Fuck apple beyond words for creating a bully situation with children because of their fucked UX design and unwillingness to simply release their own iMessage app for android.
I never said it was blameless. Just seems silly to focus on blaming a corporation like Apple for a social issue when you could choose from so many other options.
Splitting hairs about how you projected emotion as a dismissive tactic is also a dismissive tactic.
So is treating any response to “calm down, honey” as proof of the necessity in saying “calm down, honey.”
What you’re doing is bullying.
You’re ignoring the content of the argument to wind someone up, and treating any response as retroactive justification for whichever attack you’ve chosen. The correct response becomes some combination of “fuck” and “you,” but nobody can actually deliver that response, because you’re already pretending that’s the tone, and furthermore, that the argument is only a dishonest expression of that emotional outburst. These are tactics of emotional abuse. You need to stop using them.
If you’re not doing this on purpose, and instead genuinely picture some frothing caricature typing out this detailed explanation of why your comments are indistinguishable from bad-faith trolling, you still need to stop. It’s plainly incorrect. Reassess what led you here and do better next time.
On the actual point:
The first thing I said to you was, this feature Other-izes users of the competing brand, and your comment treats the company as totally blameless, even though the impact is exactly the behavior it’s designed to influence.
And you called that measured assessment “lazy and irresponsible.” Because you’re acting as though total singular blame is the metric. To such an obvious degree that you think ‘I blame the individual’ is a sensible approach to widespread issues, like they all coincidentally made the same rational choice, instead of being influenced by manipulative companies for monetary gain. Like that’s not a whole industry built on predictable human shortcomings.
Also, like it’s not instantly undercut by adding ‘I also blame the parents.’ So I guess hooray for figuring out blame can be shared.
Splitting hairs about how you projected emotion as a dismissive tactic is also a dismissive tactic.
I didn’t project emotion, I interpreted your comment as angry due to your phrasing and use of profanity. I interpreted the second comment the same way due, again, to your phrasing and use of hypocrite.
I’m sorry if I was wrong but you seem very combative to me.
I disagree with your stance on the issue at hand.
You accuse me of bullying you and being emotional abusive? I disagree with that as well but if that’s truly how you feel please report any and all comments I made you feel that way about. If the mods review them and feel the same as you then they’ll be removed.
your comment treats the company as totally blameless
Sure, I think Apple has no blame for one child bullying another, I think blame for that is on the child doing the bullying and on the child’s parents.
I think it’s lazy and irresponsible to blame Apple for an issue that exists without them and before them. Especially when there’s things they are both directly responsible for and that have a greater direct impact.
Text bubbles are what kids chose to focus on for their bullying, I’m sure Apple benefits from it, but those same kids would bully about something else if that was gone. This is a people problem, I’d argue American people, that doesn’t change if green text bubbles were gone tomorrow.
Like repeating the insults lazy and irresponsible, based on the binary all-or-nothing blame I just addressed, quoting the previous time you used those insults?
Your ardent insistence on individual responsibility doesn’t seem to extend to why someone would respond to your comments like you’ve repeatedly insulted them. Surely there’s no reason for someone to call you a hypocrite. They must be angry, in a way you’ll voice as an accusation, for no apparent reason.
Meanwhile.
Back at the point:
Apple turning the universal standard of text messages into a color-coded sign of smug superiority - see previous thirty years of their marketing - is at least partly to blame for the trend of children acting smugly superior based on that brand loyalty. Do you understand “partly to blame,” as a concept?
I never called you lazy or stupid. I called blaming a company for a social issue lazy and irresponsible.
I don’t know why you’re taking this personally, I don’t know you, I certainly can’t make a judgment about you as a person.
I disagree with the take that Apple is to blame and shared my thoughts on that, not you.
When I got an iPhone years ago it had a function I didn’t know about. Different text bubble colors depending on protocol used. It was all awesome because I had limited texting so it was handy to know if messaging was free (iMessage) or if it was counting against my limit (SMS).
Nobody bullied anybody over it then. You want to blame Apple, partly, for kids getting bullied, ok. I disagree with you and I think blaming Apple is lazy and irresponsible. You as a person? No idea. You might be industrious and diligent, maybe you’re somewhere in the middle, maybe you are lazy and irresponsible. That’s not really for me to judge from one opinion shared on the internet.
