Can all the folks saying “I don’t care” on this just stop? If this doesn’t affect you, why are you commenting at all?
Some smart folks managed to reverse engineer Apple’s secretive tech that they refuse to put on any platform they don’t own, which is fucking awesome. Even if you don’t give a shit about using iMessage, it’s awesome they were able to stick it to Apple at all, and make the gap between iPhone and Android that much smaller.
And of course Apple comes in and breaks it. Do you not wonder why? Does this mean there was a minor security hole that was exploited or was it something else that changed? This arms race is fascinating, regardless of your preferred mobile OS.
We’re literally on a platform designed to escape these closed ecosystems and walled gardens. A platform built around open communication standards.
And still there’s a downright bizarre contingent of people around here that seem to be chomping at the bit to defend or downplay Apple’s iMessage shit.
you’re on a platform someone else created with someone else’s money and someone else’s time. You’re just a entitled moron, who’s so far away from reality that you don’t know what goes on the real world and that joining the “fediverse” is going to magically fix every damn problem we’ve got.
I’ve found the complete opposite on here. Outside of the apple communities but even those get trolled/downvoted from nerds browsing all like everything else.
Yes, but no. RCS itself is. Google RCS however, not especially. Google keeps promising to open up the bits they’ve tacked on but have yet to. Which includes things like the open end-to-end encryption. Apple will be implementing vanilla RCS which does not have that yet. But they have claimed if I remember correctly that they are going to help develop that. I don’t know if I believe that or if that’s just something they said to foster some false Goodwill
The “I don’t care” crowd could be the rest of the world, that use messaging apps instead of SMS or iMessages. Try to consider this factor first. Not everything should be centered in America, or exclusively to what happens there.
I understand that. But that doesn’t have anything to do with my point, which is that if someone doesn’t care about this issue, they don’t need to show how much they don’t care.
In fact, I would argue that your general sentiment – that of considering others in different situations than oneself – applies more to the people acting like this topic doesn’t matter because it doesn’t affect them personally.
Guess you’re right. I’m not justifying them, but trying to put a bit of light into why a lot of people don’t care. I’m not the kind of person to express such a moot opinion, but I guess some people get tired of seeing a conversation that only affects only a portion of people and feel the need to express their feelings. Again, I’m the kind to remain silent, but there are all kinds of people out there.
Can all the folks saying “I don’t care” on this just stop? If this doesn’t affect you, why are you commenting at all?
Haven’t you heard? Lemmings are all about “Stay alone in a basement and never get out and socialize, because people use something you don’t agree with. If they really want to talk to you, they’ll switch.”
They didn’t, but now they’re on lemmy with more people with the same attitude, trying to socialize but never realizing why they don’t have any friends.
Reddit migration brought all the entitled, self agrandizing, freeloading, weirdos to the fediverse.
Meanwhile, Whatsapp continues to be the most used messaging app in the world, with no sms or any other sort of fallback if you don’t have an internet connection.
whatsapp is spyware from facebook, it’s supposedly end-to-end encrypted but that’s worthless coming from a company that goes through embarassing databreaches every other week…at minimum
I have never had an issue with messaging anyone in iMessage, regardless of what platform they are using. Serious question: is there something I am missing out on with iMessage that warrants investigating alternatives?
So… What your telling us is that it’s bad. Not good.
because incompatible. It won’t work on any device. Except those of that cult. That cult whose leader killed himself after magically getting a a new liver somewhere in Asia.
You know, donor organs for which there are waiting lists of months and months.
Which was totally not weird and surely 100% legal and all. Just fine.
That’s interesting about the reactions. I’m an Android (Pixel) user, and I swear when using the standard SMS app on my phone, from some iOS users I see their reactions as an emoji, while from others it does the “[user] liked your message” thing. Could it also be related to the version of iOS that’s being used on the other end?
iMessage can only send SMS messages to non Apple phones, which suck. And if you have friends in other countries get crazy expensive and suck even more.
You aren’t sending iMessages. You’re sending text messages, and vice versa. Old school SMS and MMS (from the days of the first cameraphones…the standard hasn’t changed much since then) are the best common language between your phones.
Google/Android support RCS, the open modern protocol to replace SMS/MMS, and Apple is being sluggish to implement. Apple also supports iMessage, the default enhanced language to replace SMS/MMS, but that’s a closed protocol, and as such only supports Apple.
