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Comment by _zllx | Hacker News Reader

iMessage is a true marketing innovation in America, where the only "alternatives" are Facebook and (barely usable) SMS. It restricts communication and makes life more difficult for everyone who doesn't have an iPhone, which in turn increases iPhone sales. Meanwhile, while holding basically infinite money, they pretend some patent troll is holding them back from making it cross-platform. Pure genius.

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I use WhatsApp and Signal to communicate with people on an iPhone in the US all the time. How have I ever been restricted?

I do know that MMS is garbage, and that the mobile networks used to price gouge people for using MMS, and on top of that it doesn’t work many times, or at least it didn’t use to.

That's why he pointed out that it is marketing.

Because people believe you need to have iMessage.

Source? I've never see an Apple advertisement that would lead me to believe I can't use WhatsApp or Signal or any other messaging application.

Anecdotal sources: Every group of peers that wouldn't have excluded me from the group chat if it didn't "turn green"

The green means that it's technically inferior than WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, etc. and/or you can end up with surprise international texting charges from your mobile network.

I don't have a problem with people discriminating against MMS, but everyone I know doesn't have a problem using any of the other decent alternatives that work on both Android and iOS.

I agree it's a good indicator, only given it isn't exclusive to a restricted platform (or expensive platform, therefore making it a status symbol). I think Signal does this right, 1. by supporting all major platforms, 2. by showing standard SMS as "dull grey" and allowing you to choose your own color for a contact (otherwise having a random color) when the conversation is Signal enhanced. On that note, I have hopes that Signal can become The One True Messenger after they iron out a few more quirks.

There’s a pretty common meme about people having green texts being “meh”. It’s weird.

Does this count as a “source” in this instance?

https://me.me/t/green-texts

Edit: found something more traditional https://www.vogue.com/article/breathless-couples-who-are-not...

pretty frustrating read though. Be warned.

Sounds like the green messages are doing people a favor by pointing out garbage people who discriminate against someone for not using iOS.

I'm just claiming that there is a valid use case for making it abundantly clear if a conversation is happening via MMS versus iMessage, so I didn't take it as a way for Apple to somehow "lock" people into iMessage...especially since plenty of other chat apps are a few taps away with no degradation in usability.

Before there was iMessage, there was BlackBerry Messenger. It had similar qualities of being a nicer user experience as compared to SMS.

Must be nice to reimplement an old idea and qualify as innovation. :)

Google tries again, again, and again, to create a decent messaging app, and fails every time. Whether it's bad marketing or management, it's clearly not the simplest thing in the world to achieve what apple did with iMessage (unless now you want to posit that the billionaires in Google also have no idea what they're doing ever) and the discussion is relevant especially when we are reviewing their management style.

Google Talk was fairly successful for its time. Why Google were unable to replicate that success again, I have no clue.

> and (barely usable) SMS

What's the issue with SMS in the US? At least in Australia, SMS is no hindrance to messaging between Android and iOS apart from the colour of the bubbles.

You never know if SMS actually arrived. Sure, it probably did. But sometimes, it didn’t. And you won’t know.

Is that a common thing? IME they do always arrive unless the recipient has a habit of leaving their phone turned off for weeks.

The two group conversations I have on my iPhone that I interact with most are MMS, and often (once a week or so) I will miss part of a conversation and have to piece together what the heck is going on. More often I have a problem where messages send/recieve out of order (even if I'm stationary or using Wi-Fi calling to send), or one message will send and once will bounce so the recipient will get a picture with no context or a caption with no context.

None of us are on the same messaging services (besides Discord I guess, but that doesn't have good notifications), so we can't switch. This is on AT&T, but Verizon and T-Mobile have the same problem.

I've had issues receiving SMS messages for no apparent reason, despite living in a major city and keeping my phone charged. I went down a rabbit hole with some support people once on it and we never found the root cause.

SMS messages work almost all of the time which makes it really irritating when they don't.

You’re right it is very rare that it doesn’t arrive. But I’ve lost friendships or at least severely disrupted them the few times sms didn’t work. It’s not just that it didn’t arrive. In one case it was days late (yes, days). In that case, the delay turned the original message from a casual one into an insult.

The colour of the bubbles is a brilliant marketing play. People put peer pressure [1] on each other to “upgrade” their bubbles from the ugly green to the cool blue by buying an iPhone.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/15/18624681/apple-imessage-a...

Sorry to burst your bubble, but it’s not just marketing: in the US, the green bubbles are sold by your carrier to marketing firms, while blue bubbles are opaque to your carrier.

Most likely the missing "chat" features that people have become used to (reactions, read notifications, "currently typing", threads).

I think the marketing works because it gives you just one option that everyone automatically uses. I just downloaded a 5th messaging app from the Play Store because everyone uses something different. It is exhausting. This is one case I hate having "choices" among 100s of mediocre apps.

> only "alternatives" are Facebook and (barely usable) SMS.

Why don't Americans use Telegram?

For me there are two basic reasons: 1) everyone I know is on iMessage, 2) iMessage does everything I require of a messaging app. Honest question and not trying to be hostile, why should I prefer telegram? What am I missing?

1) everyone I know is on iMessage,

So you're privileged in an entirely privileged bubble? If iPhone is only 52% of the USA and 20% of the world it seems almost statistically impossible that all of your friends or family can use iMessage.

End to end encryption. If you’re using iCloud with iMessage Apple has access to your messages.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

Apple doesn't have access to your iMessages unless you give them permission by consenting to have your keys backed up to iCloud. If you use iTunes backup (or don't back up your phone), the Messages will be encrypted and can only be unlocked if you have a device that still has the keys.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

"Messages in iCloud also uses end-to-end encryption. If you have iCloud Backup turned on, your backup includes a copy of the key protecting your Messages. This ensures you can recover your Messages if you lose access to iCloud Keychain and your trusted devices. When you turn off iCloud Backup, a new key is generated on your device to protect future messages and isn't stored by Apple."

“There’s always been one major problem with Apple’s privacy claim that ‘What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone‘: it isn’t true of iCloud backups.

Although Apple uses end-to-end encryption for both iMessage and FaceTime, it doesn’t do the same for iCloud backups. They are encrypted, but Apple holds the key, meaning that the company has access to a copy of almost everything on your phone – and that includes stored messages.”

https://9to5mac.com/2020/01/21/icloud-backups/

I don't know what "gimmicks" it may have which iMessage does not(although the in-chat polls are pretty handy), but IMO the big strength of Telegram is privacy. You can use it without revealing your e-mail address or phone number.

The situation of not knowing a single non-Apple user is unlikely outside the US anyhow.

Why do I need to download another messaging app? iMessage works fine and WhatsApp for people outside the US.

Why does it need to be cross platform? Why do y’all elevate it to a moral right? I really don’t get it

At the same time, it makes life easier and most importantly consistent for all those who have an iPhone. For mass market, openness of platforms don’t sell well. What general audiences want is a solid customer experience and based on sales, Apple’s hit the mark in terms of communicating and delivering on this value lever.

Can you expand on the patent troll pretext? Never heard of that.

Apparently a company called VirnetX is seeking damages from Apple over iMessage and FaceTime, which some people (in my previous discussion among others) point out as their excuse not to develop cross-platform iMessage as they do cross-platform Apple Music. I don't have any evidence of Apple themselves claiming this as the excuse.

https://9to5mac.com/2016/05/26/patent-troll-facetime-imessag...

Interesting, thank you!

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