Yes, fuck Apple, sure. But tell your kids they don’t have to care. In the end it’s just a computer and any relationship that actually matters won’t teeter on which fucking app you use. If your kid is getting ostracized from a group ONLY because they don’t use iMessage, tell them they’ve found the wrong group and they’re worth way more than that. Real friends are more than willing to take a 2-second step and install a second chat app to accommodate friends who cannot use iMessage. There are more androids out there than iPhones anyway.
Corporations are not your friends. They will not take responsibility for your kids unless they’re forced or they decide they want to get paid for doing it. Your kids deserve to know how to navigate society despite this. Teach them.
It’s bizarre you’re getting downvoted for saying this. Yeah, a lot of teens / kids won’t understand, but that’s fine if they don’t immediately understand. Pain brings progress.
WTF? Have you never met a kid in your life? Kids are stupid, their brains are still developing. You can’t just reason with them, explain that the thing they want is stupid and that they should actually want something else. It gets worse with teenagers, they think they are actually smart and stop listening while thinking that every choice they make will have a huge impact on their entire life. Telling them to “suck it up and find some other friends” has to be the most pointless thing you can do.
Look, I hate kids, don’t have any and never will but even I understand how fucked up it has to be for your kid to be excluded from activities because they don’t have a phone or have the wrong one. Being a parent now has to really suck. All kids bond over things that are bad for them (social media) so you pretty much have to choose how do you prefer to hurt your kid: by giving them a phone or by making them an outcast.
If you think you know how bad one teen can get, try dealing with classrooms of them, for over a decade.
At that age in their development, their brains start sloughing off cells that it thinks it doesn’t need, so they go out and do stupid shit no matter what you try to tell them. They’re basically learning more from serious fuckups than anything else because those are the lessons that stick.
At that age you’ve just got to compromise. In this case, I’d say tell them they can get whatever phone they want as long as they pay for it themselves and hear out your concerns. If you’re the one buying, tell them tough shit, they get what they get, or make them write you an essay of why they think they deserve a one kind of phone over the one you think they ought to have. It gives you an opportunity to hear them out completely, call out bs, share some personal insight, or maybe even reconsider your own stance on the issue.
Yeah also iOS is getting RCS support soon so the whole point is moot. The whole blue bubble thing is a lot of people with way too much time on their hands to get worried about stuff that doesn't matter at all.
The bubbles are pointless. What matters is that apple will not send media like videos or pictures over anything but sms to android users, which means it gets transcoded down to 2.5MB max. This means that any media, which is a lot of what people send nowadays, looks like absolute trash going apple to android.
Its a sleazy, underhanded way to get people to buy into the apple ecosystem so they can stop getting tiny, grainy videos of their friends/family.
You just pointed out the problem. Instead of using the inbuilt iMessage that works wonderfully for everyone with an apple phone, they now need to install 6+ other apps to send uncompressed media. Signal for johny and sheri, teams for david, bill and fred, skype for Susie on and on.
It’s no wonder I just get a thumbnail sized pixel fest of my relatives instead. Apple has very astutly leveraged “ease of use” and “monopoly action” to all but literally lock the majority of their users into an ecosystem that makes it worthwhile to buy into it to end the issue apple created.
It’s always android users complaining about this. Why should Apple care if its users don’t?
I’m an iOS user and I use iMessage with some people, discord with some people, telegram with some people and Skype with some people and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest to do so. It’s not even cumbersome to do so, the contacts show up on the same share screen regardless of platform.
If the people you are communicating with don’t care enough to send something to you in a format that works for you, that’s on them, not on Apple.
Demanding that Apple make an app for android so that you can use their service without paying for their product reeks of entitlement though.
Chat and messaging was interoperable for years, even between platforms. Go look up the history of XMPP. It was a shared protocol many different companies implemented before they realized locking down the messaging medium meant locking in users.
Chat working on whatever platform is incredibly basic and easy, even with modern features. Its is only monopolistic action that keeps these things from working together, companies engaged in capturing customers with bad practice instead of good products. In no way, shape or form is it “entitled” to expect apple/google/facebook/et al to not hobble human communication for profit, and to just use good, interoperable standards.
