Google is wrong. Apple’s iMessage is a failure
macworld.com
macworld.com
This is wrong. Google had a very good messaging system, Google Talk. It worked really well, was based on open standards, supported federation, video/audio calls and was making its way into smartphones. For example, the Nokia 770-N9 series supported Google Talk as early as Q2 2006. Calls based on an open standard in a smartphone, already in 2006...
However, internal politics at Google led to the discontinuation of Google Talk in favor of a long stream of confusing and half-finished attempts: Google Chat, Hangouts, Duo, Spaces, Allo and Meet. I've lost track of how many different services they have come up with. Apparently there's more of them I didn't even know about [1]. It's comical and sad, since the first one was great and had tons of users thanks to being embedded into Gmail.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo...
Apple's senior staff definitely use their products.
Google really does use all of its own products internally. In fact, I've had a FAR better experience inside Google than outside of it. When 100% of your work happens on chat/gmail/docs/other internal tools, it's pretty seamless. We rarely dogfood external use cases though, where users don't fully drink the Kool-Aid.
Yes. I think if Google wants to keep its dominant position, they need to rethink how they do management.
What I said in the parent post about Google Talk could also apply to other product lines. They often release good things, like Nexus tablets or the Pixel C, only to kill them shortly afterwards. As a consumer, I don't take most of their offerings seriously because they are so short-lived and confusing. Why shall I put my money on something that might be killed or phased out soon?
From what I've heard from some insiders, other Alphabet branches seem to have equivalent management issues. It's sad because they have a significant amount of resources and they could be delivering tons of value to the society.
With the internet they had a success with IE but saw companies developing their services with new non Visual*/.Net languages and running them on Linux and MySQL.
With mobile they lost on all the line.
And the latest: TensorFlow -> TensorFlow 2 -> JAX{Haiku, Flax}. This one is especially egregious because it's foundational for Google's own technology.
The worst of both worlds.
Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone can trust them.
It really only seems like a matter of time until they have stabbed every single one of their customers in the back.
...and at least consumers in that are not the customers, but the product...
It remains to be seen whether a non-profit entity can be trusted with such a position.
Over time, more and more functionality became linked to Google Play Services, which was not open source. The logical result of this was that OEMs simply went with the Google-approved proprietary flavour of Android.
but how come it's not reviving now that the biggest gorilla is gone?
There's some inherent commercial unfeasibility to RSS i think, which google uncovered by having a free client.
I mean, don't we still have that? I know that my RSS feed is still too content-free to keep up with (even after culling a double-digit number of hefty ones.)
And now we have even more RSS aggregators (Feedbin, The Old Reader, etc.) than we had before!
You don't get them with wholemeal bread.
The real frustration is that websites only put short extracts of their content into the RSS feed to force you to go and... look at their ads, I guess? But I'd imagine the number of folks using RSS feed readers who don't also use ad-blockers is vanishingly small.
I don't know how the RSS feed is configured if you set up a blogspot or wordpress blog now, let alone the newer blogging platforms or tools like Hugo.
Google Wave had that same kind of feel but it was never give the time to develop and grow. I don't know if it would have been as important as something like the laser, but it sure did feel like something that would change the world. But that's just me.
I still wonder what they were smoking. If you want users on your platform, not banning them randomly seems a good start.
But I also sometimes wonder if someone inside Google and MS are actively sabotaging or if it is possible that all this self harm has been inflicted unintentionally.
But I think it is more common and makes more sense too to put it the other way around:
Any sufficiently advanced stupidity/incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
I.e. if a politician puts a first aid kit on some wounded person in the wrong way, it is not malice, but if a doctor can't do it properly, it is.
How Mozilla treats us Firefox lusers is malice. E.g. silently enabling spying via updates, pushing disruptive UI changes, or what not.
But the big question is if there is an agreement or "understanding" or something that Google only pays as long as Firefox doesn't become a threat, i.e.:
- don't fix the plugin ecosystem
- don't fix theming
- don't get too far ahead technically (i.e. a good reason to get rid of the servo team)
- don't claim too much authority (i.e. get rid of MDN)
Of course this is wild speculation and mostly in jest.
Look at all the new features email has!
Of course as we're on HN we obviously hate anything but plain text, but that's not true of most people
Chat should be the deadest-simplest protocol/app on the planet. It’s sending text… That’s pretty much the first thing a developer learns how to do when they learn network programming. We should be able to send text from one computer to another in a way that is compatible no matter what company’s client you use. Yet nothing has managed to gain traction.
And it's plagued with spam and attacks and fakes.
Chat is sending text, and files, and encryption, and now doing all that to groups of people, which means you need group managers and permissions, and authentication of those users. Might as well add video and audio calls now you have an address book, as phone companies can't do that properly it seems
It's really a shame that voice recognition hasn't been pushed further because of all the effort put into requiring everyone to use tiny phone keyboards and frustrating emojis just to convey a message and then waiting for someone else to respond in a way that completely distracts people during normal activities like driving or crossing a street.
It's simply not good progress to continue down that texting-based/focused path in my opinion for future progress.
(But it is not really just text. People send multimedia content all the time.)
At the end of the day, texting is probably just as insecure with cameras everywhere and with the fact that the messages are transmitted and retained over mobile networks in the same way as audio and video files would be, although the audio and video files would not inherently contain direct transcripts of the communication.
If I call you, it's basically me saying "What I want is more important than what you're doing right now". Sometimes I may still want to do that, but certainly not always.
I find it really annoying when someone insists on having a long back and forth conversation over text that could be handled in two minutes with a call, but there are a lot of things that don't justify calling someone.
There's also the documentation factor. Being able to reference previous conversations is desirable in some cases.
yes! the "Cone of Silence"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_of_Silence_(Get_Smart)
We need more of these!
As if our cities were not loud enough. You might also find out that a noise that is not irritating to some parts of the populations are unbearable to others. This sounds like a very high tech solution in search of a problem, whilst the obvious answer is simple: just use text messages.
> Simple sound-proof booths could be placed in many locations to allow for call privacy as well.
So we have to isolate into some specific infrastructure to send a message? What am I supposed to do if I am late and in a packed train, for example?
> At the end of the day, texting is probably just as insecure with cameras everywhere and with the fact that the messages are transmitted and retained over mobile networks in the same way as audio and video files would be, although the audio and video files would not inherently contain direct transcripts of the communication.
What would sending audio messages change? Installing microphones in a finite set of booths sounds much more tractable than putting cameras (with a resolution high enough to make individual characters on a smartphone screen visible; none of them do that today) everywhere we can write messages. Voice recognition is accurate enough that you would not need any transcript to extract information from intercepted messages.
Frankly, you sound like you have a personal issue with text messages, which is fine, but none of what you wrote makes any sense.
Also about Duo - even though I agree that it's kinda half-assed, strange interface app, it consistently has lower latency and better video quality than WhatsApp or Signal. I use it wherever my contact has it.
I don't know about Signal because I don't use it but WhatsApp is also pretty good at that job. It also helps if one lives in a country/on a continent with a decent mobile internet service, I guess the US is not the best in that domain.
Also, who still prefers to make a call in this day and age? You only do that if there's something urgent, text is the way.
Definitely not. And the US does have pretty decent mobile internet.
