“It’s time for Apple to fix texting”
android.com
android.com
Apple is using device serial numbers for anti-spam, supported by a fully-authenticated hardware and software stack that does not allow user modification. This permits Apple to simply “console ban” any Apple device that spams on iMessage. This makes it prohibitively expensive to send spam over iMessage. They have been doing so since iMessage was launched.
Android offers no such attestation that I’m aware of. Windows, on Pluton, could offer this attestation securely — and that is a key deliverable of Pluton.
It’s easy, then, to predict what Apple’s first non-Apple platform will be: Microsoft Windows 12, only if secure-booted, with Pluton-signed attestation that the kernel is unmodified. And it’s easy to predict how Apple will implement anti-spam: by applying “console” bans to specific Pluton chips by their serial number.
If Android wants to join the party, then Android phone builders need to implement secure boot with hardware-signed attestation of non-rooted-ness, in the style of Apple T2 + macOS or Microsoft Pluton + Secure Boot. Until then, Apple iMessage will remain single platform.
(I recognize that this is extremely unpalatable to device hackers, but the same freedom to modify an OS kernel that hackers desire is also the freedom to spam all users, as we have seen repeatedly with all messaging software platforms operated without hardware-backed attestation for the past thirty years — including email, Jabber, and HN itself.)
(No, I do not work at Apple.)
> The API is not designed to fulfill the following use cases:
> Contain signals for app-specific use-cases, such as device identifiers
Correct: 'Non-heuristic antispam' and 'Private device identifiers' are incompatible requirements, unless you introduce another expensive obstacle to overcome. Spamming depends on cheap/free sock puppet accounts. The cost per account is inversely proportional to the value it holds to spammers. That cost can be in Apple's iMessage terms: $100+ per serial number, all devices must include burned-in serial number attestation in their server communications. Or that cost can be in bureaucracy: $10 per notarized "account signup request with verified citizenship", but now all communications can be associated with the notary's logs of your citizenship ID number.
There is no way to stop spam without incurring one or another cost to each user. Apple's method doesn't care who you are, so long as you possess Apple hardware. The Pluton method wouldn't either. What other methods exist that are unconcerned with the exact identity of the user, but still make spamming unprofitable?
As far as private antispam, you can imagine a hashcash-like system that takes into account how many messages you've accepted from the sender, but this is a completely different discussion.
SafetyNet does not specifically give you a device ID, but keystore attestation does. SafetyNet is a higher-level API used to verify you're in a trusted compute environment (which is also sufficient for anti-spam, btw). The keystore attestation API provides everything you need to acquire signed data directly from the HSM with things like device IDs and security trust level baked in.
You need to read up: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-bweeks-acme-device-at...
But until Apple's dominance starts to wane, there's no chance in hell they will provide iMessage for other platforms unless forced by regulation.
If push comes to shove, they can implement heuristics which run texts from non-Apple devices through a harder spam filter. Spam isn't non-existent on the iMessage network, and there already seems to be a rudimentary spam filter in place.
And fines are up to 20% of global revenue.
It's a messenger but it's based on phone numbers AFAIK--unlike something like WhatsApp.
Sure we can all have a discussion about how it should work - but having bureaucrats decide is the worst idea ever.
I find it very hard to argue against regulation which is only meant to make devices more interoperable. USB-C for charging is mature enough at this point that it seems reasonable to declare it THE charging port.
An interesting - partially ironic - observation here, is that Apple actually designed the reversible USB-C connector and submitted it to the USB-IF - a team of bureaucrats. Bureaucrats, who of course previously were responsible for blunders such as micro-USB-B 3.0, and more recently, the ambiguous shitshow that is the current state of the USB spec.
I wholeheartedly believe that Apple is such a design-driven company that they would actually engage with regulators again (gasp, even the EU), if they were to come up with a better connector design down the road. Everybody wins.
I agree wholeheartedly, but what's the alternative? The so-called "free market" (not that such a thing actually exists) clearly has not solved this problem for us.
I suspect most iPhone users are of a similar opinion or no opinion at all. Sure, here on HN you can find plenty of strong opinions, but the average iPhone user doesn’t care and is happy with the ecosystem and hardware.
iMessage spam isn't non-existent because sometimes someone tries to spam, gets a few messages out, and then their device gets console-banned. The iMessage "unsend" feature doesn't yet exist in any released iOS or macOS, so it can't be used to hide the spam after the fact.
I would (grudgingly, because the whole thing is just stupid) pay 3 bucks a month or so to be able to message iPhone users from Android without dealing with unreliable message delivery and ordering, and photos and videos pixelated to hell. I have a ton of barely-recognizable videos of my niece and nephews from my sister because she always forgets that sending me video over MMS is a boatload of fail.
They're just going to use prepaid cards they scammed from people to buy iMessage and absolutely spam the crap out of that.
Unless I've been an edge case, SMS/MMS has been nothing BUT super reliable on my phones in Australia. Can you provide a demo ? I'd like to see what you're talking about since maybe I do have the photos and videos pixelated, I just don't see this.
What on Earth are you talking about?
As other have mentioned, you can tell if it's iMessage or not in a few different ways, the send button color, the "Text Message" or "iMessage" label interspersed in the conversation, etc, but if you want to talk about the color of the bubbles, that only applies to outgoing messages.
https://www.rrstar.com/story/business/2022/04/30/new-pig-but...
I'm not unsympathetic to Apple's difficulties and goals here (assuming this spam problem is actually the reason, though I'm skeptical that there aren't also self-serving reasons that would be sufficient for Apple), but I'm so tired of society's slide toward "security at any cost, and to hell with freedom" since the 9/11 attacks over 20 years ago.
(It's possible and likely that slide has been going on much longer, but I was a teenager in the 90s and not really aware of such things. But I think it's undeniable that the aftermath of 9/11 was a big turning point for the surveillance state and for average citizens being so scared of everything that they'd be willing to give up essential freedoms just to quell that fright.)
Egads, no. The abuse heaped on me by Apple pales in comparison to the spam phone calls and emails I get. If I start getting spam via iMessage, I'll be an extremely unhappy camper. It already happens with text messages and that's bad enough.
Anyhow, sure, if you want to give away your freedom to actually own your devices, just so you don't get spam... I guess that's your choice. I just don't want to be locked into a system where that's the only choice.
Regardless, iPhones also receive SMSes. If it's impossible to spam over iMessage, they'll just use SMS. If it becomes impossible to spam over SMS, then presumably Apple can implement similar measures for iMessage that don't require us all to have hermetically-sealed, locked-down devices.
Same folks who didn't realize that all messages show up in the same color, the blue bubbles only happen when you send. They're getting SMS spam.
> I just don't want to be locked into a system where that's the only choice.
Who's locked in? I can and have switched back and forth between iPhone and Android devices. My contacts are sync'd between them, calendar, mail, all of it just works either way. Only reason I'm back on iPhone right now is because the churn (and by extension, TCO) is significantly lower. If the calculus changes on that, I'll jump ship again, no big deal.
The cost to switch is not trivial for most of the world. And the cost of iPhones is high compared to the alternatives.
Why not?
> And the cost of iPhones is high compared to the alternatives.
Given that the discussion is about switching from Apple being hard, this seems like the opposite of the point you're trying to make.
Because iPhones and Androids of comparable quality are not cheap. And many people don't know how to move their data and photos among devices regardless.
> Given that the discussion is about switching from Apple being hard, this seems like the opposite of the point you're trying to make.
You said you switched back and forth repeatedly. I was responding to that, since I view it as a luxury not everyone can afford. And folks who've sold an organ to get a blue bubble may have some sunk-cost fallacy to overcome even if they're only going from Apple to anything else.
Doesn't seem that's the case. Folks have followed up confirming that the messages are coming over iMessage, and not SMS.
Nitpick, that's not an iMessage feature, but at "Messages" feature -- the app. The filtering applies to both iMessage and SMS.
What do people need ? Apple coming and killing their cat ?
It’s really oppressive that Apple doesn’t let you install WhatsApp, Secret, Telegram, FB Messenger or any other communications app beyond their own.
While it’s all sweetness and light that Google got into bed with the phone carriers to develop this new “standard” tied to a phone number subscription that brings along all the retrograde privacy nightmares of Big Telecom since the bell system broke up.
The points you want to raise are crucial, but this is far from the hill to die on.
If the default chat app is featureful and universally supported, people tend not to stray toward non-default alternatives unless they offer meaningful benefits. Sure, this ship has in many ways already sailed, since those alternative apps have a lot of mindshare and network effects.
But if Apple added RCS to its default messaging app (or if Google were permitted to add iMessage support to its default messaging app), I would ditch everything else and just message everyone (including groups) using the default Android Messages app, relying on it to select the best non-SMS/non-MMS contact method for everyone, regardless of platform.
Sure, it would take a little more work to move messaging groups over, but the cool thing is that I could just do it myself, and not wait for my friends to download yet another messaging app. This is the problem I ran into when I wanted to get friends off of WhatsApp; I had to convince people to install something else, and not everyone felt like doing it. But everyone already has the default messaging app installed, so that problem just goes away.
> While it’s all sweetness and light that Google got into bed with the phone carriers to develop this new “standard” tied to a phone number subscription that brings along all the retrograde privacy nightmares of Big Telecom since the bell system broke up.
Just wanted to call this out as FUD. RCS existed as a standard long before Google was involved (nearly a decade?). I too don't love that it's tied to a phone number, but options for doing this well are limited, and building a second, parallel identity system has its own issues. RCS at least can be federated, and it'd be possible to allow phone users to choose their own provider. And in practice, phone number portability means you aren't stuck with the crappy choice of ditching your "identity", or sticking with a phone provider you hate.
Not sure how iMessage or WhatsApp or Google Chat or Signal is any better, though, as they're all controlled by a single company that requires you to use their identity system.
And if we want to be technical XMPP was before that and it was federated by some large networks, however briefly.
> It however turned out that although the content of the message is encrypted, there is still a lot of user identifiable data that is not encrypted and can be seen by potential attackers.[0]
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266628172...
For better or worse, much of the fediverse is made up of small enclaves of hyper-paranoid tech weirdos who have often reinvented the wheel over and over, each in their own little group, which is a big problem for the casual person who wants to toss a server on a home server for friends and family.
And I say this as one of these hyper-paranoid tech weirdos. The network's growth is immensely stifled by the fact that people aren't keen on sharing, or building user friendly tools for the normies.
(Beyond that, I've found the usability of Matrix on both desktop and mobile to be atrocious.)
Bottom line is iMessage works really well and people like it. Same with FB messenger and Whatsapp. You want to move friends to something else? There needs to be a selling point much larger than just security.
And really iMessage is not so much better than the cross-platform alternatives that it's worth leaving some friends out.
" In another exchange, Apple executives discussed in 2013 whether releasing a version of iMessage for Android would make it easier to switch phone brands. iMessage is still exclusive to Apple products.
“I am concerned that the iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove and obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones,” Craig Federighi, Apple software senior vice president, wrote in 2013."
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/epic-games-v-apple-trial-app...
I'm on several text chains with a mix of iOS and Android users. It works fine.
1. No threading is supported. If you reply, it duplicates the message being replied to.
2. “Tapbacks” (reactions) duplicate the message being reacted to with “so-and-so likes message … message”
3. Photos are reduced to a size that fits in MMS (very low quality)
4. Videos look like postage stamps
5. The chat cannot be renamed or have a photo added
6. Members cannot be added or removed without starting a new group (conversation)
7. No message effects
There may be others, but this is off the top of my head.
> 1. No threading is supported. If you reply, it duplicates the message being replied to.
Threading (using "Reply") is not supported in mixed iMessage/SMS/MMS text chains. (I'm using iOS 16, so this may have been (unwisely) supported in earlier Message versions.)
> 2. “Tapbacks” (reactions) duplicate the message being reacted to with “so-and-so likes message … message”
You can now see iPhone tapbacks on Android phones in Google Messages. I'm not sure if it's on defaultly yet. https://www.macworld.com/article/610908/google-messages-andr...
The other things you list are limitations and side-effects of the standards used. They're valid, but I consider the experience "fine" without them. If the groups I text with cared about these we would probably use WhatsApp since everyone has that. Signal would be my preference, but it's hard to change people's habits.
I think the point I want to stress is that when everyone uses iMessage, it’s as easy as texting, but just about as good as WhatsApp/etc. from a feature/user experience point of view.
Agree that we can be friends. Hopefully my comment wasn’t seen as adversarial. I just get annoyed when I see the green text bubbles, because people try to use iMessage features and it’s just bad. Non-techies don’t realize it’s different because it’s the same app, but then wonder why photos aren’t high resolution, or things don’t work as expected.
I didn't realise it was still used in the US though.
MMS definitely doesn't work on my phone, though I'm not sure if this is a provisioning/settings thing or that the provider has abandoned it. I never really looked into it as I've never needed it. I just tested it once to see if it worked.
Right, I mean, that's exactly the point. I can't force someone else to install a messaging app I'd prefer to use. But if we had an actually-good, cross-platform messaging standard that was implemented in the default, stock messaging app of both Android and iOS, I would not have to depend on my friends caring or not. I could just use it, and know that they will receive the messages.
For billions of people that default is WhatsApp and installing it is as much a part of setting up your phone as is plugging in a SIM.
You missed out the bit where you sign your soul over to Mark Zuckerberg.
I can safely know that any phone made today will have SMS/MMS capability, and nothing about WhatsApp/WeChat/Messenger/Telegram/...etc
Okay, so let's say Apple implements RCS support. Should they support the version of RCS that the carriers want? The version Google implemented? Are they now going to be required to implement support for proprietary Google extensions? Will they have to run their own RCS servers because carriers don't support this version of RCS?
RCS is a fragmented mess. It's dead in the water. This noise is just Google flailing about after having binned yet another one of their messaging platforms. Personally I don't care what Apple does here. I still want SMS support for when I'm in an area with little/no data coverage and I'm still going to treat RCS with the same disdain I'd treat any unencrypted messaging platform.
If the issue is interoperability with Android users, fine. Google had successful messaging apps on iOS (I used a few) and they destroyed them through their own mismanagement. RCS doesn't solve that in the slightest.
> This... isn't really hard?
If you want E2EE the demand is now that Apple spin up its own Google-RCS servers and/or rely on Google's infrastructure. If you want Apple to rely on the carriers you don't get E2EE. Rather than work with the carriers Google fragmented RCS making implementation that much more difficult.
Like SMS?
From the Wikipedia page:
RCS Business Messaging (RBM) is the B2C (A2P in telecoms terminology) version of RCS.
*This is supposed to be an answer to third-party messaging apps (or OTTs) absorbing
mobile operators' messaging traffic and associated revenues*. While RCS is designed to
win back Person-to-Person (P2P) traffic, RBM is intended to retain and grow this A2P
traffic. … RBM is expected to attract marketing and customer service spend from
enterprises, thanks to improved customer engagement and interactive features that
facilitate new use cases. *This was the primary reason for the development of RCS by
the GSMA*.
My take is that carriers should be dumb pipes. Voice, SMS, and data routing and that's it. Part of the reason RCS is already fragmented is because the carriers are trying to monetize it, you can bet your ass they're going to continue to drag their feet with E2EE – which is why Google's stood up their own separate RCS infrastructure.