The fact that Apple won’t, and at most has pretended to make gestures while an intense FTC has started filing lawsuits against tech giants, tells you that they fully understand the value this brings them as a company.
You’re asking them to do work and open up their chat platform to other devices that are outside of their ecosystem and they have no os level control over. The security aspect of this in itself makes this not something “incredibly basic and easy”.
On top of that, there’s literally no benefit for them to do it. There are plenty of third party options for chat out there, and again, clamoring for them to do this work and maintain a product while still maintaining security for no return is entitled and unrealistic.
People making this argument show themselves to be naive to how software development and business in general works.
It is not a secuirty issue to have interoperable chat platforms, with e2ee to boot. This is solved, open source, and usable by anyone. They don’t have to “work on devices outside of their ecosystem” since they will all be following the same chat standard. That standard will work on other devices, because those devices in other ecosystems will also follow the same standard. This is the foundation of how the internet works, from email to the web. Chat is no different.
I spoke pretty extensively as to why Apple locks out other phones from their system, so Im confused about why you think I don’t understand it. They do it to build up monopolistic power. They want user lockin, to control the social network that is “iMessage.” Once they lock users into their ecosystem, it keeps them buying high profit hardware. It’s very apparent why they intentionally harm human communication by opposing interoperability. It makes them money.
That makes Apple scumbags, flat out. The same goes for all the rest that won’t offer interoperability. It’s not a reasonable choice. It’s not for safety, or security or any other buzzword. They make it harder for people to talk to each other so they can make more money. Period.
So your answer is “everyone I know with an apple device should stop using the thing that apple made sure works wonderfully for them and shift to another app to talk to me.”
That’s just not in touch with reality at all. What people actually do is keep using iMessage and sending shitty compressed media to android users. That’s the problem people are actually complaining about, not some “bubble color” strawman.
It’s a 40/60 split in the market. It’s not like a friend group is likely to have only one android phone. Unless the iPhone users are avoiding people with Android phones.
Saying people should use a system agnostic message app isn’t farfetched or selfish. It’s the common sense solution.
You are absolutely correct. I’m an iOS user and have absolutely no qualms using anyone’s preferred message app (as long as it’s not WhatsApp, fuck fb).
People have always hated on apples Windows apps, the same is probably true if they have to start making android apps too.
It’s literally the correct decision for them not to make an iMessage for android, the only people demanding it are the people who aren’t buying their products!
Google has been begging Apple to implement RCS for well over a year now. They wouldn’t need to pull a beeper on Google since Google actively wants to help Apple implement their standard.
Propably when Google allows Android apps to access modem-level RCS message sending. Right now Google Messages do everything via Google’s some sort of a proxy server.
A whole lot of mess just like always when phone operators do anything.
Imagine how cool it could be if every mobile provider would just provide data and free XMPP account with autoconfigure instead of RCS or VoLTE crap.
Beeper Mini, I can agree the reason for existing is stupid. Not Beeper as a whole. I greatly like having a one stop shop for all of my messaging platforms. It’s a straight up fucking pain in the ass to have Messages, Messenger, Whatsapp, Discord, Telegram, LinkedIn, and more all having their own specific applications with separate lists of people in them. Gaim/Pidgin/Trillian/Adium had the right idea back in the day and if it isn’t done at an application level like Beeper, then I would really like it done at an OS level where all apps of a communication/chat type have their notifications and interactivity bundled. There’s going to be platform exclusive features that don’t have parity that wouldn’t be able to be part through or presented the same, but communications are such a base level function of these devices and the generally one-application-at-a-time type of display of phones makes the balkanization of communication mediums even more annoying.
I think Blackberry had the right solution with their Hub app. It was just a big inbox with a lot of integrations. It would show you all the conversations from different apps (including email) with all the typical filtering, sorting and searching. You had a single screen to see all your conversations nicely organized but clicking on a message would take you to the external app to send messages. It was super useful but of course apps had to provide some API for this to work and BB wasn’t popular enough so at some point it just stopped working. Android could easily do this but I think they are just not as good at UX as BB was (seriously, BB OS10 had lots of great features iOS copied a decade later and more, it was really nice).
