Steve Jobs Promised Open Source FaceTime Back in 2010: What Happened? | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs Promised Open Source FaceTime Back in 2010: What Happened?

cnet.com

113 pointsdenzil_correa73 comments

The article title is simply wrong. Jobs promised to make open standards, not open source.

To people talking about Virtex and server hosting: an open protocol doesn't imply that that a server must handle traffic for free. Your webserver runs an open protocol (HTTP) but only allows connections from authorized clients.

Video-chat providers could sell access to their chat-hosting, or make peering agreements with other providers, like the regular Internet.

But Jobs wasn't really interested in that; he was riding a marketing wave making promises he didn't have to keep.

It's just a long way to say he was laying...

Relatedly, what I don't get is how everyone is so excited about many-user FaceTime. I'm just glad they finally brought it back.

Back in 2008 or 2009, all of team reddit used iChat AV to have a video meeting, and one of us was in California, one in Boston, and two in Australia. And it worked flawlessly. And it worked on Windows!

FaceTime still hasn't caught up to Apple's own discontinued product ten years later.

You could also show any Quicklook supported file in the iChat AV video stream. I remember doing some remote Keynote presentations that way. Resolutions wasn't great, but it worked. Ten+ years ago.

I believe that they axed the mac product, then ported the iOS implementation to the Mac -- which makes perfect sense even if it was effectively a regression for those folks who had been happily using the desktop version.

The new version looks amazing, even if it may still be technically a regression in some nooks and crannies.

This article is silly: they answer their own question at the end but pretend like this is still some big mystery or Apple never actually intended to nor wants to open source FaceTime.

But without the VirnetX patents and the peer-to-peer architecture, this service requires significantly greater backend resources. I’m not sure how Apple could feasibly open this standard to third party clients now.

> they answer their own question at the end

They do? Where?

> There's also an ongoing lawsuit to consider -- as Ars Technica documented in 2013, Apple was forced to majorly change how FaceTime works to avoid infringing on the patents of a company called VirnetX. Instead of letting phones communicate directly with each other, Apple added "relay servers" to help the phones connect.

> Presumably, someone would have to pay for those servers, and/or figure out a way for them to talk to Google or Microsoft or other third-party servers if FaceTime were going to be truly open.

I don't see why the patents made an open standard impossible, or even relatively difficult.

The patents covered parts of the technology which Apple planned to make an open standard. This would have left the standard patent-encumbered, making it hazardous to implement.

VirnetX is a listed company. Apple could simply buy them out from under the Board's feet and throw them in the dumpster and not even notice the cost.

Market cap: 202M

Apple makes that in what? Ten minutes? ;-)

> Apple makes that in what? Ten minutes? ;-)

About a day and a half. (that's based on 2017's $48 billion net income)

So Apple almost certainly could afford to buy the company, but they'd need a business case for doing so, weighing that option against all the OTHER nice things they might want to spend $200 million on.

Apple also has something like 250 billion in liquid assets.

WhatsApp has video group calling very soon too. But Facetime is at minimum an Apple account/id thing the same as Google Meet (which is great btw) is for Google accounts. So I don't see how Facetime really solves something in that area even when it would work for Android and Windows PCs. Side note: actually the algorithms used in Google Duo and Meet are better for low bandwidth (which you have in many areas of the world) than Facetime ever was.

We currently have only one person in our entire company of 15-20 people who uses both Android and Windows, and have been considering just buying her an iPod so she can use iMessage/Facetime.

Im surprised she didn’t bought one herself it’s fairly easy usually to use an iPhone/Mac in a non-Apple environment the other way around is impossible because the native or exclusive solutions are quite good or at least entrenched enoguh to be used nearly exclusively.

Marketing/Sales goal at Apple reached: 100%

Buying specific proprietary hardware to use specific proprietary software.

The dream.

That's rather a minority of companies out there.

There's a Facetime-quality video chat app that runs on Apple and non-Apple hardware already, it's called Google Duo

But is it end to end encrypted like FaceTime?

