The Genius of iMessage | Hacker News Reader

The Genius of iMessage

uxhero.com

31 pointsworldvoyageur28 comments

That isn't the genius of iMessage. The genius is that it's built in, activated by default and seamless with SMS. If my recipient has iMessage, it sends over iMessage. If my recipient does not it sends over SMS.

The carriers will love this

That's precisely what I've been thinking since I heard that. First FaceTime, now iMessage. Apple is sure not making friends with carriers with this...

Apple have never shown any interest in being friends with the carriers. Since day one of their foray into the mobile phone business, they've been barely tolerating their partner carriers - like a horrible roommate, you cannot kick out because you need their share of the rent. It's just now Apple feel strong and established enough to completely shun them.

Or to restate it: Apple is willing to piss off the carriers - this is a feature, not a bug.

The rumor is that the carriers didn't hear about iMessage until Jobs announced it at WWDC.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/06/06/imessage

Don't worry, I'm sure AT&T will filter all your iPhone traffic and count 1 iMessage as 1 SMS message regardless so there's no "confusion" for the end user trying to figure out why their SMS usage has gone down by 80%.

AT&T just introduced free mobile to mobile calling to anyone on any network a few months ago, with the catch being you must subscribe to an unlimited SMS plan to be eligible.

They are going to find ways to get people to pay for an SMS bucket whether they need it or not.

A few people have mentioned how difficult it will be to get people to upgrade to iOS 5 in order to use iMessage. Yes, a lot of people never sync and a few don't even connect to WiFi, but it's important to remember Apple is in this for the long haul. iPhones are going to be around for a while. When my iPhone 3 dies I'm going to go to the nearest Apple store and get a new iPhone with iOS 5 or higher. In other words, even if I don't sync I will eventually be upgrading. Apple would love it if everyone upgraded tomorrow, but they will settle for everyone upgrading eventually.

Actually, iMessage is a great example of Apple taking a succesful third-party concept and making it their own in the OS, like Dashboard (Konfabulator) before, they now do the same to WhatsApp, only this is iOS only and Whatsapp is crossplatform.

iMessage is more akin to BBM than to WhatsApp.

My Dad had never connected his iPhone to a computer, until he ran into a specific problem (the proximity sensor wasn’t working well) and Apple told him to update.

On the surface this sounds great… but my Dad has never attached his phone to a WiFi network either.

OTA backups and updates would need to work on 3G (so that the user doesn’t have to do anything special to get them) to help everyone.

WhatsApp (http://www.whatsapp.com/) lets you do something similar, and to any other smart phone.

I have enough trouble manually updating my iphone's OS and manually syncing it while keeping all my apps and media. The thought of them introducing more automation terrifies me.

I'm sorry but users aren't going to upgrade to iOS 5 for the same reasons they haven't upgraded in the past: they just dont care.

Unless a user is actually frustrated with something, they won't bother investigating how to fix it. Most of the time they probably won't even know there IS a fix unless someone tells them.

Users aren't going to want to use an iOS only messaging service, and they certainly won't want to use two different services depending on who they're messaging. This has already happened before with FaceTime; some people used it and found it interesting but there was no mass appeal because not everyone has an iOS device.

  > I'm sorry but users aren't going to upgrade to iOS 5 for
  > the same reasons they haven't upgraded in the past: they
  > just dont care.

What are you talking about? http://www.macpost.net/221/apple-ios-distribution-stats-95-o...

The article points to http://onefps.net/post/6496478249/50-percent-of-iphone-owner... which tells a somewhat different story.

One article sources "A little bird" and the other its own customer base. I wouldn't take neither as a definitive answer..

There is one more: http://www.marco.org/2011/03/24/ios-device-and-os-version-st...

The stat people want to know is "Percentage of devices that shipped with iOS 3 that haven't upgraded to iOS 4". Grouping all the phones together doesn't answer that, since the iPhone 4 with iOS 4 will clearly be a big chunk that proves nothing about upgrade percentage.

Here's the thing, Apple will throw out a new iPhone model that will have iOS 5 by default. That's huge! People flock to get the new iPhone every time they come out with one.

Another thing is that if you use a Mac and want to use iCloud you're going to have to upgrade that phone (and Desktop) OS. I think many people will be keen on doing so.

While I agree there will be tons of people upgrading via hardware, this article is specifically about making users update their old phones with the genius of iMessage. I have to disagree with that premise. iMessage will be big, but only through nerds who will update and new phones.

Doesn't iTunes offer to update your iPhone automatically (whenever the iPhone is connected and there is an update available)? I would guess plenty of people just click OK.

"whenever the iPhone is connected": many don't, at all, ever.

Sure some people don't ever connect it, but is it a large percentage? I imagine most people (1) have some digital music on their computers, (2) want to listen to it from their iPhones, (3) use iTunes to copy it over.

Of course someone might (a) not listen to music on their iPhone, or (b) buy music from iTunes directly from the iPhone, or (c) copy music to the iPhone using something other than iTunes; but I imagine none of these things are very common.

I have absolutely no data, I'm just guessing and would love to hear from anyone that does have data about this.

It does, but then it downloads some CD-sized thing, which you can cancel at any point.

I have clicked update once. After slowly fetching the update, the download was corrupt, and iTunes wanted to pull the entire thing down again. Slowly, of course. So I canceled, and haven't accepted any updates since, but iOS 5 might be worth trying again.

iOS5 will be worth trying again if only for the reason that it (finally) brings incremental updates. No more 900mb beasts, after the initial update.

Is it that they don't care, or that they don't even know to do it at all? It seems to me that having an iPhone popup occur occasionally when an OS update is ready with

    [Remind later] [Dismiss]

buttons would be a good way to get more users to do it. The first button takes the user to a page with instructions on how to connect, upgrade, sync etc. The Dismiss button would full dismiss it for that OS upgrade. They would see the popup again for the next version.

I guess it's moot with iOS5 coming though.

A good lesson for everyone: users are lazy and apathetic to your changes - sometimes you have to force the changes down their throats for their own good.

75% of my contacts who use a smartphone, already use WhatsApp. i dont see this taking off unless they provide some kind of bridge to existing services to ensure cross plattform capabilities.

The bridge is SMS. It's seamless with SMS. I would guess that mobile usage of SMS is still more common than mobile usage of IM. Instead of picking some IM app as a brdige Apple decided to pick SMS which seems like the right choice to me.

I don't think iMessage will convince many people to update. Most people probably won't even know that they are using iMessage. The only effect they will see is a shrinking phone bill.

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