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Comment by muststopmyths | Hacker News Reader

I remember back in the day when FaceTime was announced Apple made a big deal about it using standard protocols throughout the stack ( SIP and maybe WebRTC?) and dangled the hope that there could be 3rd party apps that connected with FaceTime.

We were so young and naive then.

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The presentation said something like they planned for it to be "open" or something. I believe that was the first the dev team had heard of it.

People have guess that patents prevented it from actually being an open standard. Coincidentally, some of those patents expired in the last year or two and the last should expire this year. But I kind of guess the window has passed for it becoming open.

> But I kind of guess the window has passed for it becoming open.

It’s moving there. They’re adding a web interface this year.

I found the clip from the 2010 keynote [1]. Steve Jobs said, "We’re going to take it all the way. We’re going to the standards bodies tomorrow and we’re going to make FaceTime an open industry standard." I didn't watch the whole video, so I might have missed some context, but this lines up with my memory.

I don't see a web client being a move in that direction.

[1] https://youtu.be/eujypqKT8o0?t=5809

IIRC, when Jobs said that sentence, it was the first time the team was told of any plan to make it a standard. There hadn't been any legal or technical review that it would be possible. (Not in 11 years now they couldn't have made it happen if they wanted to.)

That web interface is a customer acquisition and retention play.

It enables FaceTime users to stay in the ecosystem when their friends don't use the platform they do (vs going to Zoom, which is available for everyone). And it enables non-users to get a taste of FaceTime without before they buy an iPhone.

It's a brilliant move, but I wouldn't call it open. Maybe "open enough" :D

They have a lot of work to do if that is the case. The beta experience at present is downright poor, particularly on the non-Apple end of things.

>People have guess that patents prevented it from actually being an open standard.

Not guessed. Apple was actually sued and had to change how FaceTime works.

Facebook and Google also did that with XMPP.

There were some (lost?) patent disputes afterwards which could have an impact on openess.

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