> Also, who still prefers to make a call in this day and age?
People who have their social anxiety under control. When I was younger I wanted to talk to the opposite sex on the phone so I could hear their voice and flirt with them. Maybe the younger generation gets turned on by emojis and memes?
No shit. QUIC is great but doesn't work when the Internet is unreachable.
I may be walking outside with gloves in a freezing temperature not excited about taking phone out. But actually I was in train so no issues. Second time I was cut off when I was walking and explaining things for a few minutes... only to realize I'm dropped out of conversation - again I needed to manually reconnect by explicitly tapping on that button.
Google’s ethos was clearly to throw a bunch of teams at the problem and see what sticks. From a planning perspective it might seem sensible but for the user it’s deeply confusing: they just want to know from Google which one app is blessed and will be supported for the long haul so they can get on with their day.
Apple OTOH absolutely nailed this. Messages is there, it’s always been there. Sure the i was removed from the word but it was still the same app. Simple, direct, everyone on the same protocol without any confusion.
In terms of the complaints about things like tapbacks - The last thing I want is more than a single row of reactions. The point is for them to be simple and universally understood instantly.
the curse of too much money at hand. New hires urge to innovate.
I had Google Talk, Skype, my country's Gadu-Gadu and later Facebook chat in the same app! The same uniform interface with SMS. I had one simple button to switch protocols. I could also easily see online status of my contact on all of these (and fall back to SMS if they weren't online).
When I showed it to friends at the time they were mostly confused about it, or didnt "get" the value of it.
There is the F(x)tec Pro1X [0] which looks similar to the Nokia N900. It's a little bit too expensive for the specs (about 740€ for the 8GB/256GB version with Snapdragon 662), but could be a nice phone.
Or maybe OnwardMobility will succeed and release the new Blackberry this year and it won't be a piece of crap. /s
How things have changed.
Saying it is a good mobile phone app is a huge exaggeration, I had used it back in the 2008 era, the experience was horrible, almost exact opposite of “it just works”.
But of course, I'm outside the US.
Especially poorer countries use it a lot.
It really comes down to network effects - the app that got popular first tends to stay.
It’s kind of difficult if we want to mandate backdoors at the same time. That’s not against Germany specifically; most European governments seem to be under that delusion. Well, those who need to look like they care about privacy anyway; the others don’t care about the “data protection friendly” aspect.
Germany trying to ban telegram is new to me tho, sucks how stupid old people are trying to understand the modern world ...
Until recently, one friend group was on Facebook Messenger, but only because one guy was a WhatsApp holdout who eventually gave in.
I don't know anyone who uses iMessage, but then i have an Android phone. Maybe they're all having cool and sexy group chats on that without me.
As a reminder: most cell phone plans here include unlimited (free) SMS messages
In Dubai almost half my bank correspondence has been on WhatsApp. Guy asks me which credit card I want and starts sending me snapshots of a printed brochure.
Advertisements have WhatsApp contact information listed, most businesses has a chat line open in WhatsApp. Delivery drivers will text you on WhatsApp if they have trouble finding your place. It’s really everywhere and that is despite the fact that phone calls on WhatsApp are blocked.
But it’s not like people aren’t on Facebook or nobody snaps or anything.
And of course, in China it’s WeChat, Japan and Taiwan it’s Line and I think South Korea still live and breathe through kakaotalk.
But for the majority of the world WhatsApp is really the first line of contact.
AFAIK it’s sending it over the Internet, but not over the web ;)
If it annoys you, you can disable it easily in your devices’ settings. Personally I don’t care much, and iMessages instead of SMS is convenient for mates in the US or Australia.
(except that there's no exception; it's all whatsapp)
Sms is mostly for when you want to add urgency and be less likely to be muted.
I would love to get rid of WhatsApp due to FB and hope to do so somehow soon.
That assumption even extends to the business environments I work in. I'm often in the position of needing to coordinate with groups of customers, third parties and contractors during a change window. WhatsApp is the lowest common denominator
In the UK, I've had WhatsApp for about 12 years since the Nokia N900. If someone gives me their number, it's assumed we will communicate by WhatsApp.
As an interesting crossover, my American friends communicate with their friends/family in the US with iMessage but use WhatsApp for everything else and the only Brit I've met who used iMessage by default had spent significant time in the US in recent years.
In Europe it’s mostly WhatsApp but a surprisingly large number of people use Facebook Messenger. And often both.
But i prefer telegram more it actually feels like a modern chat application whatsapp feels like a early 2010 app.
(But the bottom line is, as you can see, that Meta is dominating the market.)
Everyone I know uses some other platform, or just SMS because it works.
With the friends in DACH region it is mostly about Whatsapp.
With the friends in Portugal it is mostly about Whatsapp and Skype.
With the friends in Balcans and east mediterrian it is mostly about Whatsapp and Viber.
With all of them, we still exchange plenty of SMS, as everyone has plenty of free ones on their pre-paid packages.
my experience in germany and spain is vastly similar
I am sure this depends on your circle and language region, but this is my POV
I haven't run into any FOMO (yet)
It works phenomenally on iOS/Android/Windows/Mac and even on Windows Phone till its very end. Call quality is good and messaging is fast and very reliable. When you take phone off aeroplane mode, you receive Whatsapp messages first even before SMS etc.
I think the word you are looking for is hijacks.
Whether you or I feel like it's the right, or even a moral defendable, solution is irrelevant for most other users.
[1] Maybe some federal judge considered those apps essential because someone was unable to text for help due to their data plan, and operators were ordered to allow that traffic to go at all times.
Telegram is faster and adding features all the time - people only it during Whatsapp outages - returning as soon as the service is back.
What Telegram does much better are public groups for creators, but its never the primary channel to communicate with their audiences, since discoverability is much worse than Instagram/Twitter.
Phone service protocols feel very outdated to me and are prone to scams, which I get from time to time on SMS, but I'd say never on whatsapp, or at least I can't recall any scam attempts.
Most of my spam comes through WhatsApp for comparison.
Surprisingly to me as a techie, a lot of people outright demand you on Viber or you can't text them. I still refuse though because Viber is crap: it's ad-ridden and can't even sync chats properly when you install it on a new device.
~ Macworld.com
yeah, ok...
> Since Apple made that choice not to support Android, though, it’s probably safe to say that Apple never actually intended for iMessage to compete for instant-message domination over the rest of the world
apple has made exclusive decisions over and over and over again. and i think everybody outside of the apple bubble knows that its because Brand Prestige is a HUGE part of apples branding.
In Europe not only Android is dominant but people use WhatsApp or Messenger. iPhone owners must use them too as their primary messaging app. I guess they have their iMessage full with SMS from banks and other notifications, like my Android SMS app.
I use whatever The other person wants to use though. Telegram, discord, Skype, email, text, Twitter, whatever
Apple has yet to do this and so far there's little indication they are going to. WA having terrible uptake in the US is a good thing.
Though I would also not be surprised to find people who felt this genuinely.
It's not how it works.
Definitely heard girls (with iphones) gossip and discussing prospective men and say "but his texts are green". Its not code for "he isn't rich" - I went to a private school and hung out with sorority girls so everyone was well off, but something more ambiguous. Something makes blue bubbles feel better.
