Apple reportedly expanding iMessage to compete with Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Apple reportedly expanding iMessage to compete with Facebook

cnbc.com

36 pointsprostoalex46 comments

> "The #1 most difficult [reason] to leave the Apple universe app is iMessage ... iMessage amounts to serious lock-in,” was how one unnamed former Apple employee put it in an email in 2016, prompting Schiller to respond that, “moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us, this email illustrates why.”

> “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” was Federighi’s concern according to the Epic filing. Although workarounds to using iMessage on Android have emerged over the years, none have been particularly convenient or reliable.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-an...

Apple may have dropped the ball with that move. Apple skipped the embrace step of embrace expand extinguish. If they had embraced all phone users by porting imessage to all phones and extended by providing an objectively better experience, for all users and use cases, they would have captured the market like 1980s Bell did. Instead I suspect that Apple is trying hard to avoid antitrust action. so apple stifles innovation and keep prices high preventing a great deal of adoption and, importantly, allowing significant competition outside their targeted, profitable, user base. Why disrupt and capture the entire market when they can slowly iterate and make fortunes while avoiding a lot of scrutiny?

I'd love to see iMessage for Android or even desktop iMessage for Windows and Linux. I would use iMessage more. I think it would grow Apple's network, not threaten it.

It would be great, but I wonder how realistic it is to expect. iMessage seems to be pretty strongly tied to the apple account identity, their internal credentials, their push servers, etc. https://www.nowsecure.com/blog/2021/01/27/reverse-engineerin...

They'd have to either rewrite quite a bit to be more ecosystem-independent, or somehow port all the necessary layers to work on other systems. There's a good reason nobody reverse engineered and reimplemented iMessage so far, even though it's "just a messaging app".

AFAIK those are all libraries that can be compiled in. It would be far less work than porting iTunes and they did that until iTunes died.

Not expanding iMessage and Facetime to other OSes when they had the chance was the single most foolish strategic decision Apple ever took. It's what allowed Whatsapp and WeChat and Line and Snapchat and Slack and Teams and Zoom even Instagram to a certain extent to happen. Not surprising given Jobs's famously monopolistic tendencies that he's passed on to the current leadership he's groomed but it did do the shareholders a major dis-service

I think it’s the best decision they made and has taken courage to stick to it.

There’s actually been a network effect especially with groups of people with being a “blue bubble” vs “green bubble”.

Doesn’t look like this has cost them financially at all.

I even feel like whenever I have to SMS someone, it feels like going backwards. It’s not encrypted, there’s no delivery receipt, no richness, etc.

I’m just amazed that Google has utterly failed to build a viable alternative on Android in 10 years (which is why all the other services have thrived there), and boy have they tried.

But the only real question is, when presenter with taking the "step backwards" of talking to someone who doesn't have an iPhone via SMS, how often does the other person plunk down a giant pile of cash for a new phone--and in the process leave the close ecosystem of apps and services they have already invested in--vs. everyone download WhatsApp, which not only bridges across mobile platforms but frankly has a better desktop experience than iMessage (which also wasn't a fully native app, but handled its web rendering worse) in addition to letting you talk to anyone, anywhere, even in markets where iPhones are rare? The issue here is that no matter how many features iMessage adds, it can't replace my usage of Facebook's messaging products, which means Facebook is always going to be in my life... if Apple had instead built the cross-platform version of these products (which Steve Jobs literally promised everyone would be the case for Facetime), Facebook wouldn't have anywhere near the power it currently does.

Quite often, actually. Well, in the US at least. "Green bubble" ickyness is a real thing among the US youth.

School children get bullied until they ask their parents for an iPhone for that blue bubble. Dates will ghost you if you text them with a green bubble. Friend groups will just refuse to invite you solely because you have the dreaded green bubble.

There's serious social pressure in the US to switch to iOS just for imessage.

I'd like to see real numbers on the frequency of this kind of behavior. I don't doubt that it happens, but it's very implausible that it's widespread behavior.

