Tim Cook's response to Android texting compatibility: 'buy your mom an iPhone' | Hacker News Reader

Tim Cook's response to Android texting compatibility: 'buy your mom an iPhone'

engadget.com

91 pointsProAm200 comments

Thankfully, shit like this will soon be illegal in the EU when the Digital Markets Act hits.

Hopefully they'll plug all the loopholes and actually enforce it.

I don't understand how anyone can defend business practices like this, which are exclusively there for the purpose of platform lock-in.

What will be illegal, exactly? There is actually nothing stopping iPhones from communicating with Android phones. iMessage, a proprietary messaging app, colors data messages blue and SMS messages green for the user's benefit. There is an entire world of messaging apps that aren't iMessage. The main gripe from Android users seems to be a mere social issue.

Also, isn't it my understanding that in EU most people use other messaging apps already?

Not everyone is American. Texts are usually not free in Europe unless you're on the highest plan. And some people don't use other apps. Before iOS 15 I had a problem even though my mom uses Viber: iOS didn't allow me to set Viber to bypass Do Not Disturb, it was only possible with calls and SMS/iMessage.

> What will be illegal, exactly?

"During a close to 8-hour long trilogue (three-way talks between Parliament, Council and Commission), EU lawmakers agreed that the largest messaging services (such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage) will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms, if they so request. Users of small or big platforms would then be able to exchange messages, send files or make video calls across messaging apps, thus giving them more choice."

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/nl/press-room/20220315IP...

So what will be illegal, are things iMessage does not do. Got it.

(iMessage can interoperate with Android, it just changes the formatting. Show me where the EU lawmakers determine CSS policy).

This is a non-issue in a lot of EU countries where people use WhatsApp for everything.

SMS is only used for 2FA and spam in EU. Everyone uses WhatsApp, viber, telegram or Facebook messenger for actual messaging with friends and family.

because this one is happenstance

I like the EU using their market position to remedy this

But aside from that it doesn't reach an antitrust issue because Apple didnt need to do anything, the people chose to associate the unencrypted message with Android and a perceived inferiority - and nobody actually cares that RCS got implemented to supersede SMS and MMS at some random time over the last decade

Since when did Apple have any obligation to provide iMessage to Android users? 10 years ago? Now?

I think Tim Cook is spot on here. Get an iPhone for your grandma if she wants the user experience that iMessages provide. Otherwise, you can get her signal or snapchat or one of the 4,225 secure messaging ecosystems.

Grandma is probably more than happy with her familiar experience and rather the iphone son user who loves his iPhone but hates the limitations of having to send SMS essentially with his grandmother. So in this scenarios Tim saying son should by an android would make more sense as he’d be able to learn a new system easily than her presumably or them both having to use a separate less ideal app just to communicate with each other. If they both preferred signal or such they would use it but even in that case the rest of their friends and fam would still be using another app. So just get person an iphone isn’t realistic especially if some have to use one or the other since work pays for phone or such.

I think if you comingle inventory (SMS messages and iMessages) and don't make that very clear to your users (Apple wants to do the opposite, to make it feel seamless), you have some obligation to not mess up the user experience on other people's devices. So I guess since then.

How much more seam is needed than two different colors, and a label at the top of the chat window identifying the message protocol?

> Since when did Apple have any obligation to provide iMessage to Android users?

They don't. But that's not necessarily the complaint either.

The argument is that they do have an obligation to not intentionally break the native cell service you paid for, which is exactly what they're doing by ignoring the RCS portion of modern LTE (GSMA) spec.

It's got nothing to do with iMessage in truth. iMessage is simply how Apple has chosen to frame their excuse for intentionally breaking your cell service.

Since they are contributing to school bullying. not having a blue bubble shouldn't matter, but we forget how brutal school was.

The color also refers to whether your messages are end to end encrypted, which is a big deal in messaging. Is the presence or absence of a padlock on browsers embarrassing? What if iMessage merely said “This message is not secured by encryption.”?

They've released whats obtainable through imessages "encryption". If it was so important to Apple that their users privacy matters to them, they'd give people a way to cross platform encryption.

Apple iMessage

Message content limited. Subpoena: can render basic subscriber information. 18 USC §2703(d): can render 25 days of iMessage lookups and from a target number. Pen Register: no capability. *Search Warrant: can render backups of a target device; if target uses iCloud backup, the encryption keys should also be provided with content return can also acquire iMessages from iCloud returns if target has enabled Messages in iCloud.