Sent from wefwef for iOS, but I’d still say Apple are the assholes here. The only reason I even have a damn iPhone is because most of the people I exchange pictures/videos with, and the people they exchange pictures and video with, happen to use iPhones. So there’s no incentive for all of them to switch to a third-party platform for just me.
“It’s installed by default and all my friends are on it” - 50% of Americans
They don’t need to worry about the fact that the other half of Americans are not able to comfortably message them, or participate in group chats, because those are people poorer than them that they might not even want to interact with anyways. Some of them might even be not white.
This becomes even more extreme as ages become younger, with around 98% of college age students and younger having iPhones (this is obviously biased to higher income colleges in metropolitian area but the data is still useful). The peer pressure of not having an iPhone is genuinely incredible (trust me, i experience it). I have genuinely had people stop wanting to be friends with me once they learned I had an Android phone.
Apple has a monopoly so powerful that they influence the social circles of almost every grade schooler and college student in America. This is why they don’t want to give it up.
I did get given a free iPhone! I opted not to use it.
Terrible email client options
Can’t rearrange your home screen beyond changing the icon order a bit
Firefox is just Safari with a groucho marx fake nose and glasses
Notifications are laughable by comparison
Share options are laughable by comparison
Camera is supposed to be better than any Android device ever invented, yet somehow managed to take blurry photos ~50% of the time so I’d end up taking 6 photos in every situation to make sure I got one where you could use it. I may be an edge case here as I’m mostly taking photos of name plates and technical documents where crisp detail is super important… iOS just wanted to make pretty colours and boke the world, even if it meant half a name plate was in focus and the back was artificially blurred for that sweet Instagram professional photographer look.
The peer pressure of not having an iPhone is genuinely incredible (trust me, i experience it).
I wanna talk a bit about where this comes from. There are what, two or three models of iPhone that you can buy off the shelf right now?
Think about grade school kids and their first phone. What do they get? Well, parents almost expect them to break the phone. If it’s an iPhone, then it’s one of the three, expensive models. If it’s an Android, it’s probably a cheap piece of shit (because on Android those are an option). It’s certainly not a Pixel or the latest Samsung.
So grade school kids learn that iPhone = quality, and Android = cheap pieces of shit. And even if at the high end Android is better, young people by and large don’t experience that. And it sticks with them. Apple did a similar strategy with putting Apple computers into every grade school in the 1980s.
And Apple is doing everything they can to reinforce this marketing and peer pressure, especially the iMessage thing. The only reason the iMessage “issue” exists is because Apple wants it to exist. They want the $700 cosmetic for chat to continue to exist. It’s a large part of their business model.
As an adult with Android, I can say this is real. I was on Safari in Africa and everybody else with me had iPhones. They were airdropping pictures to each other and I was reduced to begging for somebody to email them to me.
We were on a tour and the guide had an iPhone, but we have Android phones. He took some photos and said “Oh if you had an iPhone I could just Airdrop them to you” and we said “If you had an Android phone you could Nearby Share them to us”.
Then there was much explaining about how Airdrop was better because it works with iPhones, and Nearby Share is no good because it won’t work with iPhones.
Couldn’t quite get them to see the irony about that complaint.
The US government is forcing Google and Apple to share push notification data with them. Even if the content is not sent, the metadata alone can let them know who you are talking to and when using metadata correlation.
Signal push notifications don’t contain any useful plain text data (no content, no information about who sent you a message). AFAIK the only thing you would be leaking is that you received a message on signal, and frankly that metadata is probably going to be leaked to the US government regardless of your use of push notifications.
They can tell you connect to AWS when the Signal app fetches messages after a notification, they need to be able to peek into Amazon’s servers to see you’re connecting specifically to Signal
AWS is not a black box from the outside. The signal servers will have their own external IP addresses that you will connect with, your ISP could keep track of those connections. Furthermore, if you are worried that the government is using your ISP to spy, what makes you think that AWS wouldn’t be subject to that as well? Signal is absolutely a target in this respect too.
Of course you can do various things to potentially hide your connection to signal, for instance by using tor, but in some sense there’s no guarantee if you don’t trust anything external to you. I’m personally not too worried about the “this person uses signal” metadata, though.
There’s not enough unique IP addresses to distinguish Signal servers, if you don’t explicitly set up static IP addresses you’re going to share an IP pool
The signal servers will absolutely have public and static IP addresses. You would not be able to connect to them reliably if they could change at any time and you had to rely upon DNS updates to find the server. AWS is not magic.