The problem with RCS as a solution is that you're either going to rely on the carriers or Google and Apple to host infrastructure. Requiring Apple to implement support for Google (hosted) products is ridiculous as Apple already lists Google chat apps in their app store. Requiring Apple to host their own servers to interoperate with Google's services is also ridiculous because again Apple already provides software to interoperate with Google's chat services.
Requiring Apple to support RCS so their users can leverage carrier hosted RCS is also ridiculous because that's a fancy way of saying Apple should be required to monetize their users for the carriers' benefit. Per the Wired article linked to MMS was created solely to extract money from their users (or as Wired put it to "collect a fee every time anyone snaps a photo"). I'm sure most folks who are old enough remember when SMS (which literally consumes no additional bandwidth) was a paid feature, does everyone remember when MMS cost even more than a plain SMS?
RCS may not be a cash grab by Google, but they certainly haven't had any luck in getting the carriers to implement customer friendly features. Another lowest common denominator "standard" like RCS isn't an improvement at all, especially not in the face of the freely available, cross platform messaging apps.
What does RCS theoretically bring to the group chat table?
File transfers? Google's gonna mine them or carriers will charge exorbitant storage/transfer/viewing fees.
E2EE? Carriers don't, Google does.
Tapback? Meh.
Typing indicators? Really?
International communication? You're gonna pay…
Interoperability.
Interoperability
https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/04/google-disables-rcs-ads-in...
But either option is strictly better than the existing mess.
It's easy to say that if Apple bent to the will of the carriers the iPhone would never have been as good as it is. But look at RCS, Google had to stand up their own infrastructure because the carriers weren't cutting it.
It's not that RCS is not the right product it's that RCS is the wrong approach entirely. Even in the United States Android is wildly popular. They've had every opportunity to create a wildly popular messaging platform and have failed. Google killed their own products as a result of their internal culture. This isn't Netscape vs IE again, it's more like Mosaic vs Gopher (or AOL vs Netscape if you like).
I was going to write "as much as I'd like to see non-Apple devices brought into the iMessage fold" but then I realized that's not true. I don't care because I'd just use Signal. In fact I still use Signal with some friends that have iPhones. RCS wouldn't change that, it'd either be one more shitty carrier product to avoid or one more shitty Google product that's going to get killed in a few months.
They already have that, with SMS. Perhaps you only exchange messages with people in rich countries so don’t notice what is most commonly implemented by carriers?
Making people switch is possible (use Telegram to chat with me), making a group switch is impossible as there is always at least one person that doesn't want to install a new app or can't (phones with tiny storage.) Anything else is irrilevant in my country. There are probably some friends of mine using iMessage when chatting with somebody they know to have an iPhone. They still to have to use WhatsApp to chat with everybody else.
Is there a way to make an account with Apple that isn't tied to a mobile phone number? If so, I've never been able to find it.
Has Apple fixed the bug where it wasn't relinquishing your phone number and blackholing all iMessages which were supposed to be downgraded to SMS instead?
That said, I don't believe you need to use that phone number for messaging – an email address is used as the contact information when messaging with iMessage. This is especially important for iPads/iPod Touches and Macs, which most don't have a cell phone number.
They fully control those app's access to their store; Apple has full say over which communication apps you install on your iPhone, full-stop.
There are many reasons many IT folks actually prefer an iPhone over Android. The two biggest ones are privacy and security. Google, thus far, takes neither seriously. Google routinely sells your data (including location data, active timestamps for all apps, what you search for, the list goes on), and it routinely has malware show up on the play store. If Google could fix those issues and stop also murdering their various applications every year, maybe they'd be able to compete.
While it may sound like I have a hard-on for Apple products, I really do love Android, I just hate Google.
I'd argue Google competes just fine. If you hate Google, then use AOSP or an AOSP-derived OS; there's not a drop of Google, Apple or anyone code out of the box. Of course, I'd wager that 'privacy and security' don't matter as much to IT folks as brand-loyalty or ease-of-use, so it's all a bit of a moot point in the end. Arguing that either of these OSes is more secure than the other is a bad comedy routine; they're both being spied on by PRISM, they're both vulnerable to NSO Pegasus.
Hmm, as I understand it:
"Timestamps for app usage": notarization checks happen the first time you start a new app, basically like OCSP to enable certificate revocation: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/gatekeeper-and-runt... I dislike online validation and would prefer a revocation list. I also dislike syspolicyd's perpetual, repeated, and CPU-hungry anti-malware scanning. Installing Xcode or enabling developer mode allows pointless online checks to be turned off for scripts in Terminal at least.
"tracks spotlight usage": Siri suggestions https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/siri-suggestions... I usually turn this off.
"Find My": a feature that allows you to go to icloud.com and locate your iPhone if it is lost, and also creates its own ad hoc network for finding iPhones. Probably that involves location information. I usually turn this off.
What I'd like to know is: Is there any evidence that Apple is retaining this information and using it for other purposes, for example to build user-specific profiles for advertising the way Google or Facebook might?
Sure; all sorts of data leaves your iPhone in the form of encrypted channels to Apple servers, whether you have telemetry/analytics enabled or not. When you fully power-down your iPhone with Find My disabled, your Baseband modem is still sending and receiving information from nearby cell towers. Apple has created conduits specifically for harvesting and retaining this data, they wouldn't collect it all if this wasn't the case.
Oh, and if you still don't believe me, you should look into some of the more recent PRISM revelations (eg. how iMessage and Find My can be used by law enforcement), or the ways that the CCP uses the data Apple collects for them. There is nothing besides marketing that suggests Apple has a commitment to privacy or security.
That is not what I hear from people who work there.
> you should look into some of the more recent PRISM revelations (eg. how iMessage and Find My can be used by law enforcement), or the ways that the CCP uses the data Apple collects for them
I'd be interested in references/citations if you have them.
Perhaps not in your country, but they've certainly done it before - censoring Telegram in both Russia[0] and Iran[1], for example.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/technology/telegram-apple... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/world/middleeast/iran-tel...
I've been downvoted to hell for it before, but I'll add mine to this list because I don't _think_ it's all that uncommon either: I don't want another PC to administer and support.
I've had a lot of Android phones over the years (started with the ADP1!). Taking my last one as an example--it stopped receiving updates way too soon. Once apps started breaking, I ended up updating it by putting LineageOS on it. But then my camera never worked right again because apparently there's a driver issue. One time I updated and my microphone stopped working in phone calls so I had to wipe the thing and install an older OS on it...
You know what that sounds like to me these days? _Work_. That's literally the same sort of stuff I'm doing all friggin' day. Between work and my kid I'm lucky if I've got a couple hours a day to portion out to chores around the acreage and maybe whatever I could do ostensibly for fun. The last thing I want is to be obligated to work more because my damn phone is being a PC and doing PC things.
The fact that it's not customizable, not open, and just generally an appliance _is a feature to me_. My five year old phone is still receiving regular updates. I install them, it keeps working. I can't mess with it (and and up breaking things) even if I want to. I don't have to think about how I want the phone to work because it just works the Apple way and if I don't like it I can just get a different phone. If anything ever does go wrong, I don't need to fix it because I _can't_, reimage the phone if that doesn't work then well you're screwed.
Basically, I treat it the same way I do a toaster. It does what it does, there's a single big knob that makes my options clear. If that knob can't make it do what I want then I either learn to live with it or find another toaster. It's never gonna cook a steak for me, and that's fine. I'd rather not have steak or use another device to cook my steak than shun the toaster and try and pan-fry myself toast every morning.
I pay a premium to get an appliance instead of a PC because I _want_ an appliance. I'm happy I can outsource all the decisions and work and keep the brain space free. Sorry if I'm contributing to the downfall of society and freedom or whatever, but I just don't have the time to do anything else anymore.
Part of my original comment:
> I don't have to think about how I want the phone to work because it just works the Apple way and if I don't like it I can just get a different phone.
That's a feature to me. I don't spend any brainspace when I'm using my phone on thinking about things that annoy me or things that could be better. Launcher sucks? Does it suck bad enough to make me switch platforms? No? Then it's not worth worrying about any further and so I won't.
When I used Android, knowing I _could_ fix those annoyances meant I _did_ fix those annoyances. That's just not something important for me to be spending my time on, but I know I will if put in that situation.
It has been a bad thing for me because iOS decided to get me off Whtasapp and forced me using the much worse Apple message system without me having any say in it.
I have a SE and a relatively older iOS version on it, can't remember exactly which one. I don't have internet banking and don't have very much of a financial presence online, and, as such, I don't care that much about security on my phone (hence the older iOS version).
Some time ago I had checked the "offload apps"in case of full disk" option or something like that, with the implicit understanding, from my part, that I could "reload" any of those apps once I would have made enough space available (usually by deleting some older videos and photos). One of those offloaded apps was Whatsapp.
It turns out I cannot "reload" any of those offloaded apps if any one of them doesn't support my iOS version anymore. Whatsapp doesn't support my iOS version anymore, hence I cannot "reload" it, hence I cannot use it anymore. Trying to install the exact Whatsapp "version" that used to worked perfectly fine on my phone is, of course, impossible. This is very unsatisfactory for me.
And back to the subject at hand, of course that Apple can't hold a candle when it comes to more mature messaging systems like Whatsapp (I haven't used Telegram and Signal). The "upload photos" experience in iMessage is day and night worse and less intuitive compared to Whatsapp. I also don't know if iMessage has any builtin groups and, even if it were to have, it would be of no use to me because more than half of my friends and acquaintances don't own an iPhone so they can't use iMessage.
You can – unless the application publisher decides to disable this. It sounds like Facebook disabled your ability to install an older version of WhatsApp that supports the version of iOS you are running. All it would take for this to work for you is for somebody at Facebook to tick a single box that allows their users to do this.
Not sure how that helps users like me, but had you told me 20+ years ago that this was going to be “the state of the art” when it comes to app management (by two of the biggest tech companies in the world) I would have called you crazy. And I was a Windows 2000 user back in those days.
It’s also funny that, in a way, the WhatsApp app was the one that nuked itself. The “full storage” issue had been caused by some of my friends sending constant photos and videos of their cats (and one guinea pig) via WhatsApp, storage gets full, iOS decides to offload the WhatsApp app, I get left out of the app once I’m not allowed to “reload” it anymore. Again, crazy to think that this is the state of the art in app management.
"Want to sideload apps? No problem, just pay us $99/year for temporary installation privileges!"
"Want to sell your app? Here, just give us 30% of your proceeds."
"Running out of storage? Here's a red-dot notification in your Settings app begging you to pay for iCloud."
I don't think any of these companies will (or should) get out of this antitrust litigation unscathed. The amount of control all of these platform-holders exert is unreasonable, and unless the government steps in we're helpless to stop it.
But in the past five years, I have received so much call spam that I just don't answer my phone anymore. Imagine that, the primary use of a phone and it's all cocked up.
Imagine what happens to imessages if they leave it open.
Blame the cretins that spam people.
Since I'm on Android, I'm stuck using SMS a lot, since most people I know have iPhones. I do get some SMS spam, but not a ton, and most of it is auto-flagged and I never see it.
> Blame the cretins that spam people.
SMS and voice call spam is actually a solved problem, but carriers have been dragging their feet implementing the solutions (and have lobbied the US government to give them more time). Killing spam does not require our devices to be locked down. Carriers deserve some blame here too.
But I don't really care about blame, I care about outcomes. Blaming spammers isn't going to fix anything. Forcing carriers to implement the required technical measures to stamp out spam... that could actually work.
Another desperately needed measure is enabling law enforcement to actually fight spam at the root: follow the money. When the spammers can't monetize their spam, they won't have any incentive to spam and scam.
Uncooperative countries (e.g. India, just look Mark Rober's Youtube series where he and a bunch of associates track down and prank scam call centers or Turkey which is the German equivalent) should be sanctioned until they are compliant. Letting spammers, scammers and hackers operate in a foreign country unimpeded should be considered an act of war.
Forcing carriers or anyone to implement technological measures (remember the idea to charge people .5 cents to send out emails?) is a worthwhile effort but it's at the core a band-aid at best and the only thing it achieves is to marginally drive up the cost and complexity of service for everyone else while the scammers simply find workarounds.
So use Android! I have friends with Android. We use WhatsApp abroad and SMS at home. The messages are green and I can't tapback. That's it!
I have multiple group chats running with mixtures of iPhone and Android users.
Yes, I use Android, but would like to also be able to interoperate with iMessage. But I don't want to be stuck in a (for now hypothetical) state where I have to choose between using iMessage and being able to do what I want with my phone.
> We use WhatsApp abroad and SMS at home. The messages are green and I can't tapback. That's it!
SMS has ordering, latency, and delivery issues. You also cannot send media over SMS, and MMS has size limits for media that were set decades ago. Any video you send over MMS will be recompressed to the point where it'll be unwatchable. SMS also does not support group chats. MMS does, but delivery and message ordering issues are even worse there, and group chats are inflexible; for example you can't add new people to an existing group chat, or remove existing people.
I do use WhatsApp, grudgingly, for some people who refuse to switch to something else, but I'd like to reduce my reliance on things owned by Meta/Facebook.
I probably get more of those now than the “we’ve heard that you’ve been in an auto accident that wasn’t your fault” robocalls.
I wonder what different telcos does differently, because I have heard about some countries where you're getting flooder by these things.
And we have a loophole that allows politicians to legally spam whenever they want.
With iOS, you live with what Apple lets you do, and that's that.
That is a personal choice, and I choose to not have spam on my phone. Several months ago I was subjected to a floodgate of good ol' fashioned SMS spam that lasted several weeks. There was no way to stop the spam because the phone was receiving it through the legacy SMS channel coming specifically from Android devices infected with Flubot; the bulk of spam now comes from unpatched Android devices because hardware vendors stop releasing security updates after a short cycle, or due to loose default app permissions set on the device. I ended up creating a support ticket with my mobile telco and soon I received the following reply from a human being:
What you have encountered is, as you may have guessed, not a legitimate SMS notification.
This particular message is designed to entice you to click on a link, and doing so would potentially expose your device to malicious software.
This malicious software is trying to target Android devices, so, if you are an Android user, you should take particular care with such messages.
Note that you may receive this message even if you do not use Android devices - the website link is simply being sent to a number of random telephone numbers in the hopes that an Android user will receive it, and manually bypass the built-in security protections and install the malicious software presented by the website.
In other words, if you use an iPhone, you can still receive these SMS messages (often claiming to be relating to a voicemail or parcel delivery), but there is no direct risk to your iPhone by simply receiving the SMS. Nor is there currently any risk to your iPhone if you happen to click on the link that is in these SMS messages.
If you use Android, you should avoid permitting your device to install any software that did not come from the official Google Play store.
Corporations, such as Google, make decisions for users without getting their consent nor without informing the users. If you sign into a Google account in a web browser on your phone, for instance, the sign-in will also silently and non-consentually sign you into your Google account across all Google apps installed on the device without informing you.
The corporations, good or bad or anything in between, must be bound by the code of conduct they ought not to be allowed to get out from: must request the explicit user consent first.