What you're saying is that Apple complies with the law and that iCloud is not encrypted by default. iMessages are still encrypted end to end. We surely don't desire Apple to take on the American government and win. I assume you're also not saying that because iMessages isn't anti-FBI secure, that we mind as well go fully unsecured?

It's not Apple's obligation to force Google to submit to Apple's encryption protocols, and it's not Apple's obligation to force SMS standards to comply with their standard.

Your concern was about bullying. Would it be better if Apple simply did away with the colors and notified you that "THIS MESSAGE IS UNENCRYPTED."?

today on HN shill moves goal posts. First you brought up encryption.

second it's not apples obligation to force encryption, but if they really cared about your privacy it's as easy as releasing iMessage for Android.

Apple won't even talk about compatibility for Android so technically it is on Apple to offer a solution if they really cared

Third you brought up encryption not me

If the message was actually end-to-end encrypted, Apple wouldn't have the plaintext to give to law enforcement in the first place.

And if iMessages supported RCS, then messages to Android could be encrypted too, but Apple chooses not to support that.

> If the message was actually end-to-end encrypted, Apple wouldn't have the plaintext to give to law enforcement in the first place.

Apple does provide an alternative way to use the iPhone for maximum security with a tradeoff in inconvenience which most would consider unacceptable. Google, Samsung, etc. offers nothing of the sort, and I do wonder whether phone vendors would ever be interested in investing in a feature which essentially destroys the convenience of using your phone.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32003756

The EFF considers Apple's messaging to be end-to-end encrypted. You could choose to not use iCloud, in which case the only practical way to obtain your messages would be to seize your phone. But since they are end-to-end encrypted, if an Apple employee were able to intercept and decrypt messages, then that would be big security news. If for whatever reason your concept of security is narrowly focused on resisting judicial warrants or state actors, then Android would only be worse here.

> And if iMessages supported RCS, then messages to Android could be encrypted too, but Apple chooses not to support that.

The RCS you mention is essentially Google's own standard, one which US carriers have chosen to reject. If Google could reach consensus with carriers and major phone vendors on a new standard, Apple would likely be forced to accept the new standard. Then RCS would become the true successor to SMS.

There are also other phone apps which use their own custom protocol. In some countries, WhatsApp is the most prominent messaging app.

> one of the 4,225 secure messaging ecosystems.

And that’s just Google’s collection of messaging systems!

> Otherwise, you can get her signal or snapchat or one of the 4,225 secure messaging ecosystems

And that right there is the real problem. There are a lot of messaging apps, but most of them don't interoperate with each other. So if you want to use the same app for communicating with everyone, you either need to somehow convince everyone to install your app of choice, (and in the case of iMessage buy the same kind of phone) or use SMS/MMS. And by not supporting RCS, Apple is effectively crippling that between iPhones and Android.

Apple cripples SMS for unrelated users with their extend-extinguish approach. I used my wife's old iPhone for a few weeks when I smashed my Android phone in an accident. Then I switched back to Android (I thought iPhones were merely mediocre phones before, but actually using one for 3 weeks change my opinion to "atrocious" ;)).

Then, suddenly, no iPhone user could send messages to me anymore, because Apple remembered that I was on iMessage and all the SMS messages sent to me would be redirected to iMessage. Android users were obviously unaffected. I'd send SMS to someone with an iPhone, they would reply, and it would go into a black hole. Took several weeks to resolve. My opinion of Apple as "company making stuff for basic people, like Justin Bieber" shifted towards "incompetent and/or evil lock-in, like North Korea" ;)

It's not an issue anywhere in the world except the US, where apparently school kids can get bullied if their texts in group chats are the wrong colour.

Agreed, I think that's the most compelling reason why they should implement RCS.

The reporter had a huge missed opportunity not to bring this up. If you want to have adults peer pressure each other with emotional manipulation to buy your product, that's disgusting, but fine, you have the right to do that. However there's a huge ethical line that gets crossed when that's done to children. Teaching kids and teens that brand loyalty is necessary to maintain friendships and an identity is extremely toxic and stupid.

Kids suck. iMessage didn't invent bullying. It's just the latest in a long line of arbitrary identifiers of status. If it wasn't the iPhone, it would be the brand of shoes they wore.

Be that as it may, as opposed to the brand of shoes they (or their parents) bought, there is something that can be done to prevent this bullying at least.

I don't think that's the right takeaway.

I think the bigger issue is that we let kids create their own social structure in schools (in the US) where in-group out-group dynamics include bullying over what color your texts are, what clothes you are wearing, what songs you listen to... etc.