And yes, AWS has IP ranges allocated to it that they pull their public IPs from, that’s all that link is talking about — this page even provides the context that the IP ranges are available in order to identify which traffic is coming from AWS in order to allow / disallow it. Of course the AWS IP allocations won’t tell you which IP is associated with which service (and indeed many IPs, particularly in the IPv6 space, are probably not in use at all).
There’s not enough unique IP addresses to distinguish Signal servers
Why? Yes, IPv4 address exhaustion is a thing, and yes AWS only has a slice of IPv4 addresses to give, but you absolutely can get static public facing IPs from AWS that will be unique to your server. You can even pay for an elastic IP so you can hold a particular address and move it between instances. There is no way Signal does not do this.
Signal has native support for proxying via Tor in that case.
Yes, though the use case is mostly for getting around censorship. Realistically if you don’t want the government to know you’re using Signal… Do you want them to know you use Tor?
FYI, SNI is a thing (included encrypted SNI these days) and you absolutely can share an IP among many many unrelated domains.
Domain lookups have a TTL (time to live) and they stop advertising IPs which they’ll stop using a little bit before those IP addresses are taken out of rotation. That’s why it doesn’t break even when addresses keep changing.
Signal have an active incentive NOT to use static IP addresses!
Because it’s a significant inconvenience to disable those notifications over the very unlikely possibility that some bad actor will hoover that data up, much less do something nefarious with it.
I realize now that I misunderstood the objection, I thought you were saying that using signal was an unreasonable level of paranoia, but I can totally see why turning off notifications seems that way.
Honestly I don’t care if the government knows who’s all going to the party. Someone’s gonna post pictures of it anyhow. My garbage data is just more stuff for them to sort through.
And I’m not gonna bother missing out on everything out of fear that the government will do what exactly with my data? The risk is so low for your average person.
I realize now that I misunderstood the objection, I thought you were saying that using signal was an unreasonable level of paranoia, but I can totally see why turning off notifications seems that way.
You say that, but what if one of them had a friend who is a communist? Could make for some awkward conversation with the authorities at some undisclosed location in the future.
To be fair, signal is an open source protocol that anyone is free to implement.
“The Signal Protocol (formerly known as the TextSecure Protocol) is a non-federated cryptographic protocol that provides end-to-end encryption for voice and instant messaging conversations[…]”
Signal is an encryption protocol, not messaging protocol. My comment was about a messaging one like XMPP or Matrix.
Back in 1999 MSN messenger had support for chatting with AIM users, it was quickly blocked by AOL and for a while there was a game of cat and mouse between Microsoft and AOL until Microsoft quietly dropped the feature
Saw a few comments in the initial threads about it confidently claiming Apple wouldn’t be able to keep Beeper Mini out since doing so would mess with iOS too.
Super weird to be so sure about that when they obviously didn’t know shit about it.
Def agree that the vast majority don’t care about E2EE (though that’s probably growing with more news articles like that one where they went after someone for abortion and got their Facebook messages to prove it) I think it’s less about blue/green and more about how shitty the interop is. I don’t know anyone who is like “I won’t talk to green bubbles” but I know plenty who get annoyed when it fucks up the group chat or either side is stuck looking at a postage-stamp sized grainy image (if it even gets delivered.) Really, really blows that the predominate message services in the states are Apple-only iMessage, owned by Facebook, or SMS. I’m over 30, so I am not on Snap and most of my friends aren’t, I refuse to use Facebook products, so we’re stuck with SMS.
Beeper is more than that. Beeper MINI is about that. But I’ve been using Beeper on my PC for the past year because I am so tired of picking up my phone a million times a day just to send someone a message. I’d say probably 90% of the people I know use iPhone/iMessage so having the ability to message them on desktop was a lifesaver for me. Really bummed it’s not working anymore.
Uh. It’s not that. Along w that is videos w potato quality, messages that never make it. Of course anyone reading your comment knows you missed the point.
Yeah, I get that I wish they had done rcs earlier or whatever. Like I get not opening iMessage up, but at least support the best standard out there would be nice. MMS and sms are garbo
You sure it’s about that? What I heard is that being outside of “trusted” zone means less features such as media and encryption. Also the person in this article says apple users are basically forced to use sms to send messages to Android users. I too would not want to resort to plain paid messages if my partner doesn’t have the right app.