I recall some pretty bold statements being made that Apple couldn’t stop this reverse engineering from working ever in the early days of tech reporting on this.
Even as a Android user I thought this was pretty bold claims to make as this whole walled garden is a big part of the Apple brand and they will need to protect this as they really don’t have leading software inovation and they are no longer ahead on tech advances or specs that made the first couple of iPhones ground breaking.
Since they are a couple to a few years behind the Android features and specs, they need to protect the special brand identity above all else so I expected them to tweak things to break anything they don’t want to have happen to their systems.
I can’t blame them at all from a business prospective. While I don’t like or enjoy their products, they had built a great brand that sells itself for those that “want to be different” but actually the same as all of their friends.
They technically didn’t stop the reverse engineering from working. They threatened users with bans and scared them into not using the reverse engineered software.
It’s been awhile since I last used a iPhone 13 Pro Max for work but I do recall the constant announcements there with previous models when Apple would announce yet another great “new” feature for iPhone that Android users already had for a year or two at that stage.
Samsung also made some good media campaigns on the announcements and used the lineups for new iPhones fairly well in their advertising.
I will say I thought the iPhone 13 camera was pretty goof, the battery life was too, and within the Apple walled garden the texting of videos was nice. The overall user experience for me wasn’t a good fit. I like to browse the web without ads and watch videos without them too. Some of that can be done with a iPhone but it’s clunky and the web browsers are just safari.
There’s other customizable options I prefer that I can do with Android that isn’t an option yet for Apple but I do know they will be able to at some stage.
Overall the whole apple vs android has been great for consumers. If it wasn’t for the competition between Apple and the Android products neither group would be as far along.
Yeah. I mean, the actual reverse engineering is something Apple wouldn’t be able to stop them from doing. But anyone who thought Apple couldn’t stop them from using that reverse engineering to connect to iMessage was delusional. And if it had become more of a cat and mouse situation where Beeper was able to keep gaining access, Apple would have sued the pants off them. Apple, as shitty of a company as they are, have every right to control access to their own APIs.
No matter what the technical reality of Beeper was, this was like claiming God couldn’t kick you out of Heaven if they wanted to.
Apple has army of devs, a bottomless wallet, and is extremely petty and controlling about their garden. If you found a hole in the wall, they’d go as far as to build a whole new wall just to stop you. And they can do that, because it’s their garden. You have no power there.
I support what Beeper tried to do, but it was never going to work. Apple’s garden needs regulation to crack open, you can’t do it with software.
Depends on the context about which you’re talking.
I’m talking about accessing a service which Apple is in control of the infrastructure and has specifically put in place access and authorization controls.
In this instance, if Beeper wanted to reverse engineer the API, make their own implementation, and offer their own messaging service that’s fine. More power to them generally.
But unless Beeper comes to some sort of agreement to allow interoperability with Apple’s iMessage (or Apple is forced to allow it by government action) then they can’t take it upon themselves to use exploits or spoofing to gain access without authorization. You might think it sucks that Apple has kept their API closed and that it’s a bad idea, but that’s their prerogative. It’s just like when Twitter closed their API or when Reddit priced everyone out of using their API, except Apple never had it open to start with.
Saying you’ve put access controls in to a public service isn’t an argument. It’s a confession. Anti-competitive behavior is illegal. And forcing the traffic through infrastructure you set up specifically to wall it off is Anti- Competitive. Just because neo liberals got in control of things does not mean we need to normalize corporate governance.
just keep in mind that if you connect any service to it, the messages will be decrypted on Beeper’s server before sent either way, so theoretically they could be reading your messages even if you send them through an e2ee service.
Speaking of, does anyone remember Rockmelt? It was a weird older browser that had all the popular chats in its sidebar where you can access them without going to each website separately. It was pretty cool until Yahoo bought it and it died instantly.
I recall the early days of PC chat services like ICQ, MSN, AOL and the clients like Pigeon and Trillian to try to have them all in one place. It didn’t always seem to work the best for long.
It’s too bad BBM took way too long to open up to others beyond BB devices. They had some of my favorite emojis and they had for a time a big user base that they could have kept in their services.
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