Maybe its just that iMessage is a more rich form of communication vs SMS, and people hate needing another app to check for that one android user in their life.
Which I agree to an extent and there is actually no way to disable it.
But yea, I wouldn't want to date someone who thinks like that anyhow. Their values are obviously too different from my own if they value iMessage over security, privacy, and the ability to modify my own devices
Yeah. I think the sorority girls would agree that it may be a bad match.
> if they value iMessage over security, privacy, and ...
Its not source available, but iMsg has long been e2ee and with a focus on privacy - but i can imagine that their word isn't enough for you to trust them.
This is a marketing lie fed to you by Apple. In reality, thanks to pressure from the FBI, if either you or your contact has iCloud backups enabled, iMessage is effectively plaintext. (Same with WhatsApp on iOS, but the situation is much better on Android.) https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/what...
Signal does not have this issue, of course.
I think its only a lie in that apple has it upload by default (opt-out) which means as you pick it up from a store, its not e2ee, even though minor setting changes (one boolean button?) can make it real e2ee.
Everything is "effectively plaintext" if anyone can actually read it. You could screenshot your texts, and that ruins encryption. And obviously in a multi-person setting any weak link ruins it for all.
Personally, i'm disappointed its opt-out not opt-in, but i think plaintext backup and easy backups are a net-good for the users, even at expense of e2ee. Most customers don't need e2ee, but many will need backups. That said, i think most data, especially texts, could benefit with auto-deletion of old content. Some things don't need to live forever online.
Apple is acting in the FBI's interest, not in yours.
The user experience of conventional SMS is often terrible; it's not encrypted (I'm not even talking about E2E but simply in-transit encryption as mobile carriers are nasty and may want to snoop), vulnerable to number spoofing, delivery reports aren't supported on iOS (and even then it really depends on carriers) and is slower than iMessage.
FOMO is real for sure, but plain old inconvenience is also at play. If your entire family and social circle is on iOS, it's a massive pain to leave. This is by design.
The only reason I can think of is Apple using a dominant position in a network in order to sabotage alternatives.
Sure, ten years ago it probably didn’t seem to matter, but the iPhone 5 already bumped the screen size from 3.5in to 4in the rear camera was already 1080p, and “phablets” were already a term in 2012. It was totally foreseeable that MMS size limits where going to be a problem, if they weren’t already!
What a great case of skating where the puck is, instead of skating where it’s headed. RCS existed as a spec, just not implemented by carriers. The fact that Apple, and even Google, are routing around their MMS servers is totally their fault.
SMS/MMS is the lowest common denominator for non-Messages devices. So including a non-Messages device in a group chat means the whole chat needs to be downgraded to SMS. Even if Apple added support for RCS tomorrow, group chats would need to downgrade to it and lose E2EE and rely on the participants carriers to deliver messages just like with SMS.
There's no good way for Apple to integrate the shit show of non-Messages protocols in a sane way. Carriers made a mess of RCS in the design, implementation, and deployment. Google has had to run their own RCS backend to allow Android users to actually use RCS thanks to the carriers' bungling and meddling. Even they haven't helped the situation with a decade of half-starts in messaging apps.
Blaming Apple is a bit ridiculous. They're not going to spend a billion dollars fixing the problems created by carriers and Google when they already have their own messaging system.
Of course you can install WhatsApp on any phone but you can't install iMessage on Android so maybe Apple had to let SMSes in.
Apple supported SMS before iMessage/Messages existed. Their Messages app didn't even support MMS until iOS 3. It didn't gain the iMessage functionality until iOS 5.
Apple supports the global standards of SMS/MMS. Their own Messages service can be disabled entirely so a phone will only send SMS/MMS messages. Just about any phone able to connect to an extant cellular network can receive these messages and send messages to an iPhone.
SMS and MMS lack a lot of capability that people want in messaging systems. SMS was born out of unused space in control messages in the GSM spec. That's why fucking everyone from DoCoMo (i-mode e-mail) to RIM (Blackberry Messenger) to Apple have added some over the top messaging system to phones.
SMS is a fallback because it's supported by essentially every carrier. Carriers have tiptoed towards a better messaging standard with RCS but they are at cross purposes with OS vendors and end users. They want a messaging system that allows them to charge per use and the ability to snoop on user messages. So they turned RCS into a mess of a standard and have bungled or slow walked it's rollout.
But no, I'm sure it's Apple that caused all the evil in the world.
They did make their own messaging system. Their Messages (née iMessage) is entirely separate from carrier provided SMS/MMS. It's accessed via the same application as SMS because on early iOS they only supported SMS. The Messages/iMessage features were added to their existing application.
Saying "this is texting plain and simple" ignores a ludicrous amount of complexity about the underlying systems. There's nothing plain and simple about text messaging systems. If you're going to bash Apple for supposedly creating problems at least familiarize yourself with the subject.
I blame Apple for making communications software (iMessage, FaceTime) that is utterly useless to me as an Apple customer.
There are exactly two useful ways to make this kind of software.
(a) Build on top of a standard that others can implement for other platforms.
(b) Support all big platforms yourself.
Apple has decided to do neither. They made something that is totally useless for everyone outside of some close-knit circles in the U.S. Lock-in strategies are always lock-out strategies as well.
But they're not just pissing off their own customers, they're also playing a very risky game. Messaging apps have a tendency to become platforms in their own right (e.g WeChat).
By taking itself out of the picture, Apple is creating a power vacuum that is being exploited by the likes of Facebook. Ultimately this could even threaten Apple's hardware sales, for instance if Facebook manages create something interesting out of WhatsApp + Oculus.
So in my opinion, Apple's strategy is unintelligent and norrow minded. It's classic short sighted "corporate greed".
For iMessage there were desktop messaging standards like XMPP or the immature at the time RCS from cellular carriers. XMPP is not a great protocol for mobile devices with unreliable/changing network connections and background processing constraints. RCS was immature when iMessage was released and hadn't really been deployed by carriers or was deployed but not interoperable between them. It also requires a SIM and a cellular service. So it's a non-starter for non-phone devices. Additionally it doesn't offer E2EE without proprietary extensions and running private relays like Google has done.
For FaceTime there was never a really good video telephony standard to implement. FaceTime uses some existing standards but all over Apple infrastructure. Remember FaceTime has always been an over the top data service and like iMessage has no tie to carriers. When FaceTime was released it didn't even work over cellular, it was WiFi only.
So what standards should Apple have adopted? As a minority player in the mobile or computer markets which of their own services should they have pushed as standards?
Obviously standards are the way to go since WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Skype, and Google's 400 different messaging systems all implement the same standar...oh wait they don't.
Messages is a value-add for Apple's platforms. Google isn't bending over backwards making Nest devices work with Apple ecosystems and Microsoft doesn't offer an XBox SDK for the PlayStation. WhatsApp isn't opening their messaging for Apple to adopt. Companies compete with one another, making products and offering services to attract customers. Why is this unintelligent and narrow minded when it's Apple?
If there was no suitable standard then they should have created one. Either that, or support all major platforms.
>Companies compete with one another, making products and offering services to attract customers. Why is this unintelligent and narrow minded when it's Apple?
