I imagine with the Apple situation they are working on adding support currently however, even if it’s reduced. They need an iOS plan B.
I hope they don't. Apple needs to feel the pain their evil and immoral behaviour is inflicting on the world.
In a perfect world, the government would force them to behave ethically. Absent that, Hey's stance here is the next best thing.
If folks like Basecamp don't start standing up to Apple, then nothing stops Apple from just outright killing the majority of mobile software development. And while it's not directly their fault, at some point iPhone users need to recognize that their purchase of an iPhone is directly funding the destruction of the innovative / creative software they claim to want to have.
If you like Hey, maybe stop buying a phone that's trying to murder Hey. If you run a company like Hey, maybe stop giving in to the mafia's extortion demands.
For Hey alone, agreed. I don't think they have enough clout.
But Hey is a cool/popular new thing. If the next 20 coolest newest things also skip Apple as well (because Apple continues this grossly unethical behaviour) then Apple iPhones might lose their largely-unearned reputation as the place where the coolest/most-polished apps live.
It doesn't necessarily have to be a huge multinational corporate stance to make this painful. It just has to be enough of the trendiest new things people want.
In a perfect world there is a good enough iPhone competitor that would force Apple to behave better because otherwise companies wouldn't build apps on their platform.
That's true, but I would argue, perhaps somewhat conservatively, that email is an area where we don't want or need much innovation. Email works fine and has for decades. In many cases, "innovation" (except at the protocol level) has made things worse.
The fact they don't support the widely supported IMAP means no easy way to move away.
This is vendor lock-in to their walled-garden. This approach should be killed, dead, before it ever makes it to the end user.
As for IMAP with more JSON there would also be Fastmails https://jmap.io/
Unless I'm missing something about what they're doing, this is a basic SIEVE script that filters anything not explicitly whitelisted into a folder.
You could probably build that with a bunch of hacks but you'll not get a polished consumer friendly feature out of that. They are not in competition with people running mutt and a bunch of custom scripts, it's more of an alternative for people using Gmail with Gmail apps currently and don't even know what's IMAP.
That's exactly how you'd do it, and the functionality definitely exists - all handled on the server side. See: learning spam from ham by dragging to/from the spam folder.
If I were building it for my parents, I'd say "anything in Pending/Held/StrangerDanger that you flag will be whitelisted and will be in the Inbox from then on".
Flagging a message on iOS Mail is pretty straightforward - swipe+tap or long-press+tap+tap and easy enough conceptually as a "this is good" action, I think?
Backend picks up the flag change, adds the address to the inbox, strips the flag, and moves that message to the inbox.
Add "move it to junk to undo the whitelisting" for completion (also easy on iOS Mail).
Perhaps not as polished as writing a custom app to do it, no, but it seems fairly consumer friendly to me?
Again I'm not arguing that IMAP isn't creaky and clumsy but let's not pretend that lack of power is the reason they didn't use it.