Yeah, but iphone users are different as they already have some default app that they could use instead of installing other apps. Wouldn’t they want to use that default app as often as possible if their partners have the same ability from their pov? I mean it’s not about the color as the original comment thinks, but about the stuff that the different color implies. Not the thing that is nice to the eyes, but the actual convenience and price.
It’s not as good as we want it to be. Those using RCS on Android are almost all using Google’s specific implementation, Apple is instead going to be using a more standard implementation. It’s probably going to work better than SMS, but it’s going to be a far cry from everyone just using any modern internet messaging service.
I worked in the cellular space for about 20 years off and on before moving to other pastures. I guarantee you that maybe one in a thousand think like you.
BY FAR the average buyer that Apple targets come in two flavors.
First, the “I’m cool and all my friends are doing it” and second is the “I’m the father, I don’t personally give a shit but my daughter/son wants us all to be on iMessage.”
BBM was the jam back in the days before iPhone. If you wanted to be in on the group chats you needed a blackberry. In the last little bit they opened it up to more devices but the gig was up.
They were never popular over here outside of business users, I always liked the tiny red LED. Sure, I can make the flag on my iPhone blink on new messages, but it’s not the same
But Android phones still have multicolor notification led. In fact it blows my mind that iPhones don’t, I wouldn’t even consider a phone without it anymore.
I don’t know what may have changed as I am an iPhone user, but about 10 years ago I worked in a small security role for a fairly large company, and the communications company we were using was more than happy to hand over sms logs as plain text. I would personally never send messages to anyone I was sure wasn’t encrypted and I can tell that by the blue bubble. I just don’t know when it is green.
I don’t know what has changed as I don’t keep up with it, but I am still dubious about messaging outside the Apple ecosystem, which is ok for me as I live in a country where most people use iOS
This is literally perpetuated by schoolyard bullying. Anyone over the age of 20 will very likely be entirely out of touch with how big a deal green/blue is for pre-teens and teens these days. It’s pretty much a cornerstone in teen social structures.
It’s because it breaks all the nice extra functionality of iMessage. iMessage is closer to Discord chats; You can do things like react to messages, send live emojis, spoiler/emphasize text, edit/delete sent messages, see when someone is typing, see read receipts, automatically send check-ins when you arrive at a destination, draw doodles, send full quality media, share galleries natively, etc… But as soon as someone with an android joins the group chat, all of that goes out the window and you’re stuck with boring old SMS.
Is it intentionally hostile on Apple’s part to bar androids from joining? Yes. But the reactions from Apple users aren’t entirely unjustified, because they’re left with a noticeably reduced feature set as soon as someone forces them to use green bubbles.
So why not use something like WhatsApp or Signal instead then? Sounds like a terrible user experience to me. Nobody I know uses iMessage, everybody uses WhatsApp instead, which is platform agnostic.
But I’m European, so the iPhone penetration is lower iirc and they can’t stay in their bubble as much.
Because Whatsapp users are just as big “twats” as you call it. Try functioning without Whatsapp in Europe, you can’t, and no amount of excuses will get you out of it.
Any messaging network starts acting like peer pressure once enough people around you are using it
I’m personally dying to see the DMA do its magic. If there’s even a dreamy chance of not having to have the big messaging apps installed on my phone in order to talk to people on these platforms, then I don’t want to stop dreaming.
In theory it would be trivial to open up the big networks, if they were each willing to expose a public, open API. The APIs don’t even have to be interoperable directly, they could let the client apps deal with that. It could be rolled out super fast if they wanted to – couple of months.
But of course none of them actually wants this, so I expect they will fight it tooth and nail, while not appearing to do so. Meaning they’ll drag this out for as long as possible while blaming each other. I expect RCS will be a perfect red herring for this, because of its complexity and the ability to blame interop issues on each other.
Is it intentionally hostile on Apple’s part to bar androids from joining? Yes. But the reactions from Apple users aren’t entirely unjustified
The reaction from Apple users is to blame Android users - which is entirely unjustified.
But of course, post purchase rationalization and brand loyalty play a big part in why people want to externalize blame rather than questioning their own decision or blaming their favorite company for providing a shitty cross-platform messaging experience.
Yes had a business owner come in and demand all employee phones be iPhone or get out. Jobs was his personal hero and thought Apple could do no wrong. The issue was the company he bought was run on software made for Windows. A lot of extra effort went into making it work on macbooks he insisted we all use.