Because it's classic short-termism for the narrowest financial reasons, showing no creativity or vision whatsoever. They prioritised locking in some U.S based users at the cost of creating an oppportunity for the likes of Facebook to serve the overwhelming majority of users for whom Apple's offering is useless.
I have no problem in principle with proprietary software that is only available on a single platform. What I find unintelligent and even offensive as a customer is choosing this approach to create this specific type of software that so obviously requires a different approach.
For me, iMessage and FaceTime do not add value. It's preinstalled crapware that causes massive security issues.
I'm not suggesting that Apple should be responsible for making cross-platform messaging 100% compatible, but someone at Apple has made conscious decisions to make the experience as infuriating as possible.
Personally, whenever I carry an Android, I'd very much prefer Signal or WhatsApp than Google Messages app.
And similarly in other countries.
There's no "abusing market position".
Apple and Google don't want to play nice with one another. That's on both of them. The carriers are a third pole that don't want to play nice with each other or Google or Apple.
Google and Apple want value-add features on their platforms. Carriers don't want E2EE so they can mine text messages for advertisers.
HN: Look at my startup that will compete with and dominate some segment of a market.
Also HN: Startups are impossible because big players exist!
Before the iPhone and Android there were a number of mobile platforms that all sucked in their own special ways. The mobile market was the incumbents' market to lose and they then lost of their own accord.
Seriously? Windows Phone flopped because Microsoft couldn't get its act together. IE sucked and couldn't handle even mobile sites that iOS and Android had no problem with. The messaging and e-mail had anemic features. And Microsoft simply couldn't execute on a third party developer strategy.
For whatever interesting ideas the OS had it was a dumpster fire of execution. It didn't help them at all that Windows Phone 7 had no backwards compatibility with Windows Mobile so they burned anyone invested in that platform. They repeated the trick with Windows Phone 8 where Windows Phone 7 devices couldn't run 8. Being the third place platform and repeatedly burning your customers was just an asinine choice for Microsoft.
Windows Phone had interesting features and UI concepts. What killed it was Microsoft's absolutely terrible execution. It had little to do with Apple and Google being "entrenched". Microsoft wrapped a handful of interesting features or good hardware (Nokia phones) in layers of crap.
What is the purpose of this? It's an issue solely with apple phones, people sending me videos from Android phones come through fine in full quality but anything from an apple device comes in looking like a Minecraft video.
>can't receive replies to specific comments
Apple actually started having their phones start sending texts with the reaction a few years ago, see this from my girlfriend earlier today
MMS (and in all likelihood RCS) is a complete non-starter for this market.
Way faster than the typical android notification takes to show up (since heavy battery saving was made standard) for any IM app
I don't think it has anything to do with getting your apps from Play Store vs elsewhere. This is in the UK and despite Google Play being available, back when I worked in a phone store, customers bringing compromised Android devices was fairly common (in fact some of them didn't realize the bullshit ads or spam on their lockscreen/notifications was malware, they thought it was just normal and accepted it), and that was only the stuff I could see - technically there could be plenty more malware that chooses to remain stealthy.
Messaging app are wildly dependent on social circles and age groups. I'm forced to use 5 of them...
MMS isn't as bad as it used to be, however. Less regions have service that is too poor for MMS to work but SMS works fine I think.
You can disagree with it, but that doesn't make it not real.
Just switched from android to iPhone after 12 years of owning and working with android as a developer. I just got tired of fiddling. Most of my social group and family uses iPhone and there's no way the non-technical folks in my life are switching, so... If you can't beat, join.
So now least you've now heard of it from someone other than these articles :shrug:
Once the fifth android device in a row bricked on me I made a decision to try an iPhone 11. I couldn't be happier. It just worked, never crashed, and certainly didn't brick during the time I used it, just under 2 years. I recently upgraded to an iPhone 13 and am still thrilled with it. I never had an Android phone that lasted longer than a year before issues started to surface, and I never had one make it 2 years ever.
The performance of the iPhone made the take the plunge to try a MacBook Pro for my personal use. Couldn't be happier with that, either: it offers a linux-like experience on the command line, and provides a mostly great UI (I don't care for Finder--but I haven't any other real complaints).
Edit: my Android phone purchases were top-of-the-line models: Nexus and Pixel phones purchased off Google directly.
(Personally I have found the real differentiator is not the price, but the amount of crap the vendor adds. There are crap 1k+ phones running Android and often you can find some cheaper ones that have a better software experience)
Yes, it is.
You have a fairly reasonably consistent experience going from one Samsung to the next, or from an LG v20 to LG v60. But, going from a Samsung to an LG? Yeah, there's differences. They're skinned differently, some have their own custom apps by default that aren't stock Android. Each does certain things slightly better or worse.
As an example, in my experience and preference, I've preferred the audio on my LG phones to my prior Samsung phones (I don't use my current Samsung with headphones at all, as it doesn't have a 3.5mm plug and I don't have an adapter and I don't want wireless headphones, pure personal preference there on no wireless and I've had no need for an adapter for the duration I've had the Samsung this last 9 months). I'd say for my personal taste and use, the audio experience has been a fair comparison as I've used the exact same headphones and largely listen to the exact same music files across the different phones (literally by moving the SD card from one phone to the next, no copying involved). I'm sure someone out there will disagree, though, and that's fine.
IMO that Apple devices break less are a myth. They just get repaired instead of thrown out hence last longer on average.
Also the SE cost twice what most Android phones cost. It is not a budget phone.
The only exceptions I've had where performance was reasonable given the price are Sony's phones, the LG G1(?) and some of the pixels. But generally speaking everything on Android stutters _so much_ it's really painful.
I have always had this silly theory that this is somehow a Java thing, because there have been very motivated people trying to get low latency stuff working on Android and are just unable to... but it's just unavoidable no matter how much money you spend.
https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/perc
https://www.aicas.com/wp/products-services/jamaicavm/
All in all, Google just made a big disservice to the Java community with their Dalvik and ART forks running Android Java, and the sooner they are on their coozy Kotlin universe with Android running on top Kotlin/Native (Kotlin is after all so much better than Java /s), the better.
I am not an Android developer myself, but my understanding is that you can write extremely performant code, so it's probably not true that Java is holding back developers who want to write stutter-free apps.
I imagine that thanks to people at Epic and Unity that things will have improved much on that front, it's not like games don't exist on Android after all.
In my experience that has not been quite true. Do you consider it fair to consider top of the line Pixels with mainstream non-Pro iPhones? I'd say they are roughly in the same price class. If so, I can tell you almost every other if not every single Nexus/Pixel generation has major and widespread issues after a year or so. iPhones usually have none of that and they have longer software update cycle.
As for non-critical issues, the debacles with "holding it wrong" and forced low performance mode are quite memorable. I don't remember anything quite as bad as forced slowdown in the Nexus/Pixel line.
And here's why:
>It’s quite normal. They’re not worth repairing or replacing.
People have bricked and broken iPhones fixed all the time. In my small 50k citizen town there are three shops that only fix iPhones. That's all they do for a living. There's exactly zero "Android repair shops". At best you could ask one of the iPhone shops if they can help. Please stop this myth of Apple devices not breaking. They break all the time.