The problem here is that we are talking about a (possible, hypothetical) measure that blocks spam, but requires phones to be 100% locked down and unmodified from the factory. I categorically refuse to accept that sort of thing. If you will accept that, then you are a part of the problem.
In reality, though, there are plenty of ways to combat spam that do not require us to have locked-down phones and move closer and closer to a corporate nanny state. Your shitty telco is actually fully capable of blocking spam like what you've received, but they have chosen not to.
> Corporations, such as Google, make decisions for users without getting their consent nor without informing the users.
Sure, but at present I can wipe my phone and install GrapheneOS or CalyxOS or whatever, and Google will not be able to make any decisions as to what I do on my phone.
I get that they make other random decisions for us. Sure, that's inevitable. If I want to use Google Docs or whatever, they will make decisions about how my data is used, and what features are present in the product, etc. I accept that, and am ok with that. But if I'm sold a piece of general-purpose hardware, I expect to be able to do whatever I want with it.
> If you sign into a Google account in a web browser on your phone, for instance, the sign-in will also silently and non-consentually sign you into your Google account across all Google apps installed on the device without informing you.
Maybe if you use Chrome, but... I don't. So that doesn't happen to me.
It is a perceived problem specifically for you (and, based on the arguments presented so far, it appears to solely based on the personal dislike rather than on objective grounds). If you refuse to accept it, that is solely your personal choice, and I, for one, have no objections to you being able to exercise freedoms to make your own choice(s).
> If you will accept that, then you are a part of the problem.
You have neither moral nor any other right to inflict the sense of collective guilt upon anyone, including myself, who has an opinion distinct from that of yours. What is an adjudged problem for you, is a feature (and not a bug) for some, and is a conscious compromise for some others. I am in the latter category as I have consciously consented to the trade-off after weighing up pros and cons of alternatives existing at the time – it became my personal informed choice.
> In reality, though, there are plenty of ways to combat spam that do not require us to have locked-down phones …
Combating text message spam requires a non-trackable, universal digital identity which is a non-solved problem. SMS and RCS do not solve this problem as they both allow a digital identity to assume one persona exactly: the device owner's phone number. iMessage, o the other hand, offers a stop-gap solution and allows iMessage users to assume one of the many personas (either a default phone number or one of the email addresses registered with iMessage), and it allows the user to select the specific persona on their own volition. Countering spam is a bonus and optional feature that comes as a byproduct of the iMessage way of tackling the identity management, and is not a requirement. Allowing multiple personas in iMessage also allows the user to disassociate themselves from their phone number, change it however frequently they want yet allow their friends circle and relatives to stay in touch via another persona (email address(es) registered with iMessage) – a useful feature when the iMessage user moves to live overseas.
A successful and a badly needed replacement for SMS (the protocol) will have to solve the identity management problem (as well as a morass of present SMS and RCS security vulnerabilities) first before it can become a viable option. And only then, it will have to be pushed out in a centralised manner (e.g. become a mandatory requirement for all 6G or 7G networks) so that no mobile telco would have a chance to opt out from the text messaging protocol upgrade. The adopotion of such a standard will take years, though, as users won't instantly upgrade their devices overnight, so the interoperability between GSM and new style text messages for some time will look exactly like it does today between SMS and iMessage.
As for Google crying foul on not being to interoperate with iMessage, in reality they are shedding crocodile tears and are not telling you what they actually mean by that. Google wants to track every text message to a user across both major mobile platforms (Android and iOS) AND beyond, which is something they can't do today. SMS does not offer a unique transferrable digital ID (other than IMSI which gets incised out once a message hits the SMSC), therefore Google can't link the user to activities on their smartphone to wider activities across all of their devices and the web as mobile phone numbers are not typically used for web browsing and in general app use.
Apple controls the passage of the Rubikon (iMessage) that, once crossed, would instantaly allow Google to find a creative way to track users, so Google wants that (in the same vein as Facebook does). Yet, Google is being coy about their true intentions.
> I get that they make other random decisions for us. Sure, that's inevitable … and move closer and closer to a corporate nanny state.
I vehemently and vociferously object to corporations encroaching on our larger freedoms, and, regretfully, strict regulation and even stricter enforcement of the regulation appears to be the only way to accomplish it.
> Sure, but at present I can wipe my phone and install GrapheneOS or CalyxOS or whatever, and Google will not be able to make any decisions as to what I do on my phone […] But if I'm sold a piece of general-purpose hardware, I expect to be able to do whatever I want with it.
To the best of my knowledge, nearly no-one (apart from Librem) sells general-purpose smartphones today. Each offering comes with a host of pros and cons, yet none of them are neither marketed nor sold as the general-purpose computing hardware.
Also, the option of wiping an OS is not ubiquitous on Android platforms and some handsets have the hardware that stock and alternative Android distribution may or may not support. Therefore, there is no such a thing as a generic Android phone which is what the majority of Android users have. And no, since you are part of the HN congregation, you are not a representative selection of the Android user base.
Apple, on the other hand, sells a package that happens to have a smartphone (or a smartwatch, or a tablet) and an OS (as a conduit into the package), and the nicely wrapped package has well stipulated constraints that one either takes or leaves. Purchasing an iPhone is not mandatory in any jurisdictions that I am aware of, either, therefore an the act of puchasing one is also a personal and conscientious choice.
> Maybe if you use Chrome, but... I don't. So that doesn't happen to me.
Ha, the classic «it does not happen on my laptop!» remark.
Sarcasm aside, it is more insidious than that. I had to log into Google using my work Google account in Safari on my laptop, but because Safari syncs the browser cookies and local storage across devices via iCloud (it is another feature I have consciously consented to), the Google account cookies have made it into my phone via an iCloud sync. Next time when I opened Google Maps on my phone, it pulled the Google cookie + stuff out of the Safari local storage, and I was then instantly and silently logged into Google using my work Google account (I degoogled myself years ago in favour of paid 3rd party services and no longer personal Google accounts). Such a practice, apart from being blatantly deceitful, is borderline nefarious, so, with all due respect, I do not buy into Google's crocodile tears about iMessage.
If an identity can be verified via a presented assumed persona (supplied as a proxy for the identity in question) as a third party identity verification service call, locking down a device becomes redundant (although the hardware vendor will likely continue to do so for other reasons). It does not seem likely that the identity management is going to be solved any time soon though.
If Apple provides an anti-spam SMS filtering service it is completely orthogonal to how much they decide to handcuff their own users.
SMS is not a platform specific protocol and cell phone numbers have their own independent authority (however dysfunctional it may be). So unless you decide to block yourself from the entire world outside of Apple devices, it has nothing to do with being locked down. Locking down a platform from it's own users does not intrinsically benefit security or spam prevention, saying so is a false dichotomy, no matter how much Apple spins it.
(i) Allow rich non-iPhone messages through for all people.
(ii) As (i) but only for numbers in my contacts list, or who I have replied to.
(iii) Don't allow rich non-iPhone messages. Use SMS.
Why do you present this as a binary choice?
Why do I need to suffer at the whims of your wants and needs? Why are you so hellbent on advertising your opinion in this binary manner? Don’t like iMessage? Use something else. Nobody is stopping you. Why do you feel compelled to bring the conversation back to this weirdly obsessed and diluted dilemma where you see a first party solution and start kicking and screaming incessantly
But you don't own the hardware running iMessage.
SMS on the other hand... but iPhones receive SMS too, don't they?
IMessage is full of profitable phone owners
What's the advantage of iMessage spam? Group chat spam? Higher quality video spam? Is that worth all the effort to do your spamming only on Apple devices?
It's also ignoring the root issue. Adding RCS to iMessages doesn't affect the spam. You'll still get it from both SMS and RCS.
Apple not adding RCS is 100% due to keeping market share.
Consider yourself lucky. I get hundreds.
Of course the real solution should be on the network's end, but not giving out your number to any businesses is probably the best thing you can do while still accepting random texts from anybody.
I used to work at Apple but this messaging stuff is really damning.
My iPhone gets plenty of spam SMS messages, alongside my iMessage chats. The sanctity of iMessage communications doesn't stop that.
Swapping SMS for RCS support messages doesn't increase the spam surface.
Google could have implemented crypto-signed device identifier attestation as a mandatory requirement for RCS, which would have given them considerable leverage against iMessage. Why wouldn’t they? What was more important to them than stopping texting spam?
RCS doesn't belong to Google. It's a standard.
Citation needed.
I don't get random spam on Matrix/Element... it even handles video calls and more...
Do you get spam calls on your iphone?
But seriously, we all know spam and abuse from bad actors is a huge problem for any sort or platform. Email, phone calls, physical mail. Sometimes people will put fliers on your car window to spam it.
Same with VPS providers. Even my router gets random pings and port scans. Forums have to fight bots. It goes on.
I have even gotten iMessage spam, which can easily be reported.
It comes in waves and goes away.
Not true for iMessage at all...
Not sure about the spam thing, after all they also provide a federating email service.
You don't need to stop federation. You don't need device attestation. These don't benefit the user. They are only there to give the platforms more control.
This exists and has existed for years, via the SafetyNet Attestation API [1].
[1]: https://developer.android.com/training/safetynet/attestation
2. I don't think you know what you're talking about. Android supports the device attestation: https://source.android.com/security/keystore/attestation
> ID attestation allows the device to provide proof of its hardware identifiers, such as serial number or IMEI.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-bweeks-acme-device-at...
It feels like you've concocted some narrative to support your incredibly speculative original comment about how Apple does this because spam. You're clearly wrong. You can do attested compute on Android as others have been trying to point out.
Google could have given us device-signed messaging with RCS, so that users and carriers could block devices for spamming regardless of the source address.
Google didn’t. They had the power to do so in RCS using their own APIs, and yet they chose not to offer an effective protection.
How is this failure by Google a selling point for RCS? Why would anyone consider RCS at all without device attestation? We don’t need yet another abuse-laden, unidentifiable-source chat protocol. We need a material improvement in quality of life for users, not a veneer of fancy bells and whistles on top of the same plague of spam as today.
Maybe Google doesn't think you need device attestation to manage spam on a messaging platform. There are numerous examples of apps today that don’t suffer from spam and don’t use device attestation. And there are examples of spam on iMessage.
Furthermore, I can already receive messages on my iPhone from non-iMessage users so I don’t even understand how any of what you’re saying makes sense in the first place. RCS is a protocol (not a platform) that would make the experience of receiving those messages better. It does not add some new attack vector for spammers.
Have you tried using a device with an RCS messenger app and been plagued with spam more-so than on iPhone? I switch between devices all the time and have not noticed any difference.
It’s not about spam. It’s about Apple playing lazy/dirty. Hence the OP.
> If Android wants to join the party, then Android phone builders need to implement secure boot with hardware-signed attestation of non-rooted-ness, in the style of Apple T2 + macOS or Microsoft Pluton + Secure Boot.
You didn't mention device IDs.
It's not that big a problem apparently, and doesn't require giving up that much control.
On the other hand I social never use iMessage. It's not very popular here in Spain at all because of the Apple-only thing. Android is far bigger in marketshare here.
I think the onus is on Apple to open the platform.
This seems to be a strawman - no one is asking for cross-platfrom iMessage, just for Apple to upgrade it's officially-supported cross-platform messaging stack (SMS) from the 90s.
This can't be true. It is trivial to get iMessage working in a macOS VM with randomly generated hardware IDs.
Yes, and that is absolutely fine. Computer freedom is more important than the ability to prevent spam. It should be illegal to prevent the rooting of devices or even put up any roadblocks for the user. It doesn't really matter how much this freedom impacts their networks. The freedom to run whatever software we want and interoperate with everything without being discriminated against should be our inviolable right.
In this state, it would still be theoretically possible to attest to some kind of unique hardware ID, as the Secure Enclave is still locked down. But even if it weren't, it would be good enough to just distribute a unique key with each device. Sure you could take it off the device, but who cares? If it got banned, you'd still need to buy a new device for a new key.
…But given the sibling comment (by pxeboot) about using iMessage in a VM, I'm not sure whether any of this is actually done.
If someone does end up in a spam list (and they don't rack up a high score across multiple targets), let them know they're in such a list and where to start looking to resolve that issue. A good enough solution for this is to have number carriers attest to have verified the government issued ID of the individual in question; and if spam happens shortly after that to yield the government ID number of that individual.
An alternate form I've considered, for email, is to pay a postage (transfer + storage) micro-transaction fee, and possibly an attention fee for prompt review. The custom might be to refund these in cases of legitimate messages.
They'll find another reason not to implement it on other platforms.
Also, since basically every device that receives message also receives sms, isn’t this irrelevant?
This does nothing to protect users from non-Apple devices.
Ah, perfect tracking. Let's add that to Pluton list of promises.
Yet in every thread recently someone spreads FUD how without uncle's Apple protection, bad world will hurt you, when reality shows that's nonexistent problem on other platforms.
> Most businesses, consumers, and developers universally continue to ignore the primary reason that iMessage is a closed platform, rather than an app on every platform as iTunes is: Apple is using device serial numbers for anti-spam.
That statement is false. Primary reason is, that Apple wanted to lock customers in their ecosystem. You can read about it here: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406303/imessage-android...
Also attestation doesn't stop spam (see other responses in this thread) and is harmful mechanism that will lead to more walled gardens.
But there are very important key disadvantages that come with that. And I don't believe fighting spam is Microsofts MO. Just open Edge and look at the ads. This is very close to selling penis enlargement pills.
"device hackers" - seriously? You mean people that like to have control about what their devices do. Installing software you want should never be hacking.
That aside I am very skeptical of forcing Apple to open their messaging. The responsibility to choose a different medium is on the user.
There's the high-level SafeyNet API which essentially lets you assert that you're running on a non-modified device running non-modified software in the context of a verified boot:
* https://developer.android.com/training/safetynet/attestation
It also has the lower-level Keymaster 3 API (since 2017) which provides HSM-signed certificates with the device attestiation extension, including the system trust level and verified device identifiers:
* https://source.android.com/security/keystore/attestation
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-bweeks-acme-device-at...
Microsoft is the one that's late to party... And your hypothesis seems pretty dependent on an argument that Apple can't build iMessaging on other platforms because they're the only platform with device attestation. That's simply not true.
If Apple wanted iMessage on other platforms, they've had at least 5 years to build it in the way you theorize must be required.
Furthermore, others mentioned that a large portion of SMS-spam originates from the FluBot infected Android devices. Well, the only reason FluBot does not infect iPhones is laziness - it is perfectly doable at scale using custom configuration profiles.
In none of these emails is spam or privacy or security even mentioned.
The primary reason Apple is doing it for platform lock-in, plain and simple. They literally said so themselves internally. Any other explanation is fanboyism.
I’m genuinely interested. Do you have a link?
https://twitter.com/techemails/status/1463558823109660677?la...
>short version - don't make mail, calendar, iMessage work on Android and it's impossible to switch
Slightly off-topic, but wow. What an absolutely brilliant twitter account.
Have you used WhatsApp or Telegram? Neither need hardware attestation. No spam, in the decade I’ve used them. I have an iPhone and a Pixel, neither have spam.
