Apple Never Made iMessage for Android to Lock in iOS Users | Hacker News Reader

Apple Never Made iMessage for Android to Lock in iOS Users

gizmodo.com

36 pointswpietri48 comments

It would be great for the world to get iMessage on Android, maybe it would serve to erode the stranglehold of WhatsApp in many countries.

From a business perspective it still might not make sense, but many iPhone users are now using WhatsApp and Facebook messenger over iMessage. Android users around the world rarely use These same apps over sms to an even greater extent. This means Apple is losing market share on their own platform. If this continues, the lock-in they fought for is gone. Will families still feel they’re unable to buy an Android phone for their kid when they talk to everyone on Facebook messenger?

I used to just use iMessage, but then my mother got a Samsung. We've all pretty much transitioned to WhatsApp as a result. It's more convenient to just use one app for all our chat even though most of our phones are iPhones.

and Facebook owns it.

Highly recommend Signal as a great upgrade.

I've frequently looked at switching to an iphone for the longer software support, but iMessage is a consistent deal breaker. As I understand it, you can't set a default SMS app. In my case, I can't use Signal as a secure platform that falls back to SMS for compatibility.

I approach this from the other side. I always want to be completely in control over how a message gets sent because the different mechanisms all have unique failure reliability modes. If I want to send an SMS I go to the SMS app. If I want to send through Signal I go to Signal. That way I'm never surprised by my phone doing something unexpected like trying to use a flaky data stream instead of piggybacking on tower traffic or vice versa.

Oh my god! I can't believe Apple would make the entirety rational decision to not make iMessage for Android because there's no good reason for them to do so.

There are plenty of good reasons. If your point is they're only going to listen to the reasons that involve them making more money, I'm sure you're right. But at some point that becomes anticompetitive behavior.

No, there aren't any good reasons. If you want iMessage, get an iPhone. Similarly, if you want to sideload apps, get an Android.

You're not entitled to everything you want because you want it.

Oh? If you're so confident, surely you can demonstrate that there are zero good reasons. I'll wait.

Here I enumerate the set of reasons that Apple would make and maintain an iMessage client for Android, G, such that for every reason r in G, r is a good reason:

G = {}

The cardinality of the set G is zero, QED.

I guess if you're not going to take your point seriously, there's no particular need for me to. But maybe save your limp comedy for Reddit next time.

You're the one asking me to prove a negative. Your should be able to cripple my argument trivially with a counter example, which you've avoided doing, twice now.

You're the one claiming a negative is 100% true, without giving any indication you've thought through the topic. In my experience, there's no point in trying to do the work for lazy thinkers.

I'll tell you what. You list some good reasons businesses typically do things and say why they aren't valid for this. If you really can't come up with any after some demonstrated work, I'm glad to help you out.

I mean, isn't the whole point of business to make money? I can't watch Netflix exclusives on Hulu because Netflix wants to make money and having unique offerings is one way to do that.

No. That is not in fact the point of business. It's a necessary condition that businesses cover their expenses and maybe make a little profit. But making money is no more the point of business than eating food is the point of life.

"It's a necessary condition that businesses cover their expenses and maybe make a little profit." aka make money.

I think your analogy is right on. If I don't eat then I don't live. If I don't make money, my business dies. It's not easy to keep a business alive, hence why most of the businesses from 60+ years ago are dead.

I need a sustainable way to keep "food" coming in the door so I make exclusive things and provide value to people who use my product.

I don't see why every single business should be a charity.

Nobody is saying every business should be a charity. I am saying, though, there's more to life than eating food. People who treat that as the "whole point" are missing out.

Huh? iMessage transparently integrates and falls back to SMS from any phone, Android or not, even dump phones (or iPhones without iCloud login for that matter).

Yeah, completely don’t understand this. Do they mean FaceTime?

No, they mean iMessage - it's true iMessage falls back to SMS, but a lot of fidelity is lost. Reactions don't work, there's no stickers, images are lower resolutions, videos are potato quality, read receipts don't work. It's not complete incompatibility, but it's a much worse experience compared to what fully native users get.

Other than images and videos degrading, I'm always surprised by the number of people who care so much about iMessage.

Is it even the extra features or do people primarily care about blue/green bubbles?

For me it's send reliability, delivery/read receipts, and file size limits (the aforementioned video/image/GIF quality).

Those are all surmountable things with chat apps and other third party software, but the beauty of iMessage is that I can make all that work with all my non-technical family members without having to explain anything. I can't get my parents to install something like Discord or Signal.

iMessage also recently introduced threading, and although it's not as good as something like Slack it's nice to have.

Some other nice features include sharing of attachments that MMS doesn't support like PDF files and contact cards.

The next big advantage is that seeing a blue bubble when you type in a phone number or receive a message is a relatively reliable indicator that you're about to talk to a human on a real cell phone and not a bot or spammer.

Google sat around not prioritizing messaging and allowed the market to not decide on any sort of standard, except in countries that standardized on WhatsApp – basically, it's all a mess of different proprietary chat apps. Google themselves couldn't even decide on which proprietary chat app to stick with for their own services. They absolutely could have been WhatsApp (or bought them) but dropped a huge ball on that.