Now to nitpick on your post: is it possible that there are a lot more iPhone users than Android users in your town? In mine there are no iPhone repair shops, just generic phone repair shops that fix everything if they can.
Edit: there's a discussion further down about plastic laptops vs aluminium laptops and someone saying his plastic laptops never broke. He should take a look at my daughter's laptop :)
Never been a brand zealot, never will be, but also almost never seen what you say either. I used Androids for almost 6 years before jumping to iPhones. Androids were consistently unreliable and had to be repaired or changed often -- severely lagging just mere months after a buy, bugs that go unfixed for a full year, displays randomly getting super dim, batteries getting hot and going to 60% of the original capacity in just several months, volume buttons breaking etc. I am on my 3rd iPhone and I completely forgot that my phone can be a source of trouble. I have no reason to make this up. I am a normal consumer who goes after reliability.
I understand that many people are somewhat offended by Apple's mere existence (because they indeed do plenty of shady stuff) but please strive to be more objective. Not everything that Apple does is bad and your generalization is not helpful.
And as another poster said, any smartphone will break if you're rough with it. I've seen my fair share of drunk girls dropping their phone on a concrete floor, clumsily trying to pick it up, proceed to fall ass-first directly on it, and then rage how the phone is "trash for breaking as easily".
> In my small 50k citizen town there are three shops that only fix iPhones.
I live in a capital city (~2.5M people) and I know a smartphone shop owner who also owns 2 service/repair shops. He gave up on repairing Androids because Android users are very price-sensitive (his words): "they buy a phone for 220 EUR and when they hear a replacement for the display they broke is 90 EUR they just say: screw that, I'll buy a new one, or just grumpily leave". He was paying 2 Android phone technicians to basically sit around twiddling their thumbs all day, for basically 4-8 repairs a month, so he let them go and paid for his iPhone technicians to learn Android repairs for the occasional customer who needed them.
The iPhone "repairs" were mostly routine work in comparison: many people, myself included, routinely swap the battery when it reaches 80% capacity (because at that point you do notice a reduced battery life). Often people break their displays so they need new ones. Very rarely they had to actually replace a logic board or anything else internally.
The shop owner also told me that he can count on the fingers of one hand the iPhones he has to completely replace in warranty during any given 3-6 months period.
As is the case with 98% of everything, the reasons for a phenomena are economic. No grand conspiracies or big bads.
If you really did buy all of these, then you certainly didn't pay the same price. And after that, there was 3 years break before first Pixel - so you used a bricked phone for 3 years? Or it worked fine for 3 years?
All that said, if you want value for money, you embrace the disposable nature of Android devices, and buy around the $200 mark. They may not consistently last much more than a year, but $/year on phones is much less. If you can get upstart flagship phones when they've crashed down to earth, even better: Fire, Robin, Essential was a nice period of commercial flops that made decent phones (baring that power state issue). And Mr. Rubin is rumored to be working on a new upstart phone, so maybe another good buy is coming up soon. (Hopefully with a headphone jack this time)
On the other hand, devices like the Nexus 4 had a big emphasis on powerful CPU and midrange price. Safe to say that Google's strategy is fluid, to put it charitably.
"Devices in the Nexus line were considered Google's flagship Android product"
The rest just became painfully slow.
When I tap camera and the flagship phone seems to have to finish a conversation with some server somewhere before camera opens and the moment is gone then I get annoyed.
So after iPhone got user replacable keyboards I dared to try it and it has been better for me.
My Galaxy S4 and Note 4 were working quite fine ~18 months later, but only technically. They were aggravatingly slow and I was factory-resetting them each every 3 months, also rooted them and de-bloated them quite thoroughly. This rejuvenated them for a while but then some mere 1-2 months later they were back to a crawl.
We can throw anecdotal evidence around until the end of time but to say older Samsung are working only applies in very strict dictionary terms and not what an average user would find acceptable (f.ex. various functions were routinely taking 2-3 seconds before the device responded). Several acquaintances had the same experiences.
I’m not saying your product has to be the absolute best, but it needs to somewhat earn its reputation.
Brands have lost their prestige in the past for this exact reason. Some probably are right now.
Apple has been a juggernaut for ~20 years (since the first iPod). The “people just buy for the prestige” argument can’t hold that long if that’s all a brand has.
with something that makes up a practically annual or semi-annual purchase (iphone) vs mac (maybe every 4-5 years?) i think the social value plays a massive role, and the actual product simply has to have plausible deniability of being "good enough to justify the price."
frankly, iphones being $1k+ is part of their social perceived value.
nobody is saying iphones are bad. but apple throws its weight around in bad-faith ways. and they get justified by the apple bloggers. the "walled garden" is part of the prestige.
[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-re...
iphone 4 (2011)
iphone 6+ (2014)
nexus 6 (2017 - hand-me-down from my partner)
oneplus 6t - Nov 2018 to present, and i can't justify buying a new phone yet. i will probably need to replace the battery soon though.
my laptop is a mid 2014 macbook pro i traded my unused vacation for when i left that job. still going strong. amazing actually, considering it's 8 years old now.
I use it a couple of times a week. Tonight was one of those times.
It runs Catalina, as opposed to Big Sur or Monterey, but works fine.
I had a nexus 6, too. I was doing some mobile development at the time and figured that a flagship product would be a good introduction to android ecosystem. It wasn’t a bad phone, but I was surprised that the build materials weren’t on par with anything Apple had at the time. The screen was good and responsive, but seemed plasticky and 2nd rate compared to the glass that both high-end Samsungs and Apple used.
Similar experience with the nexus 9 tablet. Good idea, meh execution.
Maybe things have changed, but the nexus line, considering it is (was?) a flagship product, didn’t seem to live up to expectations.
However, Pixels are definitely meant to be flagships, and IMO they are still not worth that name.
Anecdata: my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 fell quite literally hundred times more than my Pixel 5 (I was very clumsy/drunk by then, and got better), and is still perfectly alive , while my Pixel 5's display broke very easily (it's not even the glass that is broken, it's some internal circuitry). Maybe phones were to be tougher back then? Well, I also have a Samsung Galaxy S10e, it survived many falls just fine (well it does seem a tad worse than my Galaxy Note 2, because paint goes off where it fell).
have you tried columns view? Command(⌘) clicking on links is also nifty
Undoubtedly, for the money Apple devices cost - they better damn well work flawlessly for the next 10-15 years. But they don't. I use a MBP and iMac for work and I hate it.
It's simply not possible as far as I've seen to purchase a PC laptop with similar construction quality (when they're not plastic garbage they're poor imitations of the metal body and interior layout), but one can pay almost as much for a MacBook Pro to get a PC laptop with similar or somewhat superior performance characteristics. That construction quality is worth a premium price point.
Somehow I've never had plastic parts break in the two decades I've been using computers and I don't think I'm in the minority.
> it doesn’t support the non-plastic pieces (e.g. the monitor)
Support how? Are you physically putting your monitor on top your laptop?
The link describes them as "minor shocks" but I once had a severe enough shock that I needed medical care.
So the problem is with Google's phones not with Android in general. Anecdotally my Samsung Galaxy S2 failed after 6 years (which is sad but fair IMHO), my Sony Xperia Compact still works after 5 years, same for a Samsung A40 after 3 years.