Unless the gov allows free-for-all SMS, which is not the case in the continents I’ve lived in. Sounds like a uniquely US problem, which iMessage can’t stop? You still get them, and Apple just hides them in a folder.
What are you on about really?
It is not like other platforms cannot deal with spam...
So I don't think it works.
Though the more I think about it the more I realize that we are indeed already at that point, and people really think that's a good thing. That's really sad to me.
My BS detectors just tripped.
Would you be ok if your home had the same "security" features? Say BigCo home builders install a front door, sensors, cameras and scanners in your home that allow them to monitor track and remotely lock you out of your home, your water and power supply ? Their reason? ... so that they can shutdown "bad neighbors" and keep the neighborhood "clean". And remember there's no fkin way you can get rid of those scanners, cameras and other control mechanisms.
But ya'know they gave you a piece of paper that says "we respect your privacy" with BigCo logo on it ?
I don't get why Apple, MS or anyone should be able to get away with this.
Everyone is familiar with their graveyard of failed messaging applications (along with their graveyard of products generally).
When I had an android phone, I tried RCS with someone else on Android. It never worked. I'm sure it's improved, but as the common theme of this story goes, Google blew their chance.
I also don't trust google to abide by the "standard" they've created. Their track record is abysmal. I don't want to use yet another messaging service that they've built. I don't trust it to exist in the future, receive support and updates, and for it to be maintained. If google abandons it that means the telecoms are stuck holding the bag and when we demand even more from the next iteration of messaging apps, RCS will go the way SMS has today.
This is nothing more than Google reaping the results of their own failures. It's a shame they squandered the opportunity over the last 15 years to develop a cohesive messaging app strategy across their products, but its their shame and now they have to pay the price.
In a last ditch effort they're trying to throw all the blame on Apple who was able to innovate and launch a successful messaging service years ago. Apple recognized that SMS could be improved, and they improved it. They didn't wait for anyone and they recognize the importance of continued support - a quality Google does not seem to foster.
Google had their chance over and over again but they blew it over and over again. I don't care about the little things RCS adds, message bubbles, delivery confirmation etc. These may be nice additions but they truly don't make a large difference. If an Android phone wants to send a high quality image, video etc they can share a link. That's good enough for me.
Google failed, miserably and publicly. This latest campaign is just embarrassing for them.
You literally wouldn't be. You would keep using iMessage. All that would be different is that you could now send images and videos to Android users. Right now you have to switch to another app to do that.
This is not a '"standard" they've created', this is a GSM Association standard, and it would be Apple, not Google, implementing it.
I know because I've got the bill for it.
But to go back to the original point, I don't want google near my chat history. I don't really like Apple having it either.
At some point we should require people to tell us whether they have read the link or not so we can know if it's worth taking their opinions into account.
Ah, yes, the “industry standard” which relies on proprietary extensions made by Google which are only implemented in one of Google’s applications, and whose carrier adoption figures are based on Google hosting the servers.
RCS is better, but don’t oversell this as more than Google’s attempt to pressure Apple into helping them recover from repeated self-inflicted damage. If they hadn’t screwed up their messaging strategy so many times since the 2000s nobody would care about iMessage. We could be using an open cross-platform system if they hadn’t killed that concept trying to force people to use Google+.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...
I said in another comment that Google continuing to call RCS a "standard" is disingenuous. What they're really pushing for is Apple implementing Google's proprietary fork of RCS, where most messages are routed through their own servers. That doesn't sound like a standard to me and I don't see why Apple would/should go for that.
Imagine an alternate universe where they backed a dump truck full of cash over to the Signal Foundation and said “hire all of the developers you need to make first-class desktop clients and add federation for people willing to meet CA-level requirements. We’ll ship integration in Messenger and Gmail this year.” Apple would have a lot more pressure from something which is open and better rather than a marketing play for a Google subsidiary.
Your first paragraph is copied verbatim from Google's marketing material[0] without attribution. I just wanted to point out for anyone out there if you google that phrase you will find it verbatim repeated across the internet. I know this isn't an academic environment - who cares about plagiarism - but just to highlight it as part of media literacy. Your comment is part of a media/marketing campaign, it is not an actual back-and-forth dialogue that one would expect on HN.
I'm saying you should currently use another app if you want to send images or movies, because MMS compresses media beyond recognition.
I don't understand why Apple users are against a simple fix that would let them send these things from inside iMessesage instead?
Why do you think this would let Google have more of your chat history?
I agree
And that's why Whatsapp and maybe Telegram/Signal/etc are the "standards" today
And just to reinforce this, a decade ago Google supported a cross platform messaging standard: XMPP. And then they stopped it https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/google-move....
Hell, Apple doesn't have to ditch iMessage; they just have to support RCS for messaging with Android users, or group messaging with mixed Android/iOS devices.
I would also (grudgingly) accept an opening of the iMessage protocol so Google could implement it in the Android Messages app. Not ideal by any measure, and I figure Apple would never do this (and I suspect Google would hypocritically not want to do this anyway), but it would at least improve things.
The thing that's sad overall is that the current state of affairs is just a result of an anti-consumer corporate pissing match. The only losers here are the users, both on iOS and Android. And meanwhile both Apple and Google get to tout the benefits of their preferred solution as if they're both the good guys, fighting for their users. When in reality they're merely fighting for their own market dominance.
[0] Tying messaging to your carrier is just a continuation of the crappy SMS "portability" experience. Sure, most RCS backend implementations are currently provided by Google, but one thing I'd like to see would be the ability to select your RCS provider. Maybe others would crop up if this were an option, and if RCS were actually popular.
This would be true if Google didn't want to implement the iMessage protocol as you predict; but in the current state of affairs it's just Apple being anticompetitive.
More likely they'd prefer Apple just build a standalone iMessage app for Android. (And I feel like this option would be more palatable to Apple too, if the alternative is opening up the protocol to third parties.)
I do believe, everyone understands how Google is motivated to get hands-on access to iMessage. They have had so many messaging services over the years, that I stopped keeping track already. At the same time iMessage is 11 years old and in good standing.
If you look at the launch date of WhatsApp, you'll see that in fact Apple is competitive. They introduced iMessage two years after WA got it's run.
Google wants us to pick theirs over Apple's. Also note that to my knowledge, RCS is not available in all countries.
The other funny thing is that Google complains about SMS being insecure -- all while RCS does not support end to end encryption. Google Messages added that feature recently relatively (last year? please correct me below) and I still can't understand if it's on by default or not.
Here is a random article about RCS state. Feel free to google for more: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1327240-in-the-us-rcs-text-m...
I would love a common solution, but rationally I can not blame Apple for keeping a (to me from experiencing both) superior experience that brings in customers. And Google has just managed to catch up. Google will need to make their messaging an order or two better, to the point that Apple will have to join.
P.S. Also, I am skeptical any time the phrases privacy, end-to-end encryption, and Google cohabitate the same statement.
(Edit)P.S.2. Just use https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/bluebubbles/9P3XF8KJ... in the meantime.
Ever since I built the product, people have been telling me SMS is obsolete and RCS is coming (4 years now). Google bought Jibe Mobile in 2015, if you go to the Jibe website and try to submit their "Get Started" form there is an error.
I have tried to get in touch with carriers to find out how to connect up RCS from my product (because hey, don't want to get behind the 8 ball) and haven't found any way to get it set up, even when asking my upstream providers.
I really don't think RCS is going anywhere, but if it is, it would be good to be able to build it into my product!
Why does it work today? After years of begging Google gave up and put all their users without carrier support (basically everyone) onto a Google RCS instance.
Despite how the article tries to portray things in many ways it’s iMessage but worse. With Google running everything it might as well be proprietary. And it lacks full E2E encryption.
Things probably would’ve been better off if Google had just stuck to their own private protocol and used that instead, perhaps opening it.
Vodafone has this business RCS page:
https://www.vodafone.com/business/carrier-services/messaging...
and they "launched" in 2018, but from what I can tell still no-one is using it.
There's a lot of confusion around it.
> There's a lot of confusion around it.
The story of every feature introduced by telcos in the last 100 years that goes beyond voice calls or text messages.
* All of the major US carriers announced that they'd ship Google Messages by default on android phones (including RCS). I believe Verizon was the last one [1].
* Google enabled end-to-end encryption by default for 1:1 chats [2]. They've said that e2e for group chats is coming later this year [3].
* Samsung replaced their own messaging client with a tweaked version of Google Messages on the S22 (edit: in the US) [4]. Samsung Messages already supported RCS, but I'm not sure if it supported Google's extensions like e2e.
And as others have mentioned: this isn't about Google wanting Apple to replace iMessage with RCS; it's about Google wanting Apple to support RCS as iMessage fallback in addition to the existing SMS support. Apple to Apple would certainly still be iMessage.
1: https://9to5google.com/2021/07/20/verizon-will-adopt-google-...
2: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/google-enables-end-t...
3: https://9to5google.com/2022/05/11/google-messages-rcs-group-...
4: https://www.androidpolice.com/samsung-galaxy-s22-series-ship...
Edit: I am not sure I understand why the downvote. Also disagreement should not be expressed with downvote. I was stressing that my point (and Apple's I guess) is it doesn't make business sense what Google is asking.
Supporting RCS (again, in addition to iMessage) would make their product better: it would allow higher quality media to be sent to and received from non-Apple users; it would allow for typing indicators and read receipts with non-Apple users; and (perhaps most importantly) it would allow - if Apple adopted Google's extensions - e2e encryption with non-Apple users. Apple loves privacy, after all.
It also hurts them because it decreases their network effect. If people do not encourage each other to move to iMessage because RCS is more available, fewer users switch to iPhones.
Haven't received an SMS from a real person (in other words, all SMSes I get are 2FA etc) for, at least 5 years, maybe 10.
Even people who use iPhones don't send SMSes, MMSes or anything as obsolete (including RCS). Everyone just seems to use WhatsApp and Telegram (or if they don't know any better, Viber). Locale: Central Europe.
So, why would anyone stick to the obsolete stuff? Are there regions of the US which have cell phone signals but no Internet access?
Personally I have one person in my contacts who's not in the US. This is someone I communicate with about twice a year, and we do indeed use WhatsApp for that.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_country_calling_codes
But as other comments mentioned, the number of people I "text" with regularly without a U.S. phone number / the ability to send and receive SMS is very small.
NYT had an article about this recently- https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/02/technology/sms-whatsapp.h...
For people close to me, I insist on the use of signal, but I don't have that kind of social capital with every single acquaintance.
Sure it was exciting at first when the first 3G colour display phones with cameras were a thing, but the cost and size limits were prohibitive when proper smartphones came on the scene.
I'm amazed it's still a thing in some port of the world.
TelCos just prefer to use the Internet. And I agree.
It clearly shows that people in Europe, South America and Africa are huge users of WhatsApp and only 18% use it in the US.
given that undercurrent of expense, I'm still not sure why the US hasn't moved to whatsapp/signal/other. The only thing I can think of is that mobile data is even more expensive.
On top of that, most people don't really care and read whatever comes in regardless of the format.
MMS was a failed concept, and so is RCS. Not because the technology is fundamentally bad, it's the implementation that is fundamentally flawed by keeping telcos in the loop. The only reason SMS didn't die is purely by accident: it was included as some sort of auxiliary technical channel, not really intended as a means of chatting with other people. Heck, it was almost not even included in the GSM standard and mostly thought of as a useless waste of protocol specification. This made it unattractive to market or monetise at first, and later on with the whole ringtone/bitmap mess around the 00's it only enjoyed a short bubble of commercial exploitation.
The cost, and the limited format then caused the likes of BBM and even MSN for mobile to be used as true chat replacements, except in the USA. That was around the same time as the flop that was MMS. Then WhatsApp (and others) came along and by then the whole telco legacy mindset finally caught up and it was way too late. Then Apple came around and a decade later finally RCS was invented at some sad endeavour to get back in the loop as a telco.
Similar things were tried to 'replace' email etc. in the AOL days, which also turned into a big flop.
MMS was never designed to be used for group chats. It was a clever implementation by Apple which made it become the standard for cellular group chats once every other platform copied it.
It’s just one tech that works on all phones. I don’t even mind if its missing five million emojis or things like that.
None of my contacts gave consent for me to share their private information.
This is the leading surveillance capitalism company trying to lay the groundwork to break the privacy of Apple's messaging system, demanding that Apple give up the privacy that it provides its paying customers, because it is intolerable to Google that there exists data that it doesn't have access to.
The rest is noise from morons who think that you don't deserve privacy unless you sysadmin your phone to an NSA standard, and people who work in adtech.
Also number of times per week there are posts complaining about current state of capitalism in US, but then if walls of garden built by company with one of the highest valuations in history are endangered, hundreds of cultists will defend them with fire in their eyes and little merit in their words (see recent threads about EU legislation).
SMS not in used a lot in Europe doesn't mean the world is not using it.
Yes, there are huge swaths of the U.S. that are lightly covered and don’t support Internet applications. I was in Marin County, CA (just north of San Francisco) last year and regularly saw 0 bars of 4g. At those times only SMS got through to friends and family (Messages app falls back to SMS if there is insufficient bandwidth for iMessage).
These things are highly localized.
I have never even considered downloading an app to text people… because I just text them. I’ve never understood or needed something different. I’m only now piecing together that this is an American thing though.
> Everyone just seems to use WhatsApp and Telegram (or if they don't know any better, Viber).
To remark that Telegram by default is not E2E encrypted, you need to explicitly start a "secret chat". And group chats are not encrypted as well. And when you start a secret chat it uses Telegrams "probably maybe secure, but possibly not because it's a non-standard in house built" encryption scheme with weird choices.
I absolutely love Telegram, but I will also definitely not use it for anything more confidential than mindless chatter and cat pictures".
I think a major factor is that Apple/iOS has a much lower market share vs. Android here, so iMessage was never a viable option unless you wanted to reach only 20% of your contacts.
Group chats? Totally plain text in the clear. No encryption at all.
RCS is not good enough. Fix the issues, develop something better, I don’t care.
Only E2E is good enough.
The actual "open" parts of RCS don't seem any better.
I believe Google will share their E2E spec with others. They published an overview a while ago [1], but presumably they'd offer more to someone wanting to actually implement it.
1: https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf
Sorry to pick and choose from your comment. Like I said, the other points are definitely valid. It's just this feature I don't understand bringing up.
But then Allo and Duo came along. Remember Allo? Me neither! It was Hangouts' death sentence anyway! And now Duo is being rebranded/merged into Meet for some reason.
Get out of the Google ecosystem wherever you can. They're only getting worse.
> missing read receipts and typing indicators
Life is better without both of these.
> no texting over Wi-Fi
This claim was odd. I visited Europe a few months ago and definitely sent/received SMS over wifi using my iPhone.
> When people with iPhones and Android phones text each other, Apple relies on SMS and MMS, outdated systems which do not always support texting over wi-fi. That means if you don’t have a cellular network connection, depending on your carrier and situation, you may not be able to send and receive texts.
Oh, so the claim was deliberately misleading. That's not a good way to build trust.
