrastructure, and its habit of listening on people’s activity.
Add in Androids habit of killing background services, and you don’t always get your notification when the app isn’t in the foreground.
Even Signal from Playstore uses Google Play Services for notifications.
What is your stance on being able to give encryption keys to a third party without the other participants of a chat consenting, let alone knowing about it?
If someone in my contacts used bridges, effectively breaking e2ee, I’d want to know about it.
Ideally, people should not be allowed to do that without informing their contacts, at the very least.
Beeper Mini avoids some of those problems because it’s operating in a fundamentally different way. Its developers figured out how to register a phone number with iMessage, send messages directly to Apple’s servers, and have messages sent back to your phone natively inside the app. It was a tricky process that involved deconstructing Apple’s messaging pipeline from start to finish. Beeper’s team had to figure out where to send the messages, what the messages needed to look like, and how to pull them back down from the cloud. The hardest part, Migicovsky said, was cracking what is essentially Apple’s padlock on the whole system: a check to see whether the connected device is a genuine Apple product.
It’s been out for a long time with limited access and nothing yet. Maybe Apple will change their mind toward it when it’s being used by a large group of people finally. Hopefully not.
Beeper’s entire premise is based on decrypting your messages on their servers, re-encrypting them and sending them to you, and pinky promising that they’re not reading them.
It wasn’t just that E2EE was a lie, their own server software was full of its own bugs that allowed third party access to user messages, which were stored unencrypted in their database.
Beeper can be self-hosted if you have a Mac, so you don’t have to trust their servers
Sunbird’s app (Nothing Chat) was riddled with its own security vulnerabilities that allowed users to read other users messages, which were all stored as unencrypted plaintext, all discovered by the community within 24 hours of launch
Beeper is actually open about how their technology works and what it’s limitations are, while Sunbird/Nothing basically lied about their product and never provided any meaningful documentation
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