In the end he believed he was as great as Jobs. Not sure that’s a great role model across the board for those that know more than just the apple procducts. The family values and toxic *work practices were not for everyone.
I was glad to get out of that company and back to my android phone and now Linux computing.
I will say the 3 good things about my iPhone was the camera, the full resolution media sharing with other iPhone users via iMessage, and the gallery uploading to other iOS devices.
The latter two are still a weakness with Google. At least they are addressing it with RCS but its still going to take time. Google photos has cloud back up but I’ve not really looked into how seamless the media backup to all android devices has been.
I think it’s a bit crazy to create a paid service on top of a reverse engineered product that isn’t static. Indivious, NewPipe and other youtube frontends aren’t going to create a paid youtube frontend, because they know Google could kill that at any point. Google could dedicate a full team to making youtube frontends non-functional.
Apple has a much bigger incentive to derail iMessage alternatives because they know that dumb parents have taught their kids how to live in a closed ecosystem and be slaves to Apple. 87% of USAian teenagers use Apple, which means it’s only a matter of time before Apple becomes the dominant player on the market. If you want to keep making fat stacks of cash, the best thing you can do is control the market, which means killing of competition.
The only reason Apple would ever stop killing competitors is if it became legally and financially detrimental to do so. They’d have to reach Microsoft levels of antitrust and bad press before even considering backpedaling.
Everyone buying their products is helping Apple along to their goal of market dominance.
At least here in Germany whattsapp is the standard. Apple has a phone market share if ~30%. In other countries the Facebook messenger is also quite important afaik.
But apple somehow managed to have pretty much all schools forcing their students to get an IPad. So the apple market share is increasing. I can not tell you how furious that makes me. Every parent has to buy one (or several) of those, so their children can use the most basic teaching apps, that any 100€ tablet could easily run. Poor children get an IPad on tax payers money, so I basically pay for my own children’s IPads and then a part of my tax money also flows to apple. I just wonder who (except Apple) got rich on that deal… I fxxxing hate politicians.
That stat came from an article that made the rounds a few weeks ago that cited a phone survey of 1000 or so kids in one small part of the US. Small, poorly controlled sample size, so bad data.
The point you’re trying to make is correct on a technical level, not a functional one. Unfortunately we can’t will languages into behaving in ways we think is ideal simply by making pointless assertions in obscure forums.
Yeah, I mean I totally get the annoyance of American being overloaded for both US person and of the American continents, but USAian ain’t the solution lol that kind of sucks (hard to say, no history to it, etc)
American is pretty unambiguous. What are you getting it mixed up with? No one else uses it. If you hear American, do you have to run through a list of other countries asking them which they are from? Of not, it’s unambiguous.
You could argue that it shouldn’t be the pronoun for a US citizen, but that’s a different argument than it being ambiguous.
Whatever adjective makes you feel better: appropriate, apt, fitting, correct, modest, less expansive, less assuming, less imperious, less opulent, less grandiose, less egocentric, less narcissistic
I never said it does. I just said it’s the correct word. It’s not confusing or ambiguous. Only one country uses it. It also does represent multiple states in the americas, hence the name.
If that’s the correct word to you, fine, use it. I won’t. Just because one country assumes it can be eponymous with not just one, but two entire continents, doesn’t make it right, nor do I have to agree with it.
And I guess South African should be something else, because there are other states in southern Africa? Language doesn’t really care about being “correct” with terms. It cares about being understandable. No one knows what USAian is. Everyone knows what American is. There isn’t really any debate anywhere around what to call people from the United States of America, even among other American nations.
And I guess South African should be something else, because there are other states in southern Africa?
You are correct, it should be something else. To agree on what is pretty difficult though. Azania has been suggested, but there are 12 official languages that probably have their own terms. I won’t even attempt to guess how many different tribes were brutally merged into one country by imperialists when they drew the borders to call it South Africa. It wouldn’t surprise me if they did rename themselves someday.
Even India doesn’t want to be called India. There’s a growing movement for it to be called Bharat.
No one knows what USAian is
Funny that, I didn’t have to explain to anyone what it is because the immediate reaction by people like you was "that’s not how you say ‘American’ ".
Funny that, I didn’t have to explain to anyone what it is because the immediate reaction by people like you was "that’s not how you say ‘American’ ".