Are you certain? From what I understand about how SMS works, I don’t see how that’s possible. Apple’s own docs also appear to suggest that SMS-over-WiFi won’t work: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207006
EDIT: I searched harder and found “VoWiFi”. It looks like this can support SMS and is supported by iOS. TIL.
Essentially VoWifi connects to your ISP via a IPSec VPN using secrets derived using your sim card as a smart card, then connects to a internal SIP server and voila.
I spent a lot of time trying to connect to the IPSec server from a computer, but couldn't figure out how to get the challenge solved by my sim. Gosh I wish I could make normal calls from my computer.
But 5G is mainly done on 3.5Ghz and that's tough yes. Of course they can use the same frequencies for 5G. Though the bandwidth at such low frequencies is limited, and thus the maximum speeds.
Between NYC/SF, I do not know a single person that does not use both iMessage and WhatsApp. But typically it is people who are not children of immigrants and whose social circles have no one outside the country that tend to not have WhatsApp.
SMS is crap for group chats, and imessage doesn't work if someone in the group isn't using ios.
Now, you absolutely might not care about those things, but millions of people definitely do.
SMS doesn't do group chats; I think you're thinking of MMS. I agree that it's not a great experience, though.
> Group messages to anyone regardless of platform.
That's the thing though; that's not true. WhatsApp might be available on both Android and iOS, but it only works if the person you want to talk to has it installed and has set up an account. That requires coordination. If I meet someone new and want to get in touch with them, I'm going to ask for their phone number (or email address). I'm not going to ask them which messaging apps they have installed so we can figure out which one(s) we have in common.
Sure, if later on I want to start a long-running group chat including this person, I'll absolutely go to the effort of finding a common chat platform that is not MMS, because MMS is terrible. But if I'm only doing 1-on-1 conversations, or just short one-off group chats, I won't bother.
(Interestingly, for some people, even though I have group chats with them on an alternate platform, I'll still message them 1-on-1 using SMS. Not sure why that's the case, and it's not universal. I guess it's just whatever we'd gotten used to, and saw no need to change.)
Sure, if I want to send someone videos, or do regular group chats, I'm going to find an alternative platform. But if it's just a casual contact, or I don't anticipate needing these things, I'll just stick with SMS.
90% of my time is spent copying and pastingl...help me.
Not having any friends makes this less of a burden than you might think.
https://support.google.com/messages/answer/10252671?hl=en
I think this is exclusive to Jibe and Google Messages but a widespread (in terms of installs) proof-of-concept is still pretty cool, and better than nothing.
The bigger problem is adding E2E to SMS is going to attract the FBI's ire, they really really really like reading everybody's texts.
80% is not an edge case.
Agreed that the person you replied to did not specifically mention the US, but their comment is consistent with a US user's experience, which makes sense since the thread is about US messaging.
Someone asks:
> I still don't get why people use SMS/MMS anyway?
Someone responds:
> [I use SMS/MMS because] Almost nobody I know uses WhatsApp.
You respond:
> Your bubble is not representative of the whole world though.
Not only did the responder not claim for their bubble to represent the world, but it doesn't matter in any case. The set of people they'll be messaging on their phone is largely constrained to their "bubble." If nobody in their bubble uses WhatsApp, then why would they install WhatsApp?
As for the meta discussion revolving around the US: just because nobody mentioned it doesn't mean that's not obviously the central focus of this comment thread. If someone's bubble contains no WhatsApp users, you can be 99% sure that they are American. The US is the main place where platforms like WhatsApp have not been widely adopted. iPhones are extremely popular there, and iMessage is widely used. It's a country of over 300 million people where the vast majority of residents don't communicate with people outside the country.
They don't. At least not in my experience. I have an iPhone, but there's about a 50/50 split ios/android in my friends and family.
Group chats are almost entirely WhatsApp, and single messages are a blend of WhatsApp, iMessage and SMS.
I probably use SMS/MMS once a week
I've managed to move a few of the 1-on-1 chats to Signal, but not many.
I wonder if that's a US based thing (I'm in NZ)?
> But if I send him a text from Europe to the US, I pay 1 damn euro per delivered text
How the tables have turned! It's no secret that the US has more expensive cellular plans than the rest of the world, but with my carrier, international texting is free.
If there were a single 3rd-party messaging platform that I trusted, and my friends started using it, sure. But since 75% use iPhones/iMessage, and the rest SMS, why in the world would I use WhatsApp?
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408818454938-...
Prior to business features a long time ago they used to charge a one time $1 fee to download then $1 per year.
But that's the case for any business, even one for which users directly pay for the service.
Example: https://www.telkomsel.com/en/tariff
A text costs you Rp 350.
Messaging is already extremely fragmented. BB is only the eighth messaging app on my phone. Considering getting on Beeper to consolodate this madness. Matrix/Element was too rough to utilize as is.
Almost everyone I text with is on iMessage in the US. 95% or more of my regular contacts. Many are often outspoken about their cult like allegiance to iMessage. Finally some respect.
The look on their face when I send them an iMessage from my Galaxy is priceless.
Now, nearly all of the SMS messages I get are spam. Google Messages and the phone companies are pathetic at stopping them.
I know it's rough setting up but there's a really great ansible playbook that makes it easy to maintain. I really love having all my messaging consolidated and not having all those privacy-invasive apps on my phone. Having my chats all in one big database is another boon.
The playbook doesn't support mautrix-imessage but that's because that needs to be run on macOS.
That iPhone thing was something they did in the beginning, before they used the name Beeper, I forget the name they used.
I like the idea of Beeper but self-hosting is important to me, so I use the ansible playbook instead. For hosted services there's also Element One by the way, though that doesn't include the iMessage bridge.
Well, technically it was relayed through your Mac. Not sure how many Galaxy users have Macs to send message through, so I’m not sure it’s a workable solution for most.
I'm a Google phone user on Google Fi, and make heavy use of the web app (message.google.com/web) in addition to texting via the phone. Once you get a long conversation history, the phone experience becomes poor - conversations won't load, messages won't send - and the web will often lose sync and need to be re-paired (which may or may not itself work). On top of that, some days messages just will not send quickly, not over wifi or 5g, to the point that it's too hard to converse via text and we just give up.
Google has an alternative configuration for Fi users, btw: you can do all your calls and texts through Fi, have Fi store your messages and voicemails, etc. Except you have to turn off RCS for this, because Fi doesn't support it. So you get the SMS/MMS experience they are complaining about, and on top of that they convert all your audio and video to 3gpp and downscale the heck out of it such that it's nearly worthless.
Who knows what's realistically possible but I wonder if Google is going about this the right way. Call up Tim Cook and say we'd like to give Android users a better messaging experience, how can we work with you to do that. Don't try to embarrass Apple into helping you - Apple very likely does not care - and certainly if you're going to point out where their choices lead to a worse experience for your users, make sure you're not doing the same thing.
I would encourage anyone who is curious to read more about it. It’s taken so long to gain traction that it has also become somewhat legacy. Also, it still requires a carrier sponsored phone plan? How is this “modern” in comparison to say every other carrier agnostic messaging app in existence?
Also this: https://twitter.com/RonAmadeo/status/1480679515298934786
XMPP is dead for reason, stop trying to bring it back
There is a mismatch between iMessage (Apple) and RCS (Google's flavour of the month). To the point where there is almost no sensible interoperability between the two.
All XMPP does is provide answers to "If I want to implement feature X, how should that look on the wire".
Just as the XMPP Standards Foundation annually publishes the recommended baseline feature sets for XMPP clients, it wouldn't be hard for Apple and Google to follow that or (more likely) agree on their own baseline for interoperability between the two ecosystems.
As I always say when this comes up: the wire protocol is of least concern - it's not the reason these businesses don't prioritize interoperability. No protocol engineering can magically fix that.
Yeah, it’s dead. Maybe XMPP supports shiny stuff. But no client or server support them, and if they do it’s like they don’t understand the spec the same way.
A protocol should not be extensible, it should be full featured and regularly updated to include new needs. It should also propose a reference implementation and an official client so that there’s a clear baseline.
Matrix is doing it way better than XMPP ever did.
If you ever have multiple independent implementations a single monolithic spec will always only be partially supported (or there is only a single useable implementation like Synapse), so no different than having extensions.
Matrix is properly standardised at https://spec.matrix.org by a non-profit foundation: https://matrix.org/foundation. Just because the core team created a startup to fund our work (3 years into the project) doesn’t make it “a product by a single VC funded startup” - especially when there are hundreds of independent companies building on the standard. Meanwhile empirically synapse, dendrite and conduit can all talk fine to each other and we haven’t seen any fragmentation yet.
If you want to complain about something, go attack the closed cabal of RCS or the hypercapitalism silos of FAANG - and leave us the hell alone.
Instead I think constantly reinventing the same thing with slightly different, incompatible primitives is hurting the ecosystem a lot more.
Bridges also won't solve this. The matrix.org XMPP implementation (besides not being mentioned anywhere, not even in the Matrix FAQ about XMPP) is almost unusable and I suspect it will never allow for encrypted communications or A/V calls.
Putting a notification on "matrix" on HN so you can jump on every critic and yell "leave us the hell alone" is not kind.
I'd rather have 5 IM apps on my phone than have one and have no idea how my message shows up to the other person. I like that I can use the best app for the job. I mostly talk to people on telegram but if I want to do a voice chat or share my screen, I switch to discord. It's very frictionless and modern OSs allow you to receive notifications while the app is not actually running so it consumes no resources.
Also, Google really aren't in a position to lecture anyone on this topic, given their N+1 approach to messaging services.
The problem with RCS is that the solution has been stuck in GSM consortium hell for over a decade.
I mean...are they?
If Google were serious about pushing a new standard, and were willing to actually push it on the carriers, they have plenty of money, reach, and clout to make their point heard loud and clear. That would be triply true if it weren't a "new standard" that was yet another transparent attempt to gather more data from users.
And even if Google pushed a new, better standard (than RCS) on the carriers, Apple could (and probably would) still refuse to implement it.
Yet again I recall the deal with the devil Apple did with AT&T, giving them a year or two of exclusive rights to sell the iPhone in return for having exactly zero control over the device. That was an excellent trade. Before 2007, carriers were intrusively involved with all aspects of a mobile phone.
Are they, though? Google absolutely could have implemented an iMessage competitor, directly in the stock Android Messages app, and then required third-party Android manufacturers to include it as the stock SMS/MMS/"gMessage" app as a part of Android conformance testing.
But no, instead they choose to play games with Allo, Duo, Hangouts, Chat, etc., all of which are an optional download and need not be included in the stock install. And even if/when they are required, it's still an extra app that a user has to find, and understand why they should use it.
Now, I don't want them to do this. I want them to promote and support a federated, open standard; I don't want another iMessage. RCS is not great for many reasons, but at least it's not a walled garden.
One of them works with RCS! Yay!
The second hasn't enabled RCS for some reason. (Or he has -- I haven't asked him -- but for some reason the machinery in between hasn't figured out that we're both RCS-capable.)
The third has enabled RCS, and the messages I send to him go over RCS, but when he replies, they go over SMS/MMS. No idea why.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_18_...
Yes.
I can think of one: most people’s email identity is subject to termination under Google’s ToS. Same thing with identity tied to Facebook or other social networks. In the US, your ability to take your phone number to a different carrier is protected by federal regulations.
It may not be perfect but it is better than what Apple is doing now.
While it does lock you out if you don’t pay, at least you won’t be locked out by accident since you can generally prove your identity to the carrier. This obviously is a con (sms hijacking) but for many people it’s much more important.
Not to mention the importance of phone numbers being basically universal which is why 3rd party messaging apps haven’t totally replaced sms. RCS has the potential to do so, or at least cut down on sms usage further.
Wow. I can't really come up with anything creative to blame Google for this one. Whatever you want to say about Google's messaging mess and RCS - Apple seems to go out of their way to make it inconvenient to text with Android users.
Also it doesn't sound like Google's asking Apple to give up iMessage - just that they use RCS instead of SMS/MMS to talk to Android users. Not an unreasonable ask given RCS is likely to be a widely adopted standard and an non-trivial improvement over SMS.
Edit: Color aside, the read receipts, MMS quality, Wifi send etc all seem worth fixing with RCS.
I've only seen it brought up in internet tiffs about how Apple is using green message bubbles to "shame" non-Apple users. Which is similarly straw-graspy.
Conversely if you're a parent with a distraught teenager being teased about this, I imagine that's cold comfort.
Why Apple’s iMessage Is Winning: Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
The colours do not pass the A11Y standards, which means people with poor eyesight can't read the messages properly.
This did made me curious to see if the blue background passes - and it doesn't either. https://color.a11y.com/ContrastPair/?bgcolor=047aff&fgcolor=...
At least the blue background passes WCAG AA with larger sized text, while the green doesn't pass at all.
(Same result using #64C567 for the green bubbles, which a sibling pointed out is the correct value.)
If you send a message via SMS/MMS to an iPhone user, it's green.
There is no detection if the user on the other end is an Android user.
@Time0 -> Priority1=X, Priority2=Y
@Time1 -> Priority1=X, Priority2=Z, Priority3=Y
Across this timeframe, Y's priority was lowered from P2 to P3, because the org intentionally decided to make Z a higher priority.
One could argue that improving this experience was never in their priority list; but as long as product leaders in the org knew about it; its the same thing. Letting something linger in the backlog, and intentionally deciding to never add it to the backlog in the first place, are identical.
I don't know about "maleficence", but intentional: Yes. Cognizant inaction conveys intentionality.
He's pointing out that Apple considered green originally the best background color for texting, and then added their own protocol with a blue background.
So it's not like they deliberately relegated SMS to green because they were certain blue was better; if they believed blue was superior, they'd have used it from the beginning.
Regardless, they could improve it at any time, yet its been like this for... a decade now? Cognizant Inaction Is Intention. It doesn't matter why it is how it is; they can make it whateverthehell they want, they run the code, they run the org, they got the keys to production, so: fix it!
The original color may not have been malicious, but it WAS DELIBERATE. Every design decision at Apple is deliberate; to assert otherwise is to be revisionist. Cognizant Inaction Is Intention. Its color was deliberately chosen originally; its color was deliberately changed; their inaction in fixing the accessibility issues that change created is Deliberate, because Cognizant Inaction is Intention.
[1] https://d2bs8hqp6qvsw6.cloudfront.net/article/images/750x750...
As others point out, there are accessibility options for people who want more contrast (and which benefit users with trouble reading these outbound messages in far more useful places).
For direct messages, the colored bubbles are only used on messages you send. Messages received are always white text on black background (dark mode) or black text on grey background (light mode).
edit: my bad. "increase contrast" option is on, set years ago.
[1] https://medium.com/@krvoller/how-iphone-violates-apples-acce...
https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/B3-CB781_1017ST_2_...
My contrast tool says the blue contrast is 3.4:1 while the green is 1.9:1
But it's not just you! The green on Google's site looks visually brighter because the entire bubble is on a blue background. On iPhone, the green is normally on a white background.
Now, try setting your iPhone to Dark Mode in Settings, and you'll find that the green bubbles are still #48dd8f green and the text is still #ffffff pure white; it's harder to read on a black background, IMO.
On the page: #75d993
In the video: #58bf5d
From my iPhone (iOS 15.6): #317332
Edit: scratch that! Apparently I turned on “increase contrast” years ago.