Yes.

Yes according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Duo

That's not much better, it's still not an open standard. Plus since this is a Google chat app both it and it's successor will probably have been killed off in favor of yet another chat app within the next 2 years.

Is there anything that runs on iOS, Android, and Windows? Other than Skype (shudder).

Discord. I’m not sure if Slack can do multi-party video but it has person-to-person.

GoToMeeting, Hangouts, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, ooVoo, Viber, etc

Wire or Signal is probably the closest in end-user use / UX to FaceTime, but I think their video calling is only 1:1 so far.

It is this week; how long before it's deprecated in favour of Google's new solution?

Isn't webrtc that open standard that everybody wants?

We just need good client and server implementations with reasonable fallbacks for nat traversal, nice UI.

Houseparty, another video chatting app that is picking up steam, uses WebRTC.

WebRTC is P2P also, so I think that on a large scale it would be far less expensive, AND also afford way less laggy VoIP.

WebRTC is garbage for group video. Since all clients have their own set of protocols they support you either have to a) re-encode N times to give each client what they want or b) use some sort of lowest common denominator encoding that all clients accept.

https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/ is pretty fantastic.

The domain name is still available - openfacetime.org - I am happy to donate it to an open source project. Ping me on Twitter @satefan

(I registered the domain while I was sitting in the audience at the WWDC where Jobs announced it would be open source)

Kind of sounds like the URL for a site about open-face sandwiches.

Incidentally, an unexpected benefit of the server-relay FaceTime implementation is the ability for Apple to allow 32-person FaceTime calls which was a feature just announced on Monday.

Wouldn’t that require not being end to end encryption as well?

They can’t stitch and re-encode the video streams if they can’t decode it server side.

Couldn’t you just encode the video for all 31 other public keys?

I believe Apple explicitly said it was still end-to-end encrypted.

Wouldn't this increase the upload bandwidth needed by 31?

There might be a way for it to be end-to-end encrypted, but it's not a simple problem.

You could use a block cipher for the actual video stream with a single key, and encrypt that key with all 31 public keys.

That was the kind of thing I was thinking of. One video stream someone encrypted so any one of X people could decode it.

You never encrypt anything but the session key with the public key in this case all chat participants will exchange a single shared session key.

You could multiplex multiple adpative-rate encrypted video streams into a single stream per viewer, keeping the content of each encrypted and choosing which bitrate streams to include in the multiplexed output according to current bandwidth. There's no need to actually decode them, you just have to know which encrypted streams are which. All composition would then be done on the clients. This is just a possibility for how it could be done, I have no idea how Apple actually does it. For best results, you'd probably need some non-encrypted metadata about the streams too, e.g. timing information.

They specifically note it is still end-to-end encrypted. But I don’t have the details.

iMessage has been doing Group Messaging with end-to-end for years without much issue.

If you’re ferreting the messages as is between the parties sure but I thought they’re creating the combined stream server side. That way it’s less bandwidth and processing on each client and the functionality would work with any “legacy” phone too.

I’m pretty sure that they multiplex the video into a single stream and tell the clients decode the relevant ones. The server can also do some detection on the device to flag a stream as the focus stream without having to be able to decrypt the data the server can also tell the clients to what bitrate encode their transmition depending on the number of participants and which clients are in focus at the time e.g. if you aren’t talking send a 480p stream if you are send a 1080p one.

The problem isn’t the key exchange but the data.

Most messaging based solutions keep the same individual key exchange for group sessions also instead of figuring out some key ring or exchanging a key between all individuals.

This simplifies things and allows you to have only one key exchange algo.

Video and any other high bandwidth application would require you to always have a shared key on a group level because otherwise you are doing a lot of extra work and a lot of exra upload.

Jump off point for VirnetX

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirnetX

Non mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirnetX

According this article:

* http://blog.krisk.org/2013/09/apples-new-facetime-sip-perspe...

