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Comment by ideamotor | Hacker News Reader

Oh it's real. It's very frustrating to text people who can't receive live photos, videos sent are reduced in quality by a significant degree, can't receive replies to specific comments, and can't receive link previews. People don't click links without a preview, period. So no use sending a video or live photo via icloud link either. I have absolutely minimized texting android users due to these issues. It probably helps that 80% of the folks I text regularly (or have at some point) are apple users.

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>videos sent are reduced in quality by a significant degree

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

https://imgur.com/a/ttEhdN0

Apple sticks with the more conservative MMS compliant video format. Google do some runarounds instead

MMS video and picture sizes are size constrained by the carrier in the profile. As many carriers already allow 4MB or even unlimited sizes it is purely an issue of carriers being cheap and lazy and leaving old limits on MMS. It would probably even be profitable for carriers as MMS already counts against data and RCS allows the larger sizes anyway. Yet Google prefers to roll yet another new protocol and complain instead of getting the carriers to just fix MMS configuration issues to solve the biggest ongoing complaints.

Just as a data point from outside the US: a 4MB MMS is about 5$ in Germany, even on a 30+$/mo base price package. Sending that to a group call multiplies the cost with the number of recipients.

MMS (and in all likelihood RCS) is a complete non-starter for this market.

RCS is an official standard. Eg. In Belgium it was implemented in 2020, 2 years ago.

That picture is the description of a reaction, not a reply. And the description is much worse than having the reactions on the message like in iMessage.

That's not iMessage / Apple's fault - that's a limitation of the SMS and MMS technologies.

It doesn't matter whose fault it is. I mean its really users fault for not using messaging apps, but that's clearly by design. Apple crafted iMessage to be good enough that iPhone users overwhelmingly use it and it provides a much worse experience when texting non iPhone users.

If only there were a more modern standard, it could be called RCS

RCS is an inferior anti-user unencrypted "standard" to iMessage; too little, too late, and driven by Google who effectively bribes carriers to get behind it by providing backend servers to them and sell out the user. No user wants additional say from carrier and potential opportunity for billing. The only reason RCS has even become a thing and Android is playing that game is Google intended to force Apple's hand by ganging up on them with carriers. They failed and now they whine. What they are asking iMessage is to basically fold their pocket ace hand and join and be a lower-class participant in a Google-controlled messaging world. No wonder Apple will always say fuck you.

If iMessage is such a pocket ace then perhaps they are abusing their market position.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Considering there are dozens of other chat apps with huge market shares on both platforms, is it inconceivable that they had a better product than most chat apps? (Until quite recently iMessage was the only widely distributed and usable end to end encrypted messaging platform out there, for example.) It is Google who controls the majority of smartphones, not Apple, yet they have not been able to effectively "abuse" their market position, mind you.

Personally, whenever I carry an Android, I'd very much prefer Signal or WhatsApp than Google Messages app.

Bundling and control of defaults are powerful levers. If users were presented a ballot on first use then perhaps these incumbents would have to compete on an even playing field.

Oh I agree completely. Not only should there a regulated standard for texts placed upon any company with 5% marketshare, there should be a similar standard places upon social media over 5% marketshare.

And yet, in Europe Apple Messages are not nearly as big a thing as it is in the States.

And similarly in other countries.

There's no "abusing market position".

Ah yes the "standard" that the carriers have slow rolled, rolled out only partially, or rolled out in certain regions. Such a great standard Google themselves have proprietary extensions only available in their Messages app and only when using their back end.

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.

Perhaps the time has come to regulate the oligopoly so more competitive upstarts aren't strangled in the crib?

Yeah that WhatsApp was strang...nope. Well maybe poor Signal...nope not them either. So what "competitive upstarts" were strangled in the crib?

I was thinking more about alternative mobile platforms, i.e. IOS and Android

You're not going to legislate or regulate a platform into existence. Apple and Google didn't appear on the scene yesterday. They both started at zero users amid a market full of competitors. They are the competitive upstarts that actually competed and and were successful.

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.

IMO Windows Phone was a superior alternative yet could not complete because the two incumbents were too entrenched. Network effects don't impact only users but developers as well.

> IMO Windows Phone was a superior alternative yet could not complete because the two incumbents were too entrenched.

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.

Telegram, Viber, Line are also doing just fine.

Don't tell them that! Obviously they were strangled in the crib by...competition? I don't know. I don't understand some people's arguments anymore.

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!

That's a limitation of iMessage, the only chat system I've ever heard of limited to a single company's hardware.

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