Maybe a personalization option?
This quoted bit is actually incorrect. All messages from android and from iMessage are in identical gray text bubbles.
The blue/green bubbles are for your own sent messages only
Before iOS 5, and the release of iMessage, all messages on iOS were green.
That Google is painting this as something else speaks to how disingenuous this whole conversation has gotten, in all corners.
You have no idea how much of a hot topic this is I modern bullying
You can send SMS messages to Apple devices, from an Apple device, if you're not signed into iMessage, or they're not, or if your data connectivity is limited, or theirs is.
Bullies will always find something to bully others for, thats why they are bullies and not just expressing a preference.
I’m fairly convinced the bullying problem is a result of a society who treat kids as their parent’s property instead of communal property. Parents enable bullying.
And additionally, you're asserting that its impossible to change or improve? That its just such an intractable problem which we inherited, and changing it would be such a herculean effort that its not worth moving the needle on?
I've never seen the codebase for the iOS messages app. I believe, even acknowledging that, its probably an absolute mess of legacy code, and I have a ton of sympathy for the developers working on it. I also believe, even acknowledging that, that changing one color is something an intern could do (and because its a big tech product org, there'd be fifty user studies and three orgs of product managers involved and Tim Cook would get a say in it, but those are manufactured problems. Also, let's be clear; if Jobs were still alive & in control, even all those manufactured roadblocks would be torn down, if it were a change he cared to prioritize, because that's the kind of leader he was).
Inaction is Intentional. Inaction is Intentional. Inaction is Intentional.
Then a decision was made that iMessage messages would be blue.
I'm asserting this was not done with animosity. It was a decision by Apple's UX team to make it easy to visually identify the difference between the message mechanics and capabilities of the end-user.
It is remarkably simple, effective and easily understood.
If Apple chose to make it so there was no visual distinction between the message sending mechanisms, that would be a worse, and more confusing, user experience.
If Apple changed the colors, whatever the new colors they chose to use would just be the new focus of the debate. It would become "Orange Bubbles vs Blue Bubbles" or "Purple Bubbles vs Blue Bubbles". People would argue that Apple chose the new color based on some secondary negative characteristic of the new color, just as they do today with green.
Now compare it to green bubbles today. Anyways, when I had iPhone, flat green bubbles annoyed me. Not because "hurr-durr I have a iPhone and you don't" but because SMS lacked many features and was hella slow to send. Plus, pretty much anywhere I lived I had horrible cellphone reception which made sending SMS a nightmare.
Also, I'm not asserting that Green is bad. The issue is the shade of Green, and the a11y issues it creates. I don't know how you jumped on "entirely different colors" or "the same color"; Android's criticism in the original article is very clear, its an a11y contrast issue with the light green background and white text. That's it. Nothing else.
This issue is, seriously, a lot simpler than you're exploding it to be. Make it 10 shades darker; done. They even have an option in their accessibility settings to make it so. This is a simple change, any a11y expert (including, maybe, the MANY apple themselves employs) would say the way it stands today is bad, but their inaction conveys intention.
They are not "inactive".
(It's also important to remember that the "green bubbles" applies to messages sent, not received. Received texts, no matter to mechanism, are either black text on grey, or white text on near-black depending on Dark mode)
The green is inherited from iChat on Mac OS X, which used black text for the green bubbles: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/revie...
About 1 in 12 males are colorblind. I’m in this group.
I find white text on a bright green background very difficult to read.
This is not up to Android, it is up to Apple how their UX displays texts to non-Apple users.
I do agree that the green bubbles aren’t great looking but thats what they chose for iOS even prior to iMessage existing.
This isn't a good answer. We can use sensible attractive UI/UX defaults without being exclusive.
The thing with accessibility is that it does affect everyone.
If you get woken up by a call and open iMessage in the middle of the night, being able to read the message accurately while blinking away eye gunk matters.
Better contrast helps you read your text message if your phone is on a table across from you lying flat.
There's going to be times you're trying to read a message and your phone won't be 100% in front of you at arms length and you are able to take the time to bring the phone into focus with proper lighting around you.
If you get woken up by a call and open iMessage in the middle of the night,
being able to read the message accurately while blinking away eye gunk matters.
I still believe this is an issue. Colorblind or not, everyone probably has had difficulties reading their phone in direct sunlight. But these are seriously not insurmountable technical problems at all and the excuse is pretty weak.
What if 3 in 12 who aren’t colorblind find it easier to read white on green?
Not everything is worthy of a social justice battle.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
Regardless if they read the article or not, they were addressing one specific complaint which is unrelated to the others.
The real issue is that Apple has to have some fallback protocol for texting with non-iMessage devices, but refusing to upgrade the fallback protocol beyond SMS/MMS makes the texting experience worse for everyone, as described in the article.
(To avoid additional red herrings. No one is thinking here about opening up iMessage itself to non-Apple clients, just upgrading the fallback option. Also, I can't speak for everyone, but among the non-terminally-online Gen Xer and late-Millennial Americans I know, "texting" means using the built-in app on your phone. Switching to another app is a relationship step. Many of them are blithely unaware that they can't "just" text a photo or video to me or other Android users, nor that I can't just sign out of a group chat when I feel like it.)
Edit to add: those bubbles are green too. That’s what the bubble colors really mean. Blue and green are not iPhone vs Android, it’s iMessage (end to end encrypted) vs SMS (less secure, less private).
Besides the other issues... as soon as I heard that adolescents and teens (i.e., hyper-self-conscious, wanting group acceptance, figuring out social status) would be appearing differently in chats with schoolmates, based on whether they used Apple or non-Apple... that sure is a way to sell them Apples.
And then they leave them plugged in at home and forward the messages to their Android device.
Just so that they show up as a blue bubble on their friends phones.
Not to mention that Apple's messaging is hideously broken in more ways than Android integration. iMessage will simply delete your phone number from its "can be reached at" list, which breaks years-long threads with a single (iPhone-using) friend into inexplicable new threads.
Ever go overseas? Try putting a local SIM into your USA phone somewhere else, and watch your phone "forget" all of your contacts. Seriously: WTF? Suddenly all of your contacts are unrecognized by number. It's idiotic.
I have a paid-up developer account, so you can be assured that I filed a well-supported bug report on it.
First, RCS is not a very modern or practical standard. It was created in 2008 by carriers (GSMA!!) for their SMS/MMS centric (at the time) platforms. So is it a good idea to adopt this more than a decade later? I don’t think so.
Second, it’s really not Apple’s fault that Google has failed to come up with a messaging solution. Google has released 13 separate messenger apps since 2011!
“Right now, Google runs three mainline messaging apps: Besides this Google Messages/RCS platform, there's also Google Chat, which is a more traditional over-the-top messaging service, and Google Voice, which is a Google-provided phone number with SMS. Google Hangouts is technically still around as the fourth messaging app, though that's shutting down in November. There are also siloed messaging apps built into Google Maps, Google Photos, Google Stadia, Google Pay, Google Assistant, and Google Phone, and none of them talk to each other.
Google's head of messaging also quit last month, so there's no telling what the future of Google messaging holds until someone takes the reins. I would suggest Google get its house in order before it starts throwing rocks at Apple.” https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...
Is a standard from the 90s acceptable then? Do we say Apple shouldn't migrate to USB-C since it's old-ish? A standard being around a long time is a good thing, but when a better one comes along I don't see what excuse Apple has to not migrate (besides anti-competitiveness, which is a really good reason I suppose).
>Second, it’s really not Apple’s fault that Google has failed to come up with a messaging solution. Google has released 13 separate messenger apps since 2011!
The argument in the article could be made irrespective of Google. The article isn't saying "Apple isn't playing nice so use our stuff instead", it's a critique of an obvious attempt by Apple to build a walled garden around messaging. Google is arguing for a standard adopted across the industry, not one of their many messaging apps.
All that Google is asking is for the fallback to be at least in the current century, is that too much to ask.
Prior to the invention of iMessage - (iOS 6?) - all iPhone texts were this colour of green. It was the same no matter who you texted.
This means Apple never intentionally designed the green bubbles to be more difficult to read.
https://www.gottabemobile.com/how-to-tell-if-youre-sending-a...
White text on green is significantly different - the older green bubbles with black text are noticeably clearer IMO, even if I also find it unlikely it was done deliberately to make SMS look bad. That said, Apple will certainly be aware of the cultural thing of the green vs blue bubbles given major news outlets have written on it (in the US anyway), so...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
Incoming messages are always black on grey, for SMS and iMessage both.
If the color scheme actually impacts legibility, it would only affect messages which you yourself wrote. It wouldn't have any effect on legibility of messages other people wrote, where that really matters a lot more.
I got the impression RCS de-facto depends on Google servers in some way. Can someone confirm if that's the case?
https://pocketnow.com/why-you-should-probably-avoid-googles-...
Google has exactly zero credibility here. Look how many messaging platforms they've created and killed off. Who's to say Google won't kill off RCS when they get a chance?
If Apple implemented support, they would have their own server, they wouldn't use Jibe or the carrier's.
Sure, there are tools to intercept SMS without the user noticing, but as a second factor an attacker still doesn't have access to other factors.
The successor RCS has the problem that users cannot reset the password. If you are compromised you need to urgently contact your ISP.
Why can't I message between WhatsApp and an RCS client. Or any other chat technology, how about Google Chat to RCS, or Slack to RCS, or anything else.
Their examples for 'the modern standard adopted by most of the mobile world': Motorola, OnePlus, Google Pixel, Samsung, Snapdragon are all providers of Android phones, so clearly they would use the default Android messaging service.
I have a few folk (mostly family) who uses Apple messaging, everyone else seems to be on WhatsApp.
Don't forget Android has over 80% world-wide market share.
My point still stands they are saying adopt our technology, but being disingenuous by calling it a standard.
Besides that how many people are using WhatsApp instead on both iPhone and Android.
It is supported by many companies, one of which is Google.
(Actually, in hindsight it isn't that surprising. Tech companies only make the money they do because of the lack of consumer protections... so definitely in most HN'ers interest to keep the status quo.
FWIW, the only reason cookie banners are annoying is because the sites intentionally made it that way to bully you into allowing 3rd party cookies. EU regulations allow a site to not have banners if 3rd party tracking is opt-in. They could easily do it via a separate settings page. They only chose the banner because they want you to keep tracking cookies on and the annoying banner results in a higher rate of people agreeing to be tracked at the cost of annoyance (which is somehow respun to be directed to the policy not the site owners). Imagine if every time you enter a business you were asked to sign a liability waiver. That's what cookie banners are.
(You do not have to have a banner if all the cookies you use are first party "essential for functionality" cookies)
It should be a consistent browser-based preference that makes it impossible for a website to do something that I told it not to do. The problem with that is it requires innovation because cookies have inherent privacy design flaws. When you can't innovate, legislate.
As a regulatory body, what else can they do...? In fact, I actually see this as a good thing.
You should think of regulation as an abstraction, an interface, a contract, that defines only a desired outcome (in this case the idea that 3rd party tracking should be opt-in rather than opt-out or non-opt). The details are then left to private entities to implement.
In fact, had they defined it to be say a browser feature or any other specific implementation, it would be strictly worse. By legislating the abstract concept of 3rd party tracking consent, they are leaving open the door to innovation. The idea is that if someone can come up with a better way of collecting consent in terms of UX, while still guaranteeing the same level of consumer protection, then they should be able to outcompete worse implementations.
The law does not require banners per-se (instead requiring affirmative consent before tracking can commence), nor does it require any button size (instead requiring that features not requiring tracking not be gated behind the consent wall and that certain consent outcomes shouldn't be favoured as a part of the UI). What we have is only that way because innovation is not that fast and the motivation to innovate here isn't that high (yet) --- banners are easy enough to implement and not so egregiously bad as to turn away users.
I don't know why they didn't use it in the law. Probably advertiser lobby because it's much easier to coerce the user into agreeing when they control the process (dark patterns)
In most other cases it's government overreach, but ruining iOS would make the tech ecosystem better.
It's not as black and white of course but this seems to be a recurring theme.
Of course, this is painting with a very broad brush, and people in both places believe in all sorts of different political ideologies, but I think it generally tends to be true. Europeans are more likely to reason along direct lines like "this is a good policy, therefore it should be enacted" whereas Americans will think in more abstract terms like "this may be a good policy, but do we really want the state to have the power to enact such a policy? How may this power be abused in the future?"
I don't have a good explanation for _why_ this is the case; intuitively, you'd expect the opposite, since the US has never had a totalitarian regime, and most of Europe has within the last 100 years. My only guess is that nowadays the US is way more corrupt, undemocratic, poorly run, etc. than most countries in Western and Northern Europe which leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.
I can't really blame Apple for not being interested in adopting a "standard" that's mostly Google pretending to be a standard.
Speedy and WebP were two examples. RCS already existed (I believe) but basically every single carrier has dragged their feet on it to the point of doing almost nothing (at least in the US) so now Google is basically running the entire thing through their network just to get it to work for their customers because carriers are incompetent/indifferent/directly opposed.
But I doubt that last part was listed in the article.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but with better PR
And then you have Cloudflare doing crap like automatically reconverting JPEGs to WebPs so when you try to download a JPEG you can use anywhere you end up with a WebP you can pretty much only use in a browser.
They call it “the modern industry standard” half a dozen times on the page. Zero mention of their affiliation.
Google, however, added their own extension for E2EE and started roll out with their self-hosted RCS rather than carrier hosted.
Given that RCS is mandatory in 5G networks and supported by world's largest carriers - Yes, it's an industry standard. Given that version used today is published in 2016 - Yes, it's modern. So, what's the problem?
One-on-one E2EE is a big deal and I would to see Apple on-board with it too, including without iCloud exceptions.
I tried to go back to a non-smart phone, but it was impossible due to not having whatsapp. That might be a 'local' thing though, not sure.
Anyway, they should just release imessage for android; that would piss off meta too, which is a win in my book ;)
That's a bit of an overstatement and really depend on who you ask. I'd say that no-one uses WhatsApp. I know exactly two people who uses WhatsApp, but that also not representative of their actual marketshare.
I see that it’s more limited to Western Europe but it really is dominant in a lot of markets.
But that’s not really the point, the point is that also in the markets where the network effect causes the majority of people to use Telegram, Viber or Facebook Messenger, they’re mostly not using SMS, because even if it is free, a messenger service is better.
Also all my contacts on Balkan countries rather go with Viber, so, nope not everyone.
SMS is the old, WhatsApp/Telegram/Messenger/Signal/Discord/etc is the new.
No thanks, I'll stick to SMS.
For this reason alone, I greatly prefer iMessage/discord/slack/whateverIsNext so I can use it on my phone and my computers.
I get that's not your experience, but it is indeed an experience that exists, and is probably fairly common.
More than 95% of my personal communication with other humans I know (remote communication, that is, not in-person, obviously) is in WhatsApp. The rest is phone and SMS and that's all older family.
SMS, like email, is mainly for machines to talk to me.
This is wild to me. I'm squarely in the middle of the millennial generation and I've never used WhatsApp and I've never known anyone that uses it. Nearly all of my personal communication is through Messages on my iPhone/iPad/Mac.
