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Comment by ceocoder | Hacker News Reader

I came across this article[1] and this thread quoted[0] in article some time ago. I don't think of iMessage as a walled garden, it is almost like a low fence you can see across with a sign that "you must be this cool to participate".

iMessage is literally the only reason I have not tried an android phone because I don't want to deal with the fallout of all of my chat threads going back to 2011(?) getting disrupted. I don’t think I can come up with a better example of vendor lock-in.

[0] https://twitter.com/BenBajarin/status/1162048581299163136

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90391587/why-we-dont-want-you-an...

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Vendor lock is real, but would that not be rendered moot of other players could offer a superior user experience? Especially when you consider that Facebook, Google and others have a far larger base of potential users than iMessage. As far as I understand, the only iMessage feature that competitors couldn't emulate due to first-party entitlements is the SMS fallback functionality, which while nice, is definitely a feature that people could live without.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, every other messaging app I've used just has't lived up to the UX provided by iMessage. Spam is a major issue on all non-iMessage messaging platforms I've used. No messaging app I've used on any platform has performance as fast and fluid as iMessage on iOS. Competing products are often full with ads and useless features that clutter the user interface and degrade performance. And these platforms often have annoying restrictions on media quality. Facebook Messenger, for instance, has garbage quality images and video compression, while iMessage appears to apply no further compression on media files. Using any other messaging app, either on iOS or Android, has consistently been way more of a headache than its worth for me.

Google and Facebook may have a larger user base but it is not the in the same realm, e.g. I use iMessage to talk to my family, my close friends, parents from my daughter's preschool, co-workers, people I've only interacted with professionally - vendors etc - all it takes to connect is a phone number which is universal, and like you say it falls back to SMS. Compare that to Facebook where you have to add someone as a friend - which I don't do often because it just feels odd, or Google where messaging ecosystem is a bit fragmented with Allo, Duo, Hangout, Hangout Chat etc. Signal and WhatsApp are actually viable options but compared to iMessage feel heavy and not native, however I do use them both.

And like you mentioned - spam - I have yet to receive an iMessage spam message. That is pretty amazing.

How about all the iMessage created "Liked", "Loved", "Emoji" messages? Each and every one of those creates a message alert on non-iPhones. It is by far the most spammy type of message one receives on an Android device (in the USA at least).

oh yeah, those are just beyond irritating. Fortunately, I have very few friends who actually use "Liked", "Loved", "Haha" reactions.

Anecdotally, any iPhone users don't know they're doing that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Curious, what were your issues with Whatsapp?

What's app has a pretty massive spam and fake news problem. It's an unfortunate side effect of WhatsApp's ability to forward message to your contacts. Users will forward fake news to their contacts, those contacts will then forward to their contacts and so on. It's essentially a modern reincarnation of chain emails of the 90s and early 2000s.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/03/02/whatsap...

I've had discussions with my friends and family on WhatsApp about them forwarding fake news, but they either don't understand (a lot aren't particularly computer literate) or refuse to listen. WhatsApp has tried to fix the problem by restricting the ability to forward messages, but this behaviour is so ingrained in the "culture" of the WhatsApp user base that software fixes are unlikely to resolve the problem. Anecdotally, I know a lot of WhatsApp's younger users refuse to engage with users on the app because of this behaviour. I've personally disabled WhatsApp notifications to control the amount of fake news spam I receive.'

Edit: This behaviour is highly regionalized, so I wouldn't necessarily expect all WhatsApp users to have experienced it

Has nothing to do with the software. I use Whatsapp as my main IM and never had this issue. Pretty sure the same would happen on iMessage too if it targetted the same demographic.

So your parent comment wasn't really a fair comparison because you left out the biggest IM service which does actually compete really well with iMessage without the vendor lock-in.

In my experience, it has. I use both iMessages and Whatsapp in India. I have never dealt with fake news and all the low signal forwarded memes and garbage on iMessages.

Whatsapp, on the other hand, is filled with it. The only solace in whatsapp is that I can disable auto media downloading to escape it to some extent.

This has more to do with people who use whatsapp vs people who use iMessage. If all the people who use whastapp migrated to iMessage, the same problem will happen there.

It might, but part of why it happens is that the app makes it easy for that to happen and users are trained.

Think how "redditors" talk vs how we do here in HN. We have clear rules about what this forum is about. Commenting "lol" -> "loll" -> "lolll" is not accepted. You'll be warned, marked "dead", or outright banned.

Moderation in a messaging app only happens at scale via UX.

Curious as to what you think is the difference in UX of iMessage that doesn't encourage people to spread random messages to others?

AFAICT iMessage allows people to freely forward messages to multiple contacts at no cost just like Whatsapp - https://9to5mac.com/2018/08/02/iphone-how-to-forward-imessag...

One long press on WhatsApp to forward (on the same menu as copy, reply, and delete) as compared to a long pressed followed by “more...” to find forward on iPhone (and it was only “recently” added).

Indeed. Even little frictions like these can go a long way to curb such spamming behavior. As evidenced on HN itself.

The propaganda spread on Whatsapp is happening because of external issues. There are groups of people paid or motivated to spread it on that platform. Such a minor thing wouldn't make any difference in reduction of propaganda spread to people dedicated enough to spread it.

> Such a minor thing wouldn't make any difference in reduction of propaganda spread to people dedicated enough to spread it.

You may have missed the part where I said it wasn’t even available at all until a recent-ish update.

Don’t forget that propaganda is created by dedicated people but it’s viral spread is via innocent, gullible victims. That’s where the inertia in forwarding comes in to play.

Nobody seems to mention Signal, which does offer sms fallback, at least on Android (don't really know on iOS).

It can't do that on iOS only software written by Apple gets to do things like that.

> Unfortunately, for whatever reason, every other messaging app I've used just has't lived up to the UX provided by iMessage.

It’s as if there was at least some justification behind the “overpriced” nature of iPhones, despite what many Android enthusiasts want us to believe.

Same for me, but with my primary number on Google voice. Google dropped the ball here with an option to compete with iMessage, whether with Voice or Hangouts/Gchat

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