You could have called them anything and I would have known what you were talking about because of the context. The same context you used to guess “USAian” was available to everyone else.
So it was context alone, was it? Using the acronym USA in an adjective referring to something from the USA didn’t clue you in at all. Just the context. Without it your reasoning would’ve completely led you astray and the sentence would’ve become unquestionably incomprehensible.
Yeah if Apple is willing to invest tons of money to keep using literal slaves (or at least to be intentionally ignorant about slavery in their supply chain) they aren’t going to be chivalrous about someone circumventing their intentional attempts to amp up class based marketing pressure for their apps.
If you really want to go down that road, use something like “United Statesman” or something that actually fits the language. “Americanian” is absurd and people will take you less seriously for it.
I hate to break it to you, but the name America as it was chosen by Europeans was meant to be the name of the continent.
The name USA was chosen by unitedstatesians when creating the country. A stupid mistake. Everyone else managed to pick a name, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Argentina… but not the USA.
USAian reads better than USAn 🤷 And I’m not going to type out “United Statesman” every time I want to refer to something USAian like a car. “United Statesman car”.
No, my dude. You just seemed like a non-native speaker of English and I was trying to help you out. It’s what I do for a living. I’ll be happy to teach “USAian” to my students if it ever becomes commonplace vernacular that they would likely hear on the streets. Unfortunately since it’s kind of grammatically nonsensical and weirder to both say and understand, that might take a whole lot more effort to accomplish than you seem to think it will. Good luck though. I find linguistic evolution interesting, so I won’t stop you.
“Android users’ hopes that Apple’s iMessage would be forced to open up in the European Union have been dashed. Bloomberg reports that iMessage won’t qualify for the EU’s new “Digital Markets Act,” allowing Apple to keep iMessage exclusive to Apple users. …”
Same here, I also have every single one of those. I’ve found that Telegram has become better than WhatsApp with their continuous improvements but not many people want to use it even after they download it “because nobody else uses it”. 🙃
I had an arcos jukebox before the first iPod came out, every time they’d release a new version it’s big feature would be something my jukebox had always done. Except it didn’t have an awkward spinning selector wheel or celebrity endorsements.
I could connect it to the cd player and record the whole thing as mp3s, I think it even used to split the tracks automatically but I might be wrong. Plug it into usb and it’s a HDD ready to have anything copied to it without hassle… No need for shitty iTunes, no complaints about wav files and never found an MP3 it couldn’t play.
I remember thinking that surely people will realize over priced and feature limited products are an insult but no, the kids of the future I had so much hope for turned out to be gen z who care more about brand recognition than anyone ever before. I still think the feature rich generics will have their day, maybe generation alpha…
Say what you want, but the iPod click wheel was anything but awkward. It was the most approachable and efficient interface and hardware on the market by miles and miles. Navigating other similar devices without it is an awful experience of buttons and layered menus that feel clunky and slow.
I won’t deny that the Arcos and other jukeboxes were incredible devices, but they lacked accessibility and mass appeal. Their size and expense kept most people from even considering getting one. They were absolutely an enthusiast’s device and nothing more.
The iPod ushered in the boom of portable media players and paved the road for Apple’s performance in the mobile phone space by establishing them as purveyors of a superior form factor and experience when it came to those devices. Apple owes its continued success in its personal computer and tablet product lines to the iPod’s design and their decision to focus on creating a cohesive ecosystem across their products based on those design principles.
Honestly, people just know that blue = better quality, reaction emojis, and editing. They don’t know why that’s actually the case. Most laypeople don’t know a lick about things like RCS, E2EE, etc.
It’s not that they’re apple superfans that makes then like that or course, they’re apple obsessed because they’re fully brought into conspicuous consumerism - they love that apple is over priced and feature limited because it’s a way of demonstrating their excess wealth.
Airlines are big on this with their ‘show the world you’re special by spending more than most people do on their whole holiday just to get a slightly bigger seat and complementary drinks that you could have brought for twenty dollars.’ the same with cars that inexplicably cost the same as a house and why people need to have this year’s overpriced car.
Apple not being laughed out of existence is a symptom of our broken society, and yes I know people are going to tell me that they have some obscene reason for using apple but that’s just the very human trait of posthoc justification and rationalization of a choice made emotionally.
Apple has always been a closed ecosystem, doing things “their way”. When they only sold computers, it was a niche company, with a niche audience. Then they started selling music players and phones, and they became a popular company.
