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Comment by srwx | Hacker News Reader

I'll believe they are honest about caring about users privacy when they release imessage for other platforms.

Why is that your threshold for believing that Apple cares about user privacy? The ecosystem they've built so far has had significant time and effort invested into it to make it privacy friendly.

Because it highlights their real motives. Why not give everyone the ability to securely communicate? profits > privacy.

There are cross-platform messaging apps with end-to-end encryption. It’s not Apple’s job to save everyone: if you want to be saved, buy an iPhone.

If you think buying an iphone saves you then you've already lost.

Funny, I think nearly every article coming out about the location tracking, reading your contacts, reading your messages, and even malware on mobile has come out saying roughly "it's on android, but a much lesser version is on iOS" or even better "only on android."

So... what exactly did we lose with buying an iPhone in the context of this conversation? The ability to change the launcher?

Maybe you're ok with apple's limitations, I'm not. That's ok because I'm not you and I'm not asking/forcing you to change anything. So what exactly is your point? Choice is a wonderful thing.

> Why not give everyone the ability to securely communicate?

Because their message isn’t “we offer privacy to everyone in the world” but “we offer privacy to our customers”.

But they don't because when their own customers communicate with others customers the conversation is no longer private and if they aren't sufficiently technically knowledgeable then their own customers might not even know it's not secure.

It would be if they were on iPhones :) Apple's not a non-profit. There's money to be made selling privacy to those who care, and Tim's on the job.

http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide

Funny thing is Apple's competitors don't make money. Apple has ~50% of all smartphone revenue and 87% of the world's total smartphone profit share - iPhone X alone was 35% of global profit share with, to your point, only 22% of the market. Less, even, my data shows 19% of shipments most recently. Samsung is next in line off the back of approximately equal shipment volumes. Everyone else effectively breaks even or loses money. [1]

I'd say Apple's got this one figured out.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2018/03/02/apple-con...

Money doesn't matter, you don't get it. When only 1 in 5 phones is an iphone then keeping imessage.. you know what, I'm not wasting the effort.

I do get it, my argument was that money is the only thing that matters. Their goal isn't to secure everyone's communication, it's to maximize profits. They're doing that by saying if you both care about privacy, we have a one-stop-shop that'll get you taken care of, but it's gonna cost ya - and your friends. It creates an implicit pressure for others to get on the bandwagon driving up sales.

Who owes you a private and secure communication platform for free?

Not saying I agree with this line of thinking but I personally think cross platform iMessage would benefit iMessage users privacy significantly. You can't control what OS your friends use.

I think the real reason why might be something along the lines of anti SPAM or botting; iMessage seems to require an authentic, unleaked serial number to connect, as I found out a while ago when connecting my Hackintosh. (I succeeded but I have a feeling many real Mac serial numbers get banned from iCloud by Hackintosh users sniping them out of pictures in eBay listings and whatnot.

Given how leaky Android security is, I wouldn’t assume that just because it arrived encrypted that the message was secure after that point.

I think this jab is unwarranted. Android with security updates is not significantly less secure. Talking historically, Android started with more security measures than iOS, with app sandboxing from the get go. Nowadays modern devices contain dm-verity for verified boot, layered security at various levels including SELinux, etc.

Not suggesting there hasn't been more security issues with Android overall, but there's also more devices and more available source code with Android, and iOS is far from having a clean track record for exploits either. If it did, you wouldn't be so limited in which versions of iOS you could restore in iTunes...

Looks to me like where Apple is heading is offering some kind of "Apple Plus" subscription that bundles all their services, including iMessage. I predict that over time this will evolve to encompass more platforms. So iMessage will be available for Android but not for free.

That's fine with me, I'm not suggesting privacy should be free but they can't pay me enough to use their OS or hardware. I would however entertain the idea of using their services if they are available on my hardware choice.

You’re likely to get your wish. I think Apple has realized that they need to offer their services on non Apple platforms if they want to continue to grow. We’re seeing some early signs of this already.

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