If you want something more open, that exists too, which is great. It doesn't make sense to complain that iMessage isn't what you want it to be. Choice means that open and closed solutions exist in the market.
1. Requiring a unique phone number for signup, and heavily restricting accounts which appear to have used a VOIP phone number for signup (including Google Voice numbers). Restricted accounts can't initiate conversations, so they can't really send spam.
2. Allowing users to report spammers that get past #1, and limiting the accounts of users that get reported.
For details, see: https://telegram.org/faq_spam
While you enjoy your "spam free" service, some of us will have to work with the separate but not equal alternative. In case you haven't noticed, as the common communication environment has become more and more locked-down (starting with mobile, and now spilling over into desktop), fewer people are using open alternatives. Simply observing that open protocols exist doesn't make them an actual de facto alternative.
Are you paying for it?
I can be reached by telephone. What I don't have is a unique telephone number. This works perfectly fine for actual voice communication. If you think I can simply afford an extra monthly expense, you're wrong.
> You are like 0.0000001% of the market.
Made up statistics reveal your presuppositions.
There are a lot of people that don't have a unique phone number. It's a minority position, but that's kind of my point: chat services do not inherently depend on traditional phone numbers, and requiring one is going to exclude more people than you probably realize.
And of course that statistic is made up. It was a joke.
Are you in a country which doesn't have pay-and-go service?
but for IM
Security problems aren't solved through closed protocols, and open protocols don't have to have security problems.
In this case, at the very least a mailbox address would be a cryptographically unguessable identifier. Ideally, each person to whom you are introduced would get their own unguessable mailbox address that acts as a proxy for your real mailbox, and you can delete that proxy anytime you wish to stop receiving e-mail from that person (and anyone with whom they shared your address). This completely eliminates the viability of selling your personal information to advertisers and spammers. Obviously this process has to be simple and semi-automatic, preferably transparent, or people won't be able to use it (like the web of trust), but the idea is sound, and based on capability security.
People already do something like this manually with subaddressing, and it seems the general concept I presented above has an official name as "disposable e-mail addresses" [1].
Why not? I don't know the specifics of this case, but if you are a user as well as developer that is going to release apps on the App Store and give x% of your revenue to Apple, it might make a lot of sense for Apple to listen carefully when you complain that iMessage is horrible and a pain to script around.
You really love iMessage because it is free from spam and abuse, not because it is tied-down. It is Apple's job to make it the former and avoid the latter.
Because alternatives exist that satisfy your needs.
> You really love iMessage because it is free from spam and abuse, not because it is tied-down.
It is free from spam and abuse because it is tied-down. This isn't a controversial statement; it's one of the famously difficult problems in computer networks. Nobody has solved it.
This argument makes sense only in applications that can be substituted for one another. With IMs, like with social networks, you'd have to replace not just the app, but also your friends.
Since you are in a way being forced to use that particular communications app, it makes sense to ask it to complain about it getting worse.
Spam on IM? I've honestly only seen this on skype. Is this actually an issue on other networks/countries?
This is a massive unsolved problem.
"This word that doesn't mean this other word means this other word."
What?
Somehow people recognize that illusion of choice when talking about Facebook, but fail to recognize it here? Weird.
She can text me, but when I or anybody else On an iPhone try to text her it goes to iMessage and she never receives it.
Yes this is "just a bug", but it also seriously promotes lock-in. It's a very strategic bug, and if she hadn't bought a new phone she would probably be back on iMessage.
iMessage is not always a choice, sometimes it's for life whether you wanted it to be or not.
Similarly if you'd only accept cryptographically signed mail by default the spam problem would go away as a bye product.