I would estimate iOS has 99% market share among my social network, including nuclear and extended family. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a green bubble.
I also do 95+% of my driving in a single car, and 95+% of my text editing in a single program. 95ish% of my browsing in a single browser. Not locked in to those, either—in all three cases I've switched before without difficulty, and likely will again. I have no idea where the lock-in notion's coming from.
It means that switching costs are high. With the exception of losing chat history (which I was surprised to find most people don't seem to care about), switching costs between chat platforms are virtually nonexistent.
And get your contact spread over 4 differents messaging App and consequently have all of them installed.
It's time to switch to Signal. (Telegram and most of the others are not end to end encrypted.)
Most people? But yeah, it's a local thing. Denmark have had free SMS for something like 20 years, at least as an optional add-on to your subscription. So there where never a reason to move to something else. If you frequently used SMS you just paid the small free for a large number of SMS message, or even unlimited. Current subscriptions pretty much all have free SMS.
When smartphones arrived, most just use the built in messing app. On the iPhone that means that you use iMessage, but it's not something you think about. If you took the average Danish iMessage user and asked them, they'd just say it's SMS.
I don't know that I would want Apple to just dominate the messaging market, but iMessage on Android would kill of many of the existing platforms pretty quickly.
So yeah most of the time whatsapp and telegram 100% of my circle. SMS is a thing from the past, I guess the gen z here don't even understand what's SMS.
(someone from SEA region)
I'm well aware that high schoolers get bullied for being poor and not being able to afford an iPhone. High schoolers were getting bullied for being poor and not being able to afford fancy clothes before cell phones were even a thing, and prior to smartphones were bullied for being poor and not being able to afford pagers or a cell phone (or a car, or ... or ...).
High schoolers are assholes and will find some excuse to torment each other regardless of what aesthetic and design choices somebody in Apple's UX team makes for their built-in messaging app. This is a massive nothingburger and I honestly have no idea why the media gives this any credence other than the shift of the media generally towards being anti-tech.
It's not about aesthetic design, and it's not just about high schoolers. Lots of grown up Apple users don't like adding Android users to their group chats, because falling back to MMS degrades the messaging experience for everyone. Things like images sending in low enough resolution to be useless.
As a European moving to the US, I can attest how hard it is to get Apple users to switch their group chats to WhatsApp/Facebook/Signal. I don't think I'm in a single such group that isn't majority non-Americans.
You can say Apple doesn't need to care about Android users being socially isolated. But some Apple users might like an easier way to include their non-Apple friends.
I see this as more of a cultural problem. When I travel back to India, I don't complain that I can't use iMessage since iPhones are a rarity. Instead, I install whatever app I need to be involved in a group. And I weigh the cost against the value I get - if it's too much of a change for too little gain, I'd gladly sit it out.
I'm not saying the solution is to force users to buy iPhones. But the core problem isn't purely technical either.
While it wouldn't be their preference, I'm sure most Android users wouldn't mind installing iMessage to better talk with their iPhone friends.
That would require iMessage being an open standard, or Apple releasing a client for Android. Some commenters mention that the Digital Markets Act might force Apple to do this. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Meanwhile, and assuming they don't want to open iMessage, it would be nice of them to just support a better fallback option.
No it's not. iPhones intentionally don't support modern cellular messaging. There's nothing wrong with insisting they support LTE spec (RCS), like every modern smartphone does.
> The majority of people globally don't even use built-in messengers, they use WhatsApp or a similar application,
Completely unrelated. This discussion has nothing to do with iMessage / WhatsApp / etc. The problem is that Apple forces your SMS texts into effectively-2G-mode, Apple lies about the quality of the messaging you're getting from your native cellular service.
Imagine if they did the same thing to, say, your telephone calls from your phone number by running it through a ton of fake compression, and then said, "well, you could iMessage or Skype or Zoom instead if you don't want us fucking up your phone call audio".
I re-iterate, this a complete non-issue. The way you are phrasing it is incredibly biased.
Again, no it's not. My family have iPhones, I have Android. Apples garbage SMS?MMS group messaging made it so that I missed a huge number of messages from them, photos were poor quality, videos were unwatchable. We switched to Signal a year ago and have been happy with it, but this impacted us for about 2 years. And I'm a tech person! The average user is going to have no idea what is going on. This affects a large number of people and saying it's a non-issue is dismissive.
My wife has Android, I have iPhone, I know exactly what you're referring to. But this isn't "Apple's garbage SMS/MMS group messaging", this is just SMS/MMS group messaging, period. SMS/MMS is ancient, and it sucks, it was a hack when it was originally implemented and never really got better. Nobody here is claiming that SMS is good, we're merely pointing out that RCS is not the right answer and that SMS is the most viable /fallback/. Nobody should be using SMS as their primary messaging platform in 2022.
> We switched to Signal a year ago and have been happy with it
Good, I'm glad to hear this. More people should use Signal. I even managed to get my 72 year old mother using it without any serious issues.
> This affects a large number of people and saying it's a non-issue is dismissive.
It only affects people who refuse to use any one of the myriad other carrier-agnostic messaging apps. I travel extensively around the world, nearly everyone outside the US uses WhatsApp, and nearly everyone inside the US I interact with has at minimum FB Messenger or Discord. Obviously, all of these are operated by other for-profit tech entities and getting more people on Signal would be ideal, but it is what it is.
The right answer here is creating a new carrier-agnostic messaging standard with interoperability and privacy in mind, and then Google, various Android integrators, Apple, Microsoft, et al can build their own clients. RCS is not carrier agnostic, does not support E2E, and is really horribly designed protocol. Worse, because the carriers don't want to deal with it, de facto almost all RCS infrastructure globally is run by Google.
RCS is the official messaging spec of the GSMA, they effectively set mobile standards. It's on 90+ mobile operators in nearly every nation on the planet. It's just as widely supported as, say, Voice-over-LTE is (another standard by that same group)
SMS is the outdated standard that's been mostly unused on smartphones since 2018 and is only supported for backwards compatibility. RCS is the replacement for SMS, and is the current ubiquitous and broadly supported standard, since 2019 effectively all modern smartphones and cell network use it.
> Google decided to add support for it to Android in yet another attempt at building their own messaging platform.
No, that's a complete lie. Google added support for it, because they basically had to, it's an industry spec that practically every cellular provider uses. It has nothing to do with "Google's own messaging platform" because RCS is *not* a messaging platform, it's literally just how all messages on all phones work in 2022.
There's no Google service for RCS. There's no login for RCS, there's no accounts for RCS. RCS is not an "app" or a "platform", it's literally just the native default built-in way all messaging from your SIM card works on all ~2019+ smartphones.
> There is no rational reason to take offense that iPhones don't support RCS.
You know what, your right. And by your logic, there's no rational reason for iPhones to support Voice-over-LTE (that's a GSMA push), so maybe every iPhone should drop down to 2G everytime a phone call comes in (but not an iMessage Audio Call, of course). And by your logic, there's no reason for iPhones to support Carrier Roaming (that's another GSMA pushed thing), maybe Apple should ignore that one too.
Nearly every carrier supports it via Google-operated infrastructure, the carriers don't actually want RCS, have been vocal about this, and it's why RCS had no uptake for over a decade until Google decided to force-feed it to everyone. https://jibe.google.com/ is their platform they provide to carriers, through partnerships (example: https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-google-messaging-...)
RCS is hot garbage, and if you've actually read the standard you'd already know that. There are plenty of arguments that can be made in favor of a carrier-agnostic messaging standard that provides broad interoperability, but RCS is not it. This is not the way.
> No, it's not. SMS is the outdated standard that's been gone since 2018. RCS is the current ubiquitous and broadly supported standard, since 2019 effectively all modern smartphones and cell network use it.
This is absolutely false. 1. SMS is supported by /every/ carrier in the world, period. This is exactly why it's the perfect fallback, because it is guaranteed to be there and even work with pre-smartphone T9 devices. 2. SMS isn't "gone" since 2018 or since ever. RCS is not ubiquitous, it is literally only used on Android, is not supported by any feature phones, and Android only constitutes "effectively all modern smartphones" because the vast majority of people in the world can't afford an iPhone. Globally almost 80% of the market share is Android... in the West/OECD it's like 50%.
> No, that's a complete lie. Google added support for it, because they had to, it's an industry spec that practically every cellular provider uses.
Uh... no... what you are saying here is a lie. Google added support for it because they wanted to, just like they wanted to make every other one of their previous 10+ messaging apps. RCS has been a standard since 2012 (or 2013, depending on who you asked) and the GSMA Universal Profile has been available since 2016, Google didn't even start deploying RCS until 2019 within Android Messages, and did so by cannibalizing the Allo team (another messaging boondoggle).
There is no legal or regulatory requirement or otherwise forcing Google to support RCS. The majority of carriers don't want RCS, and it was basically completely unadopted until Google footed the bill to build out the infrastructure for it.
> There's no Google service for RCS.
I'm not going to even respond to the rest of your message. Look, I don't want to be uncharitable, but you frankly don't know what you're talking about and everything you are saying is incredibly biased in a pro-Google way without any basis in fact or reality. Please go actually read the RCS standard. Please go actually learn how RCS is implemented. Please go talk to someone that works with carriers on building out telecommunications systems (hint, I'm one of those people). You are straight out wrong.
Clearly every modern smartphone does not support it because iPhone does not. iPhone is half of the US market. A standard that only has 50% market penetration is hardly a standard.
> Imagine if they did the same thing to, say, your telephone calls from your phone number.
I’d be happy if no one could reach me via my telephone number. There would be a lot less spam calls to ignore. I would welcome a system where no one could dial me without me granting them permission first.
If Apple and Google teams up without carriers, they still don't have access to the full, true phone number database that carriers maintain.
It's not like there's any real benefit to having the carriers in that conversation, you can already text from either device just fine. That would continue into the future.
Additionally, 5G SMS does generally go over IP as SMSoIP: https://www.iplook.com/info/what-are-the-changes-of-sms-in-5...
With an open, single, federated messaging standard that's integrated into the stock messaging app of every Android and Google phone, all of that just goes away. If people really want to use another app because it gives them some useful benefit, they can still choose to do so. But I want the default, universal messaging standard to be something that lets me send photos and videos without quality loss to the point that videos are unwatchable.
If I could use an Android iMessage client when I have to talk to iPhone users, that would be fine. Or we could even see the rebirth of multiplatform messengers like Pidgin, Gajim and Trillian.
The issue is that right now there is no way to have a modern text conversation with iPhone users (high quality media, reactions etc.) if they don't want to leave iMessage. (Most of them don't.)
In any case everybody I know uses whatsapp so I don’t think it’s a huge deal. Texts are for spams or restaurant waiting lists.
Maybe focus on delivering a meaningful experience for your users and pull your nose out of the tail end of the iPhone?
Yet another angle on the Google vertical monopoly, and another reason Apple should stay very far away from RCS to protect user privacy.
And of course, now they've removed SMS forwarding entirely, and basically completely made the service useless/redundant. I'm glad I ported my main number out years ago.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
The site itself contradicts that claim. From the FAQ (emphasis added):
> When people with iPhones and Android phones text each other, Apple relies on SMS and MMS, outdated systems that cannot support large media files. That means photos and videos are often compressed and come through blurry. The severity varies by location and carrier based on compression and size limits.
This is the whole point. Apple chooses to fall back to an outdated system instead of one that supports higher quality media files.
And that's just one of the ways they provide a worse quality experience for everyone involved in a cross platform group chat.
There is really no reason for them to do that, except to force people onto Apple if they want to be part of group conversations with most Americans.
It’s the point of the website but is not the point the person I replied to made. I replied to what I quoted, not the article.
So you keep saying, but what’s the source for the claim? It inconveniences iOS users just as much since it only happens during the interaction of iOS and Android. I doubt Apple hates Android so much they specifically choose to inconvenience their own users to spite the competing platform. Seems to me a more likely explanation is that they don’t care enough or don’t want to implement the protocol.
Except, unlike app stores and repairs, the standard being pushed here, RCS, is not a good solution by comparison. It’s locked to carriers, who have different and inconsistent implementations, rather than being tied to an identity like iMessage.
It’ll be a shame if Apple is forced to adopt an inferior standard here…
If they're smart, they work together with Google and other large messenger providers to form some sort of secure standard. If they keep being stubborn, they'll be forced to either stop selling iMessage in Europe or accept consequences to their technology much worse than cooperation. I'm no fan of breaking E2EE for interoperation, but since none of the big market players seem interested in working together, I think this will be unavoidable. It's a shame, really, that it had to come to regulation to get the market to work in the users' favour.
This probably won't matter to users outside the EU but big changes are coming over here.
> happy children
Are they, though? Sure, if you're an iPhone user and everyone you know is an iPhone user, things are great. But once one person uses Android (or, god forbid, a feature phone), your experience gets much worse. No more E2EE, no more read receipts, no more typing notifications, no more reliable delivery and message ordering, no more sending videos at a watchable resolution...
This even applies to voice. I rather do Signal voice call than carrier voice call with most of my friends. Better quality, encryption, etc.
If I give someone my phone number (or email address, for that matter), I know they will be able to contact me without any more coordination required. That has a lot of value to me. If we eliminate phone numbers entirely (and thus SMS, MMS, and telco-mediated voice calling), we lose that ability.
I do think that, in the future (perhaps not in our lifetimes) we'll do away with phone numbers, but only after there is another universal way to contact via messaging or voice that involves only sharing some sort of identifier, without any other setup required.
[0] Yes, Signal is open source, but since they refuse to allow people to use modified clients, or build support for federation, they are a proprietary, closed system, just like WhatsApp or Telegram. It's just we can have more confidence in the privacy of our communications on Signal due to its open source nature.
Yes they can? I have no cellular service at home but I have wifi, and my iPhone connects to "T-Mobile Wi-Fi" via my home internet.
SMS messages are sent and received just fine.
What? Europe has Wi-Fi Calling, too [0].
But just in case: the quotes emphasised the act, the parenthesis referenced said nonsense with the target being the first mentioned (it could not possibly be interpreted any other way) as a result of the parent comment likely being from the US as T-Mobile outside of the US does not refer to itself as such, it's either what it became (ie; EE in the UK) or a regional variant.
Also, changing the mode of communication withot asking or informing users sounds like a bad idea. I send you SMS from my phone. You see it in your iMessage and type a reply and it goes back to my iPad.
If I want to use something else, I'll use it.
If a contact of mine who uses apple tries to SMS me that should work as expected. Always. It _never_ does. Apple intercept it and screw it up to try for their vendor lock-in anti-competitive behaviour.
Apple need to be broken up every bit as badly as google do. It's just insane the way they _both_ behave. It's a competitive race to see how can screw the public harder, faster and deeper. It has to stop, now!
Original message follows:
Could someone explain what this is about?
The page complains that pictures or videos are poor quality on SMS/MMS, and they lack encryption, like if those were relevant amd not a thing from the 90's.
Also I am reading things like "Since I'm on Android, I'm stuck using SMS a lot, since most people I know have iPhones", and that adds to my confusion.