... FaceTime is more or less SIP hacked to work better with the crummy Internet we have to contend with these days. So we probably know enough to make something compatible. What we don't have is any assurance that Apple would allow such interoperation going forward.

The problem is not actually technical...

> And since there are good reasons for Apple to keep it that way, it probably never will.

These reasons are far from good. Same as all Apple's obnoxious lock-in.

that is not what he promised. he promised standards, not an open source implementation

He died?

It's dead anyway, unless all your contacts (the ones you want to communicate with) own Apple devices.

So essentially everyone I know. We're not talking windows mobile here.

Only the person you want to talk with at that moment needs to be on an Apple device.

For example, my wife and I both have iPhones, so we use FaceTime because it’s easier. My niece doesn’t, so we use Skype.

Just because you personally aren’t using it, doesn’t mean it’s “dead”.

It's dead. If Email would only work between the same vendor, I would call it dead too. So dead means technologically dead. I would not recommend anyone using it. It doesn't allow cross vendor communication.

Love the downvotes from Apple fan(atics). It means that the truth stings.

They love their walled garden. When you point out > 80% of new devices sold are Android and can't use FaceTime, they don't care and just downvote without comment.

HN in general frowns upon flamewar topics. Making comments like “FaceTime is dead” with no data to back it up, and “it’s only iPhone fanatics downvoting me” doesn’t contribute to a meaningful discussion. That’s why it’s being downvoted.

Although I haven't said your quotes directly, it's still the truth. Making the same comment about Skype wouldn't have resulted in downvotes. This is probably because although Android devices are more common in general terms, here it is more likely to be 50/50. Hence the downvotes from Apple fan(atics).

Hangouts has been noticeably dropping off in my life. I realized I was talking to fewer and fewer people on it once one person responded that she missed my Hangouts messages because she didn't even have the app installed anymore.

On the flip side, I'm seeing a lot of non-technical people start to use Signal.

I wonder how much of the Hangouts drop-off is a result the increased focus on smartphones over desktop/laptop for a lot of users.

In the mid-late 2000s it was super common for me to chat with everyone this way. It was great on my phones back when SMS were often still limited and expensive and I could continue in the Gmail tab that was perpetually open on my PC when at home or at work.

Practically everyone I knew had a Gmail address so we could keep a running set of conversations going even at work or other places where we might not have been able to install something like AIM in earlier years.

With the shift to mobile-only (or at least mobile-mostly) for a lot of people, it wasn't a given that you would have GChat or, later, Hangouts. iPhone people might not bother to install it. Android people might gravitate toward Facebook since everyone was on it already.

Google's tendency to make good services but fail to pitch them or stick to a focused strategy can't help either. Even though I tend to like their products, I can't honestly claim to appreciate the way they seemed to be finally integrating Voice, SMS, and IP-based chat into Hangouts...before then splitting them all off into multiple similar-but-different products.

Now I still chat with plenty of people on Hangouts and have multiple years-spanning group chats still active. But I can't say I'm enthusiastic about the service or optimistic about its future. It could've been the cross-platform iMessage/Facetime competitor I wanted but now it feels like another wasted opportunity.

My kids (aged 9) use it pretty much daily to keep in touch with family and to set up their own playdates in the neighborhood. Hardly dead - Apple has enough market share to make it compelling in plenty of cases, and there alternatives for talking to folks on other devices.

You just confirmed what I was saying the parent.

Not really. Dead by implication means either the service is going nowhere fast or no-one is using it, neither of which are remotely true.

>going nowhere

certainly true. Or are there other non-Apple devices capable of using it?

Apple owns 1/3 of the market. And insofar as it’s skewed upmarket, rather than a randomly distributed one out of three people, it easily owns entire social circles.

On what planet is 1/3 dead?

on this one. 90% of desktop PCs are running Windows.

Apple doesn't have anywhere near 1/3 of the worldwide market. It's closer to 11%.

Fair, I was looking at US market, where they hold 35%.

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