None of my Android phones lasted under 2 years, my last one lasted almost 5 years and only got replaced because I wanted a slightly better camera, and both the battery and USB-C connector started to fail.
> We have a box of bricked Google branded handsets in the office. It’s quite normal. They’re not worth repairing or replacing. Conversely we have no dead iPhones at all (apart from where some idiots cratered them). We’re rolling out iPhone 12 and 13 to replace the androids. In fact a friend of mine’s flagship galaxy that is 11 months old dropped dead in the middle of nowhere the other day and left her up shit creek. She went to the apple store on Monday and bought an iPhone 13.
But maybe the issue is just with Samsung or Google phones, Samsung I dislike as much as Apple, Google phones (the Pixel ones, I had the Nexus) seem overpriced for my needs.
You're outlier.
I've been using Android since 2009 and have never had one brick either.
If my Thinkpad was not a solution, I would have continued using a Mac even with their lack of ports and upgradability.
There are numerous stories on reddit of kids who get bullied if they have an android phone instead of an iPhone. Teenagers crying when they receive the last Samsung phone instead of an iPhone. Etc.
What? In what world? I think that is a bubble in itself right there. Software devs are among the most aware groups of people (which still is not too aware, sadly) about limitations, configurability, free software, and open source software on their devices. You cannot even test websites you develop properly on MacOS (including what happens with blocking solutions in place, as MacOS limits their capabilities). Also browsers do not have the same right like on other systems. Only Safari has, which is not what you should test with. It is ill suited at least for web development.
What right does Safari have over Chrome running on a Mac?
Never saw a developer with a mac here.
I agree it is certainly part of their branding. An iPhone is an iPhone no matter the price you pay. The iPhone SE for $400 doesn't feel any less premium as the most expensive $2000 iPhone. There isn't really a obvious design element that tells you it's the cheap iPhone (except the notch and the camera, but it could just be that you didn't buy a new one) and this is also true for the hardware.
Other manufacturers definitely have a much worse customer experience for people that buy their low-end models. This is understandable because they don't have the margins Apple has.
But pretending that people buying Apple just do so because they are held hostage and they are missing out on a better user experience is delusional. Android and iOS both are trying to lock you into their ecosystem and try to sell you additional services which increase your lock-in. I'm not conviced that they deliberately design their products in a way to increase the lock-in. It probably comes naturaly if you don't have any open standards and interopability as a design goal.
People on here talk about RCS for example but if you look at the Wikipedia page about RCS [1] you can see that carriers started implementing RCS in the last 4-5 years. For my country there is only one carrier listed and they implemented RCS less than 2 years ago. Sure RCS was a standard when Apple released iMessage but at the time most providers were still charging outrageous prices for SMS/MMS. Good luck convincing them a standard which would remove a revenue stream. So iMessage was a good solution to offer a better experience for iPhone users. It just works, no configuration required and you can always fallback to SMS/MMS.
They probably could've made iMessage an open standard or made an Android app. But would've other manufacturers and Google participated in this standard (mind you it would've been centralized, there was no Signal protocol) or would everyone using iMessage be better than what we have now?
I think a lot of the criticism today is hindsight. We know a lot more today and a lot of stuff was in it's infancy when it was released and tried to solve different problems than what we see today.
Sorry for the rant. This post went a bit overboard but I had a lot of thoughts on the topic that ended up in this post. And I'm interested if someone has something to add or disagrees with my assesment completely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#St...
That makes it important. A large section of 300 million of the richest people on the planet want blue text bubbles rather than green ones, and will buy the expensive phone to get it. Fortunes have been made on much less.
/s
It may not be enough to keep a company going forever - apple has many other ways of propelling itself - but its powerful enough to get people in the ecosystem
Remember that there was a time when Blackberry had 100% platform lock-in with BBM. I myself got one (including a pricey service plan) just to be able to message my friends in college. Yet everyone left the app (and ecosystem) overnight because there was a better device available.
There was a time when ICQ was unbeatable, and it seemed like people would be using it forever, because how do you move off of a platform that everyone you know is on? Then came AIM. Then MSN Messenger. Then Skype. The Google Talk. Then Facebook Messenger. Then WhatsApp and iMessage. It will be something else tomorrow. There is no such thing as network lock-in for messaging apps, simply because costs to switch to a new one are negligible, and you can use as many of them as you want at the same time.
It's not the best phone for the buck, has never been and that's not the goal either.
Unfortunately, it seems that, since then, almost all phones have raised their "lowerbound-prices" thanks to the iPhone.
( probably not a popular opinion, considering popularity of the iPhone in the US :p)
That cost far more than 200 € new, AFAICR.
I bought it for 250 or so at the time.
https://phonesdata.com/en/smartphones/samsung/galaxy-s2-1140...
I've never bought a phone north of 350€, well, until work pays for it :p
Galaxy these days are more expensive, sure. But not at the time.
I did think i bought it pretty fast after release and 250€ seemed a good price. But now, I'm not so sure anymore ( how fast i bought it, I'm sure it was 250)
It's a damned shame we don't have a counterweight to Apple to force them to rethink consumer-hostile decisions like these. Imagine if there was a viable alternative who kept the headphone jack. Or small phones. Or fingerprint sensors. Or cheap prices. Instead, everyone just does what Apple did last year. And unless I want to buy a phone with crappy US cellular band connectivity, I'm stuck with... Samsung, Google, and Apple.
90% of the people I know with iPhones don't have any messaging apps other than iMessage. I've tried to get them on Signal or WhatsApp, complete refusal.
I don’t believe I know anyone who doesn’t have it, even people who don’t use FB like myself have it.
You can also message through the Fb app without using the Messenger app.
There are non-technical people who use iMessage because it's the default texting application and it's not a messaging platform it is something that Apple has perverted and customized into something that is deliberately incompatible with other anything.
Apple can easily be understood by trying to avoid becoming IBM/AT&T. They don't want to be ubiquitous because that has its own regulatory challenges.
Keep in mind we’re largely talking about teenagers heavily influenced by peer pressure and for the most part wanting to spend their parents’ money on iPhones.
Blue vs green arms these kids with an actual reason to tell their parents.
If I was Apple, I don’t know why I would ever want to remove this high barrier to entry. Having it making me a ton of money.
Yes, but also that Apple don't want to make it easier for Google to get their grubby little fingers inside more of Apple customers' data than they already do.
Even in mine family we're all on iMessage.
> I don't use facebook anymore since 9 years ago.
WhatsApp is still Facebook.
I mostly use first four. Biggest missing from that list - Messenger, Twitter.
What do you mean? I use Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook messenger, Discord, Teams and rare times SMS on the same phone. Different apps for different friend groups.
2. I meant I don't use Facebook Messenger or website chat. I know tech speaking WhatsApp now use same backend, I started using WhatsApp well before Facebook acquisition.
Sorry but you are really just being pedantic.
This. Most of the rest of the world ditched SMS a decade or more ago.
I really don't think this is true: I believe they mostly use the messengers built into TikTok and Instagram or are still on Snapchat.
You can't send iMessage to non-iPhone user then.
You still can send SMS/MMS to non-iPhone user.
But because Apple intentionally bundled SMS/MMS messenger app into iMessage you are thinking iMessage == SMS/MMS.