I guess the issue is that I simply cannot start to understand who would in today's context use SMS to chat. I too use Android and have a lot of friends with iPhones... we just send encrypted, good-enough quality pictures with whatsapp, telegram, or what have you. SMS or other cellular-based services are a thing of the past that nobody would use. So what's all the fuss about?
It is, and it’s largely that Apple has a vested interest in making their ecosystem look so much better in general.
If I’m texting my friends with an Android and group chat, etc; isn’t working properly - I will automatically assume something about Android is broken, because it works perfectly to my other friends who use iPhones.
Apple will never - ever - ‘fix’ this, because it’s not ‘broken’, it’s a design meant to create the illusion that iOS is the better ecosystem.
iMessage is one of Apple’s most valuable psychological tricks to keep people within the ecosystem, or convert others to join in.
This is a waste of a call to action.
It will be about as effective as praying to Rain Gods for rain. :P
Apple has a massive vested interest in not fixing this ‘problem’.
There’s also a ton of cross platform messaging apps that already have no issues when used with each other - including popular open source ones like Signal.
The websites’ creator has their heart in the right place, but their mind is confused. This is all intentional on Apple’s part. It’s genius and they know it. They will never willingly stop a plan that is working so very well.
The author suggesting that indicates a total lack of comprehension to Apple’s plan and purpose/intention.
Calling for people to ask Apple to change this is like politely asking Opioid manufacturers to stop killing people. It’s profit. It has nothing to do with what’s best for the consumer.
My main point of the comment was not to explain the subtext of the article. It was to explain that the article just didn’t need to be written, and won’t change anything.
Perhaps, you are right. Their vested interest is in making more $ for AAPL shareholders. The sands may shift. There are incoming regulatory pressures and what not.
However, it is still fair game to point out what is broken though. The Internet (such as it is) is full of opinions. It is not a waste. It is a perspective.
Perhaps a kernel of truth there, but the real success of iMessage is how it gives you all the features of a modern instant messaging platform without any hassle. Built in to the phone, same app as SMS with automatic fallback, available on MacOS, not limited to a phone#, etc.
Yeah, I can go download one of a number of other IM apps. A small fraction of people I interact with will be reachable on any given app, but a majority are reachable with iMessage. The network effect is very real.
Agreed. I can't imagine what the decision makers at Google thought this webpage would do? Will it suddenly make Apple implement RCS - I think not...
The only thing that might make Apple make open messaging in the near future is the threat of the EU mandating it via the Digital Services Act. And those platform rules apply equally to any app with more than 45 million people - so iMessage, Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, etc.
I don't mind the bubble colour... I'm OK with an Apple colour, Google colour, and an interoperable colour. It would be useful to signal what features might be available with each technology.
What I would really like is for the interoperable solution to have a common API so I can programmatically sent a message to anyone (at least the two main players with an option for other phone makers — and also apps like Telegram — to join).
No thanks, we don't want your spam.
Even a group chat purely between US Android users tends to be carried out on Facebook Messenger, not SMS, I guess cause SMS sucks even on Android.
[1]https://samjohnston.org/2008/07/18/proof-gmail-imap-gimap-su...
Anyway they're just as guilty as Apple of trying to manipulate users, this whole campaign is just PR. They don't like the fact that their users show up as inferior green-bubbles on Apple devices.
But really, these are separate platforms at this point. iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Snapchapt, AIM, ICQ, whatever else the kids are using today... you can't send messages between them all.
And look, dumbing communications down so they aren't using end-to-end encryption has consequences.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/10/23299502/facebook-chat-me...
Both iPhone and Android support SMS and I see no improvement in either using iMessage or RCS. I may be biased because I don't use neither of them.
You can't send images with SMS. People like to send each other images.
That is like using wolves to protect your sheep -- sure if you keep them well-fed it might work...
Otherwise, Google is complaining because iMessage is a moat Apple has, that Google can not break on its own.
(logos of Motorola, Samsung, OnePlus, Google Pixel, Snapdragon)
So…. Android then.
"It's time for Android to stop being such a POS"
...etc
Messaging currently requires you and the people you are communicating with to agree on a platform. If all you use is Telegraph, then you are not communicating with those who don't.
talk about hypocrisy
But Apple doesn't make commodity hardware.
Say absolutely NO to any standard that requires carrier implementation.
Only old, ugly people use Android.
… believe it or not, this is how young people think. When I was single, it was rare to find a hot girl I was interested in use Android. Now, maybe my taste in women is questionable, but that was the reality - much easier to ‘trust’ the blue, instead of that sketchy, broke ass Android green.
[1] https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Jv09_Bj8cea5-_S6DdpoA_MolG...
The reservation I have is that I still have to wade through a raft of shit when it comes to sorting out legitimate texts that wound up in Unknown Senders because they weren't in my Contacts.
I would like more control over the filtering of incoming messages, without sending them off-device.
WhatsApp and the other Facebook messaging apps won in Latin America because they’re zero-rated, like SMS effectively is within the US. If you want to make a popular chat app, pay those telcos.
There are tons of great cross-device messaging apps e.g. Whatsapp , Signal, Telegram. The market has provided solutions.
What messaging needs is an open modern standards, nothing more, nothing less.
Am I missing something?
PS- Assuming that document is by Google, but unclear, what is the source that links to it?
Many of my friends groups stopped using WhatsApp only for this reason.
Apple does need to fix messaging, but this isn't the way.
They don’t care, they want to make it inconvenient so we’ll all jump aboard the iShip. Until the bold image that Job’s left wears if in 30 years (give or take?) they’ll get away with it along with lightening ports and every other mediocre capitalization that makes them reminiscent of their previous cutting edge former self. Back then, their proprietarization at the very least helped drew their brand image.
Google pretending to be good guys as if there was any other major player they’d be helping out in this campaign was funny though.
how many times can we attempt to patch new features on top of a protocol that was never intended for those purposes and is fundamentally insecure.
But a step in the right direction
I don't see a single way using RCS as fallback over MMS would result in a worse experience for iMessage users. Apple users always like to complain about green messages in group chats. Why not do something simple that would fix it?
Sadly, some would say that they've tried and succeeded multiple times to make a "not-shit messaging app for Android" and then promptly murdered each success just as it became popular.
> … "and has now seemingly given up and adopted a terrible protocol, and is crowing about it like they're the saviour of messaging."
Yeah, this seems to be pretty much the "standard model" for most "tech giants" these days. :(
> … "They're not, they've just given up trying."
On so many levels beyond just messaging. :(
They're preaching to the wrong choir.
RCS is a new standard, Google doesn't own it people.
"What happens when they no longer stand to benefit the most?"
should probably come up.
Google can't act indignant that Apple isn't following their lead after they tried, and failed, repeatedly, to follow Apple's.
Google wanted a proprietary messaging service like iMessage for Android. They failed. They failed so many times they gave up and became champions of RCS, a standard the carriers were limping towards supporting.
Google pretending they're now champions of open standards and Apple is the big-bad meanie is ridiculous.
iMessage works seamlessly on my multiple phones, iPads, and Macs. Fuck off with that carrier lock-in trash.
While I'm sure there are grains of truth in the article, I'm also sure they're presented in such a way to lead you to a conclusion.
Google wants to either get access to the iMessage ecosystem or relegate it to the fringe. Because they can exert pressure on RCS, they cannot exert pressure on iMessage.
Only if "low quality blurry images and video" is your definition of "it works". Or maybe you've just never checked what the image actually looks like on the receiving phone.
It's tine for Google to fix search.
In a way, it feels perfectly inline with America. We use Imperial when everyone else uses Metric. We use Fahrenheit when everyone else uses Celsius. But in this case, it's not as if our government led us down this path. The problem was entirely created by our market of users.
Ultimately, poor communication stifles society and innovation. It's in all of our best interests to improve the current situation. Sure, better alternatives such as Signal exist, but we will have to move mountains to convert everyone onto a new service. For now, I think it's best if we all apply pressure to Apple to adopt RCS. It's significantly better than where we are now, and that's a good thing.
If everyone was on Signal, sure, but if everyone's on Whatsapp, maybe not the kind of thing to go "why don't you just do this too, why are North Americans so backward?" for something owned by what is basically still just Facebook.
I also don't know what the middle is doing. Client still trusts the server to give the correct identity aka pubkey for the other clients. Server could give its own and mitm, like a corrupt root CA for TLS. Yes this requires more deliberate action on FB's part, so it's at least better than non-e2ee, but not trustless like people often claim. This issue isn't at all unique to WhatsApp.
The first time your client messages another on WhatsApp, it knows nothing other than the phone number and has to somehow go through WhatsApp to exchange keys with the other client. WhatsApp can simply fake that entire exchange. Now, WhatsApp also lets you physically visit another user and scan a QR code to verify the identity out-of-band, which escapes that "centralized server" limitation I mentioned, but few use that feature. Compare this to how HTTPS works; you trust the certificate authority unless you gather the certs yourself.
I doubt the clients are backdoored to defeat the encryption, but idk what advertising metrics they're sending or what might change in the future.
Piece of advice: As far as tech is concerned, HN isn’t a place where you can get away with talking about things you don’t understand. You’ll far too often run up against people who have more expertise in what you write about than you have expertise brushing your teeth.
Also, it doesn't matter here, but where are you getting that WhatsApp and Signal use the same messaging protocol? Might be missing something, but I don't see that they both use XMPP, if that's what you mean.
I think WhatsApp is built on ejabberd for message exchange and possibly could be able to federate using XMPP.
The consequence of this was that in Europe, people preferred free online messaging over costly SMS.
20+ years down the line and old habits die hard.
It makes sense if you look at the history.
For various reasons, the US was late to the party on text messaging at all. I remember back in ~2002, traveling the world and discovering people used SMS, when back home in the US it didn't really exist, at least not between different carriers.
BUT internationally, text messages were also often expensive, a few might add up to the price of a coffee.
So, as soon as data plans became a thing, it was a no-brainer for everyone internationally to switch to data-based messaging (like WhatsApp) -- it could save you like a hundred dollars a month.
On the other hand, when carriers in the US sorted out compatibility issues and SMS's became a thing later on, it was generally unlimited on most monthly plans. So people in the US never switched from SMS to data messaging because there was no financial incentive to do so, like there had been around the world.
Seen in this light, it shouldn't be hard to understand at all. It's all about whether SMS's were expensive or free when data plans became popular.
And so for most people in the US most of the time, SMS does everything you need, so why on earth would you go download a separate app? Nobody's "refusing", they're just following the path of least friction and getting on with their day.
I don't use iMessage much, but there isn't One Alternative that everyone has conglomerated on.
Some groups use Whatsapp. Some use Facebook Messenger. Some use Discord. I jump around between all of them.
But if you have someone's phone number you can at least text them.
Also, people don't care for metric cause it's not better. Basing your system around the physical properties of water doesn't help for daily usage, just for some sciences and yes for nerds to feel better. For example, many digital thermostats have to add increments of 0.5 when you switch to Celsius since each degree is twice as coarse, and you can feel the difference. Put ˚F and ˚C weather forecasts side by side, and ask people which they prefer. It's a nice spread of 0-100˚F outdoors usually, and you basically don't go outside if it's not. Freeway speeds, 0-85MPH legally and 100 means trouble. Freeway miles, about 1 per minute. Feet/mile is weird, but that's cause nobody converts miles to feet; you don't care to compare say a trip distance to the height of a human.
I disagree with you about distance measurements. I think the relationship between millimeters, centimeters, and meters is so much better than the relationship between 1/8th inch, an inch, and a foot, that it makes up for the convenience of traveling roughly one mile per minute on the freeway.
A mile is about 1000 steps for a marching army, about 20 minutes of walking, or about 1 minute by car. Comfortable Farenheit temperatures roughly run from 0 to 100. A foot is about the length of a foot or a forearm, and an inch is about the length of the top joint of a thumb. 1/1000th of an inch (a "mil") is roughly the smallest discernable difference in size of objects when you look closely. People are about 6 feet tall. People weigh 100-200 lbs. The "lucky coincidences" continue. They do because they were evolved, not because they were accidents.
Contrast that with the metric system, which was built around properties of water and powers of 10 (which are not obviously better than the powers of 2 and 3 that the imperial system uses - next time you need a 1/3rd recipe you can see what I mean). It is not an accident that a day is 2x2x2x3 hours and an hour is 2x2x3x5 minutes (attempts to adopt metric time were proposed, but rejected). Neither is it an accident that a foot is 2x2x3 inches, and a mile is 2x2x2x2x2x3x5x11 feet (although I have never divided anything by 11 recently). Imperial volumetric measurements are basically binary fixed point: 1 gallon is 16 cups, and 1 cup is 16 tbsp. There are lots of historical names for the intermediate units, like quarts and furlongs, but those have evolved over a longer period of time.
For scientific use, the metric system is obviously a lot easier, and order of magnitude matters a lot more than easy divisibility and "feel" of a unit. For everyday use, I am not sold on it.
Most/all of the other examples you list are pretty useless to me for daily life:
- A mile is closer to 2100 paces for me, a 6’2” guy
- 20min/mile walking is just as useful as 12min/km which is about equivalent speed
- Temps, sure it’s a nice 0-100 witch is symmetric but not much else
- 1/1000th of an inch doesn’t impact my daily life
- height and weight are similar to temperature. A pleasant range that doesn’t make anything in my life easier
- imperial volumetric measurements are actually insane and actively make my life worse. It doesn’t matter that they’re readily divisible by common numbers bc it’s impossible to remember what number to divide by to go between them.
This is such a U.S. and Europe centric view of "outdoors" that I almost spit out my coffee. And probably a small part of U.S. and Europe at that. Ask people in the tropics or subtropical regions and they probably never experienced 0˚F in their whole life.
Originally the lower defining point, 0°F, was established as the freezing temperature of a solution of brine made from a mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride. That's just as arbitrary as defining 0˚C as the freezing point of water.
Believe it or not, people don't seem to know the ˚F boiling point of water, probably cause it's just not a factor in everyday life. Your kettle whistles when it's boiling.
I'm sure they are not biased at all
I personally love iMessage and use it and Signal primarily - I don’t like the idea of Google dictating its feature set, especially considering its horrible messaging track record.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
Google claiming that RCS includes end-to-end encryption here is misleading.
Encryption got explicitly axed from the RCS spec because carriers don't like it.
The end-to-end crypto they're talking about is a custom Google thing and not part of RCS.
Friends don't let friends use unencrypted everyday communications.
Reject RCS and reject Google platform marketing.
PS: Note also that iMessage has a crypto backdoor maintained by Apple for the FBI; Google should not be encouraging iMessage to become more useful/popular, as this reduces privacy and makes people less safe.
Describing iMessage as having an encryption back door is disingenuous at best. There's no known encryption back doors in iMessage. As far as can be determined iMessage is fully E2EE.
There is however a caveat that the unencrypted local messages backed up to iCloud can be turned over to LEAs/governments. This caveat holds for any unencrypted data synced to iCloud. It's no different than your e-mails sitting in your iCloud mail account. Disabling syncing of Messages with iCloud closes this hole.
It does not. The people you iMessage with still have it turned on, because it is on by default, and Apple will get it from those devices instead.