The blue vs green bubble is just an American problem, that still use SMS as their main messaging protocol. The rest of the world use messaging app, like WhatsApp. It’s truly fascinating watching these events from outside the US.
Really? Why is that? Why you can’t compare two instant messaging apps? What is so hilarious?
Btw, WhatsApp was made by a different company, and then bought by Meta, when it was already the most used instant messaging app in the EU. And it has a lot of really nice features. There’s a reason so many people use it.
e2ee means the message text is encrypted. Obviously metadata isnt as you cant hide where you want your message to be delivered to or what time it is sent.
The locking down started with the original MacIntosh (or actually with the Lisa I guess). ISTR they had at least one bit more open period after that, but those have always been the exception.
But remember: instead of going with DOS, or a PC compatible system, they developed their own OS. It’s always been closed. And doing things “their way”.
I’ve been a Mac user for more than 30 years, and I’ve always been isolated from the PC ecosystem. No PC Card was ever usable with a Mac, until they changed to Intel processors in 2005, and even then, you didn’t have drivers for those, you have to rely on some outside development. You could barely read PC files, and most PCs couldn’t read Mac files without external software until Apple changed to Mac OS X in 2001. PC peripherals were incompatible (different connectors and electrical requirements) until Apple introduced USB with the iMac in 1998 (and the PC ecosystem caught up with it).
While Macs were (somewhat) upgradeable, you needed to buy Mac specific parts to do it, made by Apple approved vendors.
So, It’s always been a walled garden. I know, I was there before the iPhone, before the iPod. They’re doing nothing different from when they started. The difference is in society: internet appeared, and we now expect everything to work with everything. We expect to be interconnected. But Apple? They always liked to be their own thing, to be different (“think different”, remember?).
So, it’s just normal Apple behaviour. Expecting anything different is not knowing what Apple really is. Fortunately, the EU thinks doing things “the Apple way” is no longer valid, and is forcing them to adopt standards, and don’t abuse their position. But they’re doing it reluctantly, complaining, and putting a fight.
There is truth in what you’re saying, but I think it’s missing a lot of nuance especially when it comes to why a lot of the things you’re saying are true. A few quick things:
instead of going with DOS
Apple developed the original Mac OS to be the first major GUI OS, and MS was left struggling to catch up. Going with DOS would have been a major step back, and set computing back significantly.
always been isolated from the PC ecosystem.
which was originally more to do with IBM than Apple.
You could barely read PC files, and most PCs couldn’t read Mac files without external software until Apple changed to Mac OS X in 2001.
This was less because Apple wanted it to be that way, and more because Microsoft wanted it that way. The reason things switched in 2001 isn’t specifically because of OS X, it’s because Apple did a deal with MS in '99 or so (and MS only did it likely to avoid more regulatory scrutiny after losing an anti-trust case) and part of that deal was more interoperability. Apple had advertising campaigns basically saying “don’t worry, you can switch to Mac and bring your files with you.”
They’re doing nothing different from when they started.
This is also true, but again misses a crucial piece of context - they do it that way because they think it’s generally better and makes better products, and I think you’d generally have to be pretty unstable to argue otherwise. Think about snapshots in time - in the 80’s when it was DOS and original Mac OS. Do our computers look and work like DOS or Mac now? Compare modern laptops to a '94 powerbook or whatever was on the PC market. The modern phone and the modern OS compared to what came before iPhone. Or take a gander what Android looked like pre/post iPhone announcement; spoilers, it was a blackberry knock off instead of an iPhone knock off.) Even Windows today looks and acts more like macOS than it has since probably the 3.1 days.
Even some of the more seemingly shitty decisions follow this pattern. Remember, iMessage came out at a time when messages cost either $5-20 for what would now seem like an absurdly small block of messages a month or $0.10 a message. Its initial value prop was that it was stupid to pay that much and if you bought an iPhone you could cut your bill way down. Or Lightning instead of micro USB. MicroUSB couldn’t fulfill all of the functions Lightning could, and it’s a worse connector for a lot of reasons.
I mean, that said, iMessage was definitely designed to keep you on iPhone and it’s being deliberately used as lock in, and there are plenty of other shitty things about Apple (like any other corp) but the virulence with which people hate it is often just because they do not get it any more than I see people mindlessly bash Linux usually with insults that haven’t been true since 2006.