To give you an idea why are conflating them - you don't actually need a phone number for iMessage/FaceTime. Because the primary ID for it is your Apple ID, not your phone number.
And I use iMessage because it's how I 'text' people, similar to how I used to text people on my Blackberry and my Razr and my Nokia before chat apps were a thing. I don't want to download chat apps - I just use what's convenient which is iMessage and it works great for my use case.
People just wanted to be able to talk easily. It was annoying to set up cross platform group messaging at first, but it hasn't been a problem for at least 6 years. The biggest thing pulling people to iMessage now is convenience and not wanting to figure out a different mutual platform.
A large portion of the current generation of kids are actually tied to Discord. I expect Discord to start dominating more and more as time goes on. Hackathons are organized and held on there. Clubs at my university have moved to Discord. There's a specific to my university Math discord and a separate CS one where even teachers interact. A lot of online streamers have set up their own branded discord for their community. I have heard some companies like Amazon even have a new hire Discord. Slack, iMessage, Whatsapp, and Messenger all lack things Discord provides.
I believe Discord is the endgame for group messaging. The way you can organize conversations in to categories and channels is a killer feature that no other service gets quite right. The way Discords use roles to help categorize people into groups and have granular permission control for who can access what content is so useful. It's a matter of when, not if Discord is the best service.
There is one big caveat to Discord right now and that's the lack of End to End encryption. Whatsapp and Signal are the only two messaging services I trust for privacy sensitive communication. I don't really care if government agencies snoop on the fact that I was playing Rocket League for the last two hours though. iMessage is E2E as well but only if you communicate with others that are also tied to the Apple ecosystem which makes it useless for me because a lot of my international friends aren't. I have an ipad that has my contacts synced so I can see who else has iMessage.
I am only a "gamer" in the gaming related Discords. There's no cross talk between two Discords unless the other people also share in being a part of both communities. People in a music related discord don't ask about the game I am playing unless they happen to be interested in it.
Discord still has that. Instagram is currently losing it. Skype once had it, but has long since lost it.
A platform that figures out how to be cool and stay cool will reap many benefits.
I suspect we'll all be very annoyed at whatever they have to do to make money.
My kids / tweeners and their friends all use Discord.
They all have iPads and iPhones too.
All they iMessage for is to message me and ask for food
Discord is fun and encourages community and exploration, as well as one on one messaging.
I can't see why they'd move to iMessage.
And before you claim it's just for gamers... it's not, they are all on it! Boys and girls.
Even the parents who organise for kids to get together k ow to share their children Discord ID!
iMessage is the Facebook of the messaging world.
Used be billions but yesterdays news.
Then they started gutting bits of it with no apparent reason beyond supporting empire building by other teams.
It's been ages since I've had less than unlimited text messages. I'd still rather not use those because they're crippled, and any "improvement" made by the phone providers will still be crippled compared to what a tcp/ip based app can do.
For example, I'm 100% sure any SMS "improvement" will still be tied to the phone. Even whatsapp is slowly moving away from that.
There's exactly one useful feature in iMessage compared to whatsapp. It recompresses your photos less. I use it when I want to send photos to a family member and that's all.
In non apple world, I think that people almost never use sms anymore. Except for first contact with someone you don't know, or receiving advertisements, one time pin codes,...
For RCS, it is going nowhere because most of the users are not interested to let mobile carriers get back control over any of our non encrypted communications. They want to be more than a pipe to abuse of it for financial gain, we want them to be just a pipe.
People don't use iMessage, we use Messages, and iMessage is one of the protocols that it supports. And I use Messages preferentially because I know everyone will have iMessage or a SMS fallback and it Just Works. I don't have to think about it. I don't have to go to one of four apps to talk to somebody (I have Signal because of That One Friend but I don't open WhatsApp or Telegram ever despite having both). They're all in this one, and it's good enough. (Messages also works on my laptop without me having to install anything, which is minor but handy if I want to dash off a longer message--and just like Messages on iOS it'll send as a SMS or as an iMessage and I don't have to care which is which. And no, nobody I know socially uses email.)
I'm sure WhatsApp is a great alternative if you live in a country where Everyone Has It, but I do not.
Messages is instant and doesn't lose history. And nobody I know uses Telegram or WhatsApp. If they work for you, then more power to you, but they do for me. Because with them I can talk to anybody if I need to, and if Android people don't like getting 3GPP videos or whatever that's just not really a problem that I care about.
The bar is really, really low. I'm sure WhatsApp or Telegram pass it if you know people who care about them. I don't, and I suspect most Americans are in the same boat on that one.
Signal on desktop with more than 10k messages opens in less than 10 seconds for me. Similarly with Whatsapp web. The only time Signal desktop has "lost" my login is when I uninstalled and reinstalled it on my phone. Which makes sense because it means it refreshed the cryptographic keys associated with my account.
Signal doesn't have an easy way to transfer messages to desktop or messages to a new phone by choice due to privacy reasons. It's not a decision I agree with, but it's a decision I understand.
Whatsapp is fine in terms of transferring messages and is instant. It's better than iMessage because it has the same major features while being platform independent. The unfortunate thing actually is that iOS makes it harder to backup the actual database of messages for something like Whatsapp or iMessage because it intentionally hides the files from you. I know many friends that have gotten upset that they lost their messages, because their iPhone died for whatever reason. It's really hard to recover data from a dead phone without paying a lot of money, if it's even possible. On the other hand I use a microsd card in my Android and my Whatsapp database is mirrored to it. I have some messages going back more than 10 years without having to use any sort of cloud backup solution or rely on the good grace of itunes backing things up properly. You need root access to get the Whatsapp key on an Android, but once you have it, you can decrypt the copied message database on desktop.
As of Oct 2021, there's an option to make an E2E encrypted Whatsapp backup based on a key of your own choosing. That means I can use a cloud backup and still maintain privacy over my data.
I care about making it easy for others to be able to communicate with me regardless of what they use, you don't have to care though.
To me it seems less of a status symbol and more driven by network effects. (Say what you will about my network)
Only applies to iPhone owners in the USA
iMessage seems like a fine solution to me when I want to send IMs. I'm not interested in all the chaff associated with recent IM enhancements. They all seem pretty irrelevant to the main function: text and photos sending.
I'd love to see a better privacy/security messaging standard, but let's get something in there incrementally like RCS.
On a side note, can Google allow Android devs to implement RCS in other apps than Google Messages and Samsung Messages, please?
If the problem is green bubbles being ostracized for some teen-idiotic reason, would you like to know what to do?
Make them all the same color.
Yes, iMessage is SMS. The color is there for you to see if a message will be sent over SMS or over the internet, because SMS may cost money. Specifically, there are two colored things: a message itself and a "send" button, one shows the past, other shows the future. Leave the coloring of the button and own messages intact, and make all incoming bubbles blue. Or green, if you feel funny. There's a reason to see how you send, but no reason to see how it was delivered. That's it. No more issue. End of story.
I had an Android phone when RCS was rolling out. It never worked. Well before then, iMessage - like most message platforms - already did everything that RCS did and far better.
Thank gosh Apple (and other message apps) decided to keep improving instead of waiting on telecom companies to build and support this standard.