There's no way to have accurate, completely relevant numbers - not even Apple can track that. But, with my anecdotal experience graduating from HS in the US having just caught the iPhone craze, here are some numbers that support that.

It's well known that Apple has about a 50% marketshare overall in the US. But what about among the youth? If my hypothesis is correct, then the green bubble bullying should mean that more teenagers own iPhones than the general population.

And indeed they do! Youth ownershop of iPhones in the US is a whopping 86%[0] - with 89% reporting that they are planning on buying a iPhone as their next phone.

This also gives iMessage the marketshare in this specific niche to be the dominant messaging app.

[0]https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/10/06/us-teen-iphone-ow...

> It's well known that Apple has about a 50% marketshare overall in the US. But what about among the youth? If my hypothesis is correct, then the green bubble bullying should mean that more teenagers own iPhones than the general population.

> And indeed they do!

Your reasoning is flawless...

That is interesting, and in my mind, insane. Here in Europe it seem to be about 50% as well, but we use either Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp, exactly because what is the point of using iMessage if you only have at most half your friends on it?

Because way more than 50% of your friends have it in the US; if you're a teenager, 80%+ of your friends have an iPhone. It's the default messaging app, and it works well, and it's become somewhat of a status symbol.

It isn't. The only major countries in the world iPhone approaches 50% are US, UK, JP and the Gulf oil states.

This was kind of a thing back when there was some what of a differentiation between the platforms when it came to features many many years ago and the concept of a premium Android was not really a thing, but in my friend groups that span between the ages of early twenties to late thirties, everyone has atleast a few messaging apps and really the only people that insist on group chats over imessage are my family group chats with people over the age of fifty.

As a lifelong Android user it's never been an actual impediment to communication, especially with people I actually consider friends, but also with just random meets from apps like Tinder or meetup where you usually start with a phone number but then move to some other platform the first time you want to share any kind of multimedia.

iMessage offers nothing that LINE, messenger, WhatsApp, snapchat etc don't already have besides being preinstalled if you own an iphone as far as I can tell.

I. Don't know any person who actually thinks this way. If friends won't invite you or dates will ghost you based on messaging app you've dodged a bullet with not associating with those people.

If Apple makes important strategic decisions on observations like that they are on a path to failure in international markets due to lack of cultural understanding.

It has cost them hugely.

Outside of the US and a few other countries iMessage is basically non-existent.

How does it cost them? Do you mean in that a free service isn't being used by non-Apple product owners/users? Or that it's costing them sales of their Apple products?

It's costing in usefulness. iMessage loses value if no one uses it, and outside of the US pretty much no one uses it, so it's useless.

There are an estimated 900 million iPhone users. If about 1/9th of the world is using those phones. Twitter has fewer users and remains pretty relevant.

Being installed by default doesn't make them a user

Just because the app is installed doesn't mean people actually use it as their main chat app.

All my EU contacts that have an iPhone use iMessage. Companies(100k+ employees) in the EU, that have an iPhone as a company phone, use iMessage.

Well that is certainly new to me. When I lived in the EU I knew precisely no one for which iMessage was the main mode of communication.

Usefulness to whom? The hundreds of millions of iOS users worldwide seem perfectly happy with it. I count myself in it.

Far from all the iOS users actually use iMessage as their main chat app.

Is apple affordable in those counties?

Easy to forget just how cheap and crappy phones can get.

Those countries would include the UK for example, i.e. many that aren't poor.

My anecdata is that Apple products are quite in the hands of people I know, to the point that I would only guess they own an iPhone if they are on double or triple (or more) the disposable income to actually afford one - i.e. even then their kids might still have an Android.

Jobs actually stood up at WWDC when he launched FaceTime and said “we’re going to the standards boards tomorrow and making this a fully open protocol”, then when they got hit with a patent suit, rearchitected it to be less peer-to-peer and didn’t open it up. Then, when iMessage came along, they probably figured what’s the point.

I wish they were that innocent.

> iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22375128/apple-imessage-an...

yeah, I really don't see a majority of apple users ever leaving the apple ecosystem because imessage is supported on Android and vice versa. What I do see is that Android users that aren't part of the apple ecosystem at all using it and now Apple has their foot in the door with these users.

This is also not new grounds for Apple; this is the exact plot they did for iTunes to dominate digital music sales.

They make a lot of money off their hardware though, and iMessage is a key part of retaining users each upgrade cycle on their own hardware. It certainly has been an issue for me.

On the other hand, I wish everyone would just use some other network as the standard, instead of something owned by Facebook or Apple or other giant Silicon Valley company. After Facebook started censoring private messenger communications between people, I just can’t trust them and am unwilling to give them a chance.

The problem for me is that at the moment everyone I talk to is on Facebook messenger, many of them I don't even have their mobile numbers to message them through iMessage. Having added them on Facebook many years ago, rather than meeting them and asking for their mobile number. Many of my friends don't even use the Facebook app just the messenger function because it seems as though everyone is on it.

iMessage has great features, but I just can't stand using multiple messaging applications if I don't need to and I'm not going to switch to iMessage by asking all my friends for their mobile numbers. It means I don't be part of the groups that have been created for years among peers and friends.

I don't really see how iMessage can compete.

The idea that I would call someone a friend and not have their mobile number, or if I didn't would feel awkward about asking for their number, is alien to me.

iMessage works, and I believe in their E2E encryption. Using it is the reason I opted into the iOS ecosystem.

The reason for me is that when I grew up SMS messages weren't as an early teen and instant messaging platforms such as Facebook allowed me and my friends to chat using minimal mobile data, which was much much cheaper than SMS messages. As a consequence, the majority of my friends, family and circle were on Facebook and it just so happened that I could also message them for what was essentially free.

Furthermore, if I was at school and I met someone I would just add them on Facebook. Which was much easier and seamless then asking everyone for their mobile number.

I never said that iMessage doesn't work, just that you can only take full advantage of its features with other Apple users. And my continued use of Facebook messenger has been because of how myself and my friends grew up using Facebook. As a result all of my friends can currently talk and collaborate on Facebook messenger where the experience is the same regardless of the device you have.

I prefer to use my computer to message people, and chat apps like Messenger work effortlessly on both PC and mobile devices. Most of my friends and I chat on Messenger or Discord (formerly Hangouts but Google is determined to kill it for some reason (and more formerly AIM/MSN/Yahoo)).

My girlfriend and I probably dated a couple months (and knew each other for about a year prior) before exchanging phone numbers.

They should have done this a long time ago. Sharing photos in a non-attachment format with close friends is a feature I wish iMessage had. I hope they borrow a little from Google+ circles. Android support will also be very welcome. Apple isn’t the greatest at usable software interfaces, but I quite enjoy the thought they put into the interactions.

> They should have done this a long time ago. Sharing photos in a non-attachment format with close friends is a feature I wish iMessage had

Well, they built that into photos ages ago (shared photostreams - they’re awesome for weddings and parties), and if your phone can run iMessage, it’s also already running photos…

I see a lot of people taking about the network effects of imessage and how there is the "blue vs. green" bubble stigma. I think this may be a pretty American perspective. From my limited experience in Europe (admittedly in a more international region) everyone just uses WhatsApp. I also know in India everyone uses WhatsApp to text. Maybe the imessage tie in is useful in the US (which is admittedly probably Apple's primary market) but I'm not sure how much it carries over to other countries.

I hate iMessage because it subverts SMS. This is mainly a problem with my USA friends & family, especially my parents. If I unintentionally tie my phone number to iMessagee, my parents can no longer figure out how to contact me reliably. Sending an SMS on an Android and receiving a reply on my Mac is a shit user experience.

You can disable being able to be iMessaged via your phone number.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201349

Snapchat is literally Apple iMovie effects in an app. So, Apple definitely missed that idea.

Unless they make it work on Android it won't matter. A messaging system that doesn't cover your entire friend group is, in effect, pointless.

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