While the bit about file interoperability may be more windows-specific, there is such a thing as the “PC Ecosystem”. The software has alternatives: dominated by DOS, then Windows, but also available are Linux and the various minor UNIX-likes, but the hardware really is a specific ecosystem based on a specific set of standards.
We are lucky the EU is forcing them to adopt standards and not abuse their power. Maybe we’ll see some progress. New iPhones coming with USB-C is a good start and, ironically, I think it will make them sell more phones. But regarding blue vs green bubbles, the massive adoption of WhatsApp in the EU (fuelled by the greed of European Telcos charging per SMS) made us immune to this discussion.
It’s interesting: in all my ignorance, my perception is that it’s the Germans the ones that feel more and more like the Americans (other than the British). But it may be just a wrong perception on my part. I honestly don’t know for certain.
Edit: a small note: you still gave the Greens and the Pirate Party to the EU Parliament, that are the best thing to ever happen to it. :D
Wouldn’t it be more correct to say that most Americans also use a messaging app (iMessage). The rest are just stuck with SMS to have compatibility with the iPhone users.
As the iPhone was (is?) not as popular in the Europe as it was (is) in the States that might also be one of the reasons why people here ditched SMS so fast once smartphones got popular.
But it’s not “most”, it’s more like half of Americans use iMessage (that’s not an app, it’s a service, the app is called Messages), and the other half uses SMS with different apps.
The factor that moved people away from SMS in the EU was telecom companies charging for it. SMS is virtually free for telecom companies, but European companies got greedy, and people moved to WhatsApp. They tried to block it, but accepted defeat after a while.
In the US, SMS is free with your phone plan, and it became popular with young people until iMessage appeared. Since iPhones are still subsidized by US telcos (afaik, correct me if I’m wrong), a lot of young people have iPhones and use iMessage, that’s far superior to SMS.
At the very least, hopefully Apple will notice that there is enough of an appetite for iMessage on Android that people are getting innovative about it.
What’s their motivation? Unless they charge for it, the other service to non customers and remove one of the barriers keeping people in iOS. I’ve read that EU won’t force it to open, so either there is profit involved or I don’t see apple doing it.
I know all that. It’s the reason why it’s not considered by the EU. But doesn’t address the fact that the is no reason for Apple to open up, unless I’m missing something
The point is to get people to buy iPhones because of getting shunned for green bubbles. It came out in litigation, the CEO straight up admitted it in writing
That was an interesting read. There wasn’t actually any mention of green bubbles from Apple indicated in the article, but the emails referenced in a different article linked in that one quoted a top exec’s concern that adding iMessage to Android would only remove a barrier to parents buying their kids something other than an iPhone. The intent is pretty clear that they don’t want Android and iPhone users to be able communicate fairly in iMessage.
Still, isn’t RCS support enough? I mean, assuming you simply refuse to just ask other people to download a different app?
From a technical POV, sure. For the average person if Apple doesn’t show RCS as blue bubble? They still won’t care, and will keep excluding people, and keep getting Apple phone sales
Apple reportedly built a version of iMessages for Android a long time ago. Then they realized how many phones their bubble scheme sold and reversed course.
Why do people want iMessage for Android? That gives them more control over the entire messaging ecosystem.
They’re adopting the RCS protocol, that’s what people should want. It’s interoperable with all phones and not just the ones that happen to support iMessage. It’s supposed to replace SMS and MMS, which are guaranteed to work between all platforms.
This iMessage vs WhatsApp vs other walled-garden messaging apps debate is stupid when an open protocol is right there.
They’re adopting the RCS protocol, that’s what people should want
Standard RCS is not e2ee, only google’s implementation on top of it is. I feel most here would prefer an e2ee messaging protocol over something else that can be observed by third parties
Samsung is the only other company that integrated Google’s e2ee implementation into their stock messages app fairly recently, it’s supported standard RCS for a good number of years now
The appeal is: 100% of your family and friends use it. A good fraction of businesses use it for customer service too. Not using it will have you left out of a pretty big chunk of social life.
In the Netherlands: whatsapp. You can’t avoid whatsapp here. Telegram is used by a smaller fraction, but it got a bit of a bad rep during the pandemic due to primarily attracting anti-vax rioters.
If it satisfies the way in which you want to label me, ok. For what it’s worth, I’m typing this on a Pixel 7 and own a MacBook and a Windows 11 desktop for different purposes.
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