No other messaging app is as simple and easy to use as iMessages. I have no inclination to use FB/WhatsApp (though it's popular especially for international cases). I'm never going to convince all my friends to download and switch to something like telegram/signal.
iMessage is simply the best SMS/Rich messaging platform that, like a lot of what Apple does, Just Works.
I will never trust a google messaging service to last and be around in 5 years. They have a massive graveyard here.
With RCS instead of SMS, iMessage will continue to "Just Work" as it does right now. iOS<->iOS will still happen over iMessage.
> I had an Android phone when RCS was rolling out. It never worked.
It has rolled out now though. No one asked iMessage to support RCS back then. They are being asked now. So it's not relevant what happened with you whenever you had Android phone.
> Well before then, iMessage - like most message platforms - already did everything that RCS did and far better.
iMessage did that for iOS<->iOS communication. Not for messages sent over SMS.
> No other messaging app is as simple and easy to use as iMessages.
This won't change with RCS.
> I will never trust a google messaging service to last and be around in 5 years.
The protocol should stay there as the SMS one is still around. If G gives up support, the fallback for RCS is... SMS which is anyway supported by iMessage already.
Disc: Googler but nowhere close to Android, RCS, any messaging app.
Not really. Google is giving the middle finger to carriers who implemented Universal Profile on their own rather than use Jibe. And we now have fragmentation even before there was time for significant adoption.
That said, your points about iMessage are right. I believe RCS support might actually help iMessage in some markets, since SMS fallback is precisely the reason people won't use it.
I also think that they have a big advantage because they have a narrow range of products (there aren't 50 different iPhones) that they can sell at a high volume giving them a lot of leverage with suppliers. Additionally they control the whole stack and probably should be able to offer a superior product compared to their competition if they execute right.
I'm not sure if this warrants intervention from regulators. As a consumer I see potential for a great product that simply isn't possible if multiple companies design different elements of the stack. There are much bigger conflicts of interest and you may be using the same software and parts as your competitor so they will never be as specialized.
I'm not sure if these advantages are fair. Should a hardware manufacturer not be allowed to develop an operating system for their hardware? Should the developer of an operating system not be allowed to develop and integrate services into their operating system?
I guess I could extend this thinking to the overall centralization in the tech space. Which is convenient and really worrying at the same time.
About the apps, I am forced to use WeChat because some of my friends live in China and that is the only communication channel they have… but it is the worst experience I ever had. Even Viber was better. And in China it’s heavily controlled.
Among my contacts in Europe, Telegram is widely used and becoming almost “a standard”… only a very few use Signal.
Even if Apple made all chat bubbles blue, I’d still get ultra low shitty videos from my “Android friends” sending a clip and not thinking about SMS limits. Maybe it looks fine on their end. On my end, get the magnifying glass out.
Or having too many people on a text thread? Wtf? Is this 20 years ago?
I also don’t get the hard core Google defensiveness thing. This is a company that mines everything they can get from you to sell ads to you…Who notoriously cancels services or fails to execute fully on them. Google Chat/Talk/Voice was confusing. Which do we use? And what about that bizarre email experiment? Voice is my favorite Google product by far. I don’t use Chrome for privacy reasons, but admit I’m stuck on Gmail. I tried to de Google my email, and then realized that having my email off of Google was cool except so many people I email were on it, so they have it anyway…
I don’t really care if your chat bubble is green or blue or red. I just want it to work with whatever I’m sending and be encrypted. SMS isn’t. Carriers retain. Why subject myself to that?
You know what app I never use on my phone? The phone app. Is there any actual anxiety about this? Does it need to morph into a Clubhouse-style swamp of dark patterns trying to turn audio in money? No. It just needs to sit there for when I might need to phone someone.
Whose theory? Feels bogus: Here (and in most of Europe AFAIK), SMS has been free-unlimited since Idunnowhen, and hundreds included back when there were still limits shortly after the turn of the century. Pretty much all the whining about limits I can recall has been from Americans.
And that's not to mention the Gruber article they link to as "proof" of the iPhone's general superiority... Say what you want about that "fireball", but for a supposedly independent and critical Apple observer, he doesn't feel all that "daring"... That was the most revoltingly gushing piece of Appleologia I've seen in a long while.
> Let’s start with the obvious: the only people having this conversation about iMessage are Americans. In most of the world, iMessage is an afterthought. Platform-agnostic chat apps like WeChat, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger dominate, though the particular apps in question vary from country to country.
Excuse me? Anyone using an iPhone and messing someone with an iPhone is using iMessage. I'm in an EU country and I have specifically made an effort to notice what sort of messaging platform people use and by far if they're on iOS they're using iMessage.
Such a bold and impudent statement to make! It's baffling how they can even write such a title and paragraph.
Ah it's my own messages that are green (took me a while to find one). Ok, so I think I used iMessage at some point, not sure though. Have to admit that that green bubble feels a bit dated, so perhaps it's on purpose? Anyway, nobody uses iMessage here, I don't remember ever seeing a blue bubble in the messages app, it's al Whatsapp here, which is actually worse, at least iPhone users seamlessly switch between sms and iMessages, in Whatsapp you're left out with a dumbphone (and I know people with dumbphones still). Then again, they may avoid Whatsapp on purpose.
“Competition” doesn’t quite work as expected when network effects are in play.
(I have an Android phone, they have an Apple phone)
This post misses the point just how much Apple users like iMessage.
The reason iMessage is not popular in other countries is: Ubiquity trumps everything. iPhone is a unaffordable luxury good outside a few rich countries. Apple pricing is horrible.
imo, and most likely all Apple users: iMessage UX is better than WhatsApp
Why?
Because Google didn't even have one. Bingo, none of their offering is going to work reliably for whatever purpose and that is not user's fault, and frankly speaking, it is 2022, there is no room for them anymore.
Also, listening to voice messages, especially when some bluetooth device is connected is infuriating experience.
All these “world domination or bust” ideas I think are silly.
BMT, IND... it will eventually be centralized and run by the government as a public service.
But I don't think Apple ever really wanted to corner this market anyway and don't really care. Same way they never wanted to beat Windows or Lenovo with their Macs.
Real or imagined "wrong brand of sneakers" has been going on forever.
This is why I feel like Telegram is a superior product.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251966734?answerId=2537...
This is a bad take.
I don't think we should be beholden to the mechanics of snail mail or email (almost 30 years old) when we're designing technologies in 2022 and beyond.
It's impossible to send hundreds of mail envelopes, and would be hard to send hundreds of emails in a minute, and both take deliberate action to accomplish. But I can easily send 100 chat messages in a minute, and in that mode of communication with its web of connections, mistakes are easy to make and speaking for myself I appreciate the ability to correct them.
With that said using telegram has been a breath of fresh air (and I hear whatsapp has it too)
It mimics life, you cannot unsay something.
If someone is hostile in a message towards me, and then deletes that message, in a situation where this eventually goes to court or some other formal proceeding, I need evidence of their action for my own defense.
> mistakes are easy to make and speaking for myself I appreciate the ability to correct them.
Mistakes can be corrected - spelling, factual, or otherwise. Followup messages, staring to correct a spelling mistake, talking on the phone, leaving a voicemail etc.