Then you've got telecoms who are anti-innovators. Google struggled to drag them into the 21st century with RCS, and as a result Google has to run their own RCS service to make up for so many carriers not yet supporting RCS.

Google has decidedly failed to make carriers do what they want where Apple has succeeded. The launch of the original iPhone was so disruptive in the sense that Apple found a carrier willing to allow them to ditch carrier-controlled app stores, implement visual voicemail, and offer an unlimited plan that was offered at a price point palatable enough for consumers.

I once tried to activate my Nexus 5X with Verizon, and they refused to do so because it wasn't a allowlisted device. Even though the phone had CDMA radios and was compatible on a technical level, Google apparently didn't bother to work with the largest carrier in America to get it to work (at least, at the time).

The fact that iMessage is built in to Apple's messaging app isn't really any different than someone deciding to use WhatsApp or Discord for chatting. SMS/MMS just happens to live in the same app. As antiquated and horrible as it is, SMS and MMS are the current universal standard, iMessage is not, and you can't expect Apple to be forced to make it so.

That means that iMessage itself is and was never relevant to the discussion of interoperability. The interoperable standard is SMS/MMS and you still can't count on cellular telecoms to support anything better than that, including RCS.

Now we're left with a duopoly where each party involved has zero incentive to cooperate. Perhaps this is the point where government intervention is supposed to kick in. Or maybe Google and Apple can scratch each other's backs to get Apple to climb aboard the RCS train.

Well for one it makes group chats with n-iPhones and 1 single Android annoying for all the iPhone users, on purpose.

There are definitely people using android who just get left out of the group message for this exact reason.

Not Receiving Text Messages On Android From iPhone Users[1]: "The problem of not being able to receive Text Messages from certain users is usually noticed after switching from iPhone to Android Phone. ... As far as the senders are concerned, they see a confirmation on their iPhone that the message has been successfully sent to you."

Ugh, Green Bubbles! Apple’s iMessage Makes Switching to Android Hard[2]: "I have a good idea of where those missing messages are. They’re in a dark, sad place I call iMessage Purgatory. It is where some messages go to rot when iPhone users do the unthinkable: switch to an Android phone."

[1] https://www.techbout.com/not-receiving-text-messages-android...

[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/ugh-gr...

This is Apple's most important support article. Customers who properly disconnect iMessage have no problem with this issue:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201351

Deregistration instructions are here:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203042

> properly disconnect iMessage

This should just be the default when you remove your SIM from the iOS device.

The third largest company in the world should be able to figure out an automatic solution for this.

The whole point of apple is ease of use, your average muppet user isn't going to figure that out.

Being helpless is not an excuse.

Remember BBM?

That was what BlackBerry tried as a last ditch effort. They believed that people would stay in their ecosystem so they could keep BBM.

What they failed to understand that the real professional users were all on Bloomberg Chat, the one platform where the people who matters are. And teenagers didn't care for BBM: As soon as one of their friends got an iPhone, they had to ditch it for Messenger or WhatsApp anyways.

Not sure this theory holds water.

Corporate use was the bread and butter of blackberries because the BES server provided end to end encryption.

This was separate to consumer blackberries where the encryption keys were manged by blackberry themselves (BIS).

blackberries were replaced replaced by iphone and android devices once similar encryption was available, and was pushed even harder once BYOD was viable with its associated cost savings.

Even before BYOD, I remember hedge funds giving out iPhones for their employees. Was a signaling move since everyone wanted one.

IANAL, but for those asking why Apple should be expected to port iMessage to Android, I believe that is possibly missing the point.

Epic is probably using iMessage lock-in as a supporting argument for anti-competitive behaviour from Apple. It doesn't necessarily matter beyond Apple's self admission that they exhibit this behaviour in more than one way.

They can't have a lot of confidence in their product being superior when they have to resort to these kind of tricks. I mean I knew about the lock-in but this actively makes me want to avoid Apple products.

Let's turn this around.

What is the reason for apple to make an android port?

Well the fact that they could is obvious.

But the fact that people at apple are stating it publicly is somewhat peculiar.

This just makes me mad. Over the years extended family members have spent a lot on replacement iPhones for kids when what they really wanted to get for them was cheap Android phones.

The idea that iMessage was the lock-in factor here is absurd. No one purchased an iPhone specifically to get access to iMessage.

That seems unlikely. I've considered switching to iOS just because a bunch of family are heavy iMessage/FaceTime users.

Low-effort options have all sorts of network effects.

This seems so odd to me, the UK as a country switched to WhatsApp due to there always being a decent % of Android users amongst all groups of friends

Why would it lock them in? There are a ton of other free messaging apps

People will use what their friends and family already have. So if everyone uses iMessage but you.. that's lock-in explained.

I wouldn't buy an iPhone only to have iMessage because my family uses iMessage...

You would if you lived far away and it was the only way they communicate.

Or if you just weren't on this site, and that's what everyone around you does.

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