School culture should be about academic achievement, and controlled and led by teachers. It works that way in other schools systems. Grown ups actually place limits on bad behaviors of children, with the full support of parents.

In this case, that might mean not giving kids personal multimedia devices, and not permitting their use on school grounds at all.

Also, this is not about Android or iMessage specifically, it's about interoperability. WhatsApp etc. are just as guilty.

Wouldn't it be amazing if you could message all your friends in a single App, without having to think about what platform they're using? If you could just see and respond to all their messages in a single thread, one for each friend?

The number of messengers I have installed on my phone (and I'm forced to use regularly because they're not interoperable) is madness.

To which business practice are you referring?

a) developing a messaging product, then not porting it to your biggest competitor?

b) declining to implement a mediocre standard at your biggest competitor's behest? The last major US carrier finally deployed RCS this year, some smaller carriers around the world still do not support it, and it notably requires carrier participation, unlike iMessage.

c) ???

It isn't as if Apple is blocking communication with non-Apple devices.

If Apple is somehow legally forced to spend the time and effort to implement RCS, then I would hope they would still find a way to make it clear at a glance when I'm sending a message via iMessage vs RCS or whatever else.

iMessage purposefully kneecaps communication with non-apple devices. They are trying, and succeeding, to make it extremely cumbersome to text androids. I can't blame them, it's an incredibly successful strategy that has locked me into their ecosystem at the very least. But it's also obviously anti-competitive.

I'm not seeing it. I can text phones running Android just fine.

I can't use new carrier-dependent features when texting Android phones, but Verizon Android users couldn't use those new features either until a couple of months ago, so I'm not sure how upset I should be about Apple still not supporting that. I don't think I would call it "cumbersome," let alone "extremely cumbersome."

I see no artificial restrictions on communicating with Android devices. Nothing is blocked, nothing is available but restricted, so I don't think "kneecapped" is the right word here.

They are not investing the effort to support a new thing, Google's umpteenth effort at messaging, which requires carrier dependence and undermines end-to-end encryption. Some people might find that unfortunate, but I don't think "refusing to implement new service" is the same as "kneecapping communication," personally.

> I can text phones running Android just fine.

I don't agree. Waiting ten plus seconds for each text to send is not a viable way to have a conversation. Anything beyond 5 or so texts becomes unbearbale.

That is very much not my experience. At all. I just tested it again, in case something had changed recently without my notice, and a friend with whom I only use SMS responded within five seconds of me hitting send, so clearly there was no delay of any kind when sending the message, let alone a ten-second-plus delay! That sounds very broken, and you might want to contact your phone service provider about it.

Unless...are you perhaps talking about when someone with whom you previously used iMessage is offline, or switches away from iOS, and the Messages app first tries iMessage, and only when that fails, falls back to SMS? Because that process includes a delay (while it tries to establish an iMessage link). But that should only happen in very limited circumstances for a very limited period of time. That's the only thing other than service issues I can think of that you might mean.

Oh, duh, don't need to rely on a generally-available remote friend. I disabled iMessage on my phone and send SMS to my partner while watching their phone. Had them respond. In both cases, sub-second delivery.

There is normally no delay for SMS messages for me. Again, I can text phones running Android just fine.

> Former marketing chief Phil Schiller famously said that porting iMessage to Android "would hurt us more than help us," and another former Apple exec said in an email that "iMessage amounts to serious lock-in."

Thank all that is holy that innovations like email came from government and academia, and were designed for federated interoperability from day 1.

I still remember all the adulation for Steve Jobs' "open letter to Flash". Only a few voices at the time warned that his criticisms were motivated more by Apple's need to position the App Store as a walled garden for entertainment that did not have to compete with free Flash game websites and Flash video streaming sites.

Didn't Jobs originally want to create an email that only worked (on and to) Apple computers? I think that might have been in a movie about him that I watched

NeXT mail was amazing, and is probably what you're remembering.

The lack of interoperability is strictly illegal since it's being leveraged to expand Apple's already formidable market power (using market power to extend market power is the strictly illegal part) by pushing people to buy an iphone. Cook can hardly deny that's a conscious thought at Apple, 'cause he just said the quiet part out loud.

FRO - IINAL but I do know "monopoly" is not the correct term in law, "market power" is. You don't need to be a monopoly to violate the laws.

If you’re telling me that any sort of vendor lock-in is illegal then this law is being flagrantly violated all the time by everything from computers to razors to Diaper Genies.

He isnt. The illegality or lack thereof is determined by your level of market power.

That seems awfully woolly. What he actually said is “using market power to extend market power” is illegal, but without any kind of market power vendor lock-in is pointless.

Not wooly at all. The "abuse" of a "dominant market position" is illegal. Vendor lock in to raise prices above the competitive level or to extend market share is the abuse, and "dominant market position" is well defined through law and thousands of precedent cases in antitrust. (In Europe Hoffman-La Roche vs. Commission is one of the cases defining it.)

Not pointless, but nothing like as powerful, true. Any lock-in can create market power over a subsection of the market, however small, illegally; but small potatoes stuff is rarely prosecuted. Huge potatoes are rarely prosecuted, post-Bork.

Why yes, especially post-Bork, lock-in (and much else) is overlooked in many, many instances. But then, the Sherman Act was passed to hamstring previous "restrain of trade" suits; and was suspiciously rarely used. John Sherman was the brother of General Sherman who ran an urban railroad before and for part of the Civil War. The powers that be serve themselves while pretending to serve the people surprisingly often.

Lock-in isn't necessarily illegal (or even avoidable.) Note too that lock-in that's a necessary consequence of IP such as a patent is legal, for the duration of the patent, and no longer.

Apple doesn't have a monopoly of mobile devices.

Please read the comment of mine you are replying to. This was anticipated and answered after "FRO", which stands for "answers to frequently raised objections."

The moment you move the definition from monopoly to "formidable" market power you start the slippery slope you can never get of.

Well not yet, but the EU is working on it;

The Digital Markets Act states that major messaging services must be interoperable.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/nl/press-room/20220315IP...

So by this act, should I be able to send a Twitter DM to your phone number if you don't have a Twitter account? What does interoperability mean here? Can I send Instagram messages from my Signal app?

By law the EU is going to require that when you make an Amazon Alexa announcement in your household that "dinner is ready" it will have to interoperate with Facebook messaging, Twitter DMs, Instangram messages, LinkedIn, Signal, iMessages, and SMS.

(the royal) We still demand all messages be sent to the nearest telegraph station, delivered by courier on horseback, and presented by a melodious singer who politely knocks on the door just post dinner time, TYVM.

IANAL but I think the legal ramification is probably that big services won't be allowed to ban third party clients and services, i.e. Whatsapp waged war on unofficial clients for the longest time

Please read the link that the OP graciously provided:

> EU lawmakers agreed that the largest messaging services (such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage) will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms, if they so request. Users of small or big platforms would then be able to exchange messages, send files or make video calls across messaging apps, thus giving them more choice.

It's lamentably common to pass laws that force the enforcement of previous more general laws, so please don't take the passing of a law as an admission or attestation that what the new law forbids was previously legal. In the U.S. this is going to be even more common, since post-Bork judicial idiocy has ex-facto sidelined much previous law; but the law is still there, and could still be enforced. It just isn't being enforced. Since judges can't easily be replaced, passing "repeater" laws that rule out bizarre interpretations of previous law is going to happen.

Are you using “market power” differently than the common definition in economics? It normally refers to any firm which has the ability to set prices above marginal cost without losing revenue, i.e. any firm in a market that lacks perfect competition, i.e. every firm that actually exists.

Same definition (except I don't think you want marginal cost there, because fixed costs - not just the increase in fixed costs - as well as opportunity costs - should be included), but of course market power can be used to restrain trade, take over adjacent markets, etc; as well as just soak the consumer in the short run. All these are abuses and illegal - still the litmus test of being able to charge extra is a good one.

True, but I don’t think GOOG pushes interoperability for the sake of consumers. Maybe it’s just easier to collect data that way, and Apple wants that data for itself.

I don't see the problem here. 20 years ago you could have said the same thing about AOL Instant Messenger not being compatible with Yahoo Messenger.

The problem comes when you use your dominant position in one market (messaging apps) to strengthen or create a dominant position in a different market (mobile phone hardware).

It seems like a stretch to claim that Apple’s position in either market is truly dominant given a similarly sized competitor.

Not a stretch - one of the criteria of dominance is being able to make abnormal profits. The company's famous 200% markups that are triple that of everyone else in the industry is a strong sign. (Even if you disregard that its next-biggest competitor Samsung is 10x smaller in phone revenues.)

Their mobile hardware is generally comparable to competitors' flagships both in tech specs and prices, so aren't the profits more of an issue with scale and efficiency? It feels like quite the stretch to claim that Apple is able to massively overcharge for its phones because they control access to iMessage.

From the article:

  Former marketing chief Phil Schiller famously said that porting iMessage to 
  Android "would hurt us more than help us," and another former Apple exec said 
  in an email that "iMessage amounts to serious lock-in."

I read that but I don’t think it changes my position. It’s lock-in if you buy software for your Xbox but does that mean that Xbox has a dominant market position?

Not just a different market - on other matters, brief lack of interoperability is okay, but yes, AOL may have pushed the point back then, too.

I don’t understand, where is the interoperability issue??

I can send someone who has an android phone a text message. I can send them a photo, or a video. It would seem the two are completely interoperable.

Does having your messages turn green really upset people that much?

> I can send someone who has an android phone a text message. I can send them a photo, or a video.

You can, and the quality of the photo/video on the other end is horrendous. It's artificially downgraded. Android doesn't have this problem when messaging any other platform, because all other platforms use RCS (an open standard), which Apple chooses not to adopt because they benefit from the lock-in.

It also breaks all the other features that iMessage and RCS both provide. So no, it's not just about the color of the bubble: it actually is an interoperability issue.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/08/13/google-apple-...

> Android doesn't have this problem when messaging any other platform, because all other platforms use RCS

I broadly agree with you about this being an interoperability issue, but what other platforms besides Android use RCS?

My Android phone has occasionally prompted me about switching on enhanced messaging features, RCS, but to do so required agreeing to some Google T&Cs that I wasn't comfortable with, so I've consistently declined.

RCS is a weird thing. It's supposed to be operated by carriers - but it's inconsistently supported by carriers, so Google provides the service. I'd rather not send photos and all my personal messages to Google. No, I don't use Gmail, and no I don't backup my Android phone to Google servers.

SMS seems to have gone out of fashion for personal conversations, except when mobile signal is poor and SMS is the only thing that still works. So I don't particularly feel the enhanced features matter. Commercial SMS is still used a lot, but I probably prefer to _not_ have enhanced messaging from those anyway.

Because of Apple's clearer privacy stance compared with Google, especially with Google being primarily an advertising and tracking company by revenue, I sometimes think I'd feel ok using Apple's services - if only iOS wasn't so limiting. But because of iOS limitations I pretty much have to use Android and live with the compromises. I am conflicted about this, because if iOS is forced to open up, it'll be more useful to me for some things, but also more of a cesspit of scam apps, and Google Chrome and related services will dominate the landscape more.

Although everyone recognises Apple uses iMessage for "prestige" and lock-in, I think there are good reasons why even if Apple didn't care about its own benefits, and only wanted to protect users' pricacy, Apple should perhaps not go all-in on RCS in its current form. From Wikipedia about RCS:

"Amnesty International researcher Joe Westby criticized RCS for not allowing end-to-end encryption, because it is treated as a service of carriers and thus subject to lawful interception.

"The Verge criticized the inconsistent support of RCS in the United States, with carriers not supporting RCS in all markets, not certifying service on all phones, or not yet supporting the Universal Profile. Concerns were shown over Google's decision to run its own RCS service due to the possibility of antitrust scrutiny, but it was acknowledged that Google had to do so in order to bypass the carriers' inconsistent support of RCS, as it wanted to have a service more comparable to Apple's iMessage service available on Android.

"Ars Technica also criticized Google's move to launch a direct-to-consumer RCS service, considering it a contradiction of RCS being native to the carrier to provide features reminiscent of messaging apps, counting it as being among various past and unsuccessful attempts by Google to develop an in-house messaging service (including Google Talk, Google+ Messenger, Hangouts, and Allo), and noting limitations: such as its dependencies on phone numbers as the identity (whereas email-based accounts are telco-agnostic), not being capable of being readily synchronized between multiple devices, and the aforementioned lack of end-to-end encryption.[8 In June 2021 Google introduced end-to-end encryption in Google Messages, an app supporting RCS. Encryption is supported only if two users are on Messages in a 1:1 chat (not group chat), both with RCS turned on."

Right, the color the bubble is to remind us that features are missing, it's not a missing feature itself.

RCS still doesn't support end-to-end encryption, and still requires carrier participation. There are still carriers that don't support it, and not all carriers support it equally. Google just managed to get the last major US carrier to adopt RCS this year so all of this about Apple being behind is marketing nonsense.

Back in my day we had ircII and Microsoft Comic Chat. They were interoperable, however only Comic Chat users could enjoy the graphical interface, automatic speech bubbles, and avatar placement functionality. We got by but there were definitely a lot of hurt feelings and jealousy.

This is why I don't buy or recommend apple products anymore. I was never a fanboi, but rather had some nice experiences (about 10 years ago - eg I am just retiring my 2012 Retina MBP - and it still works, just a little slow these days).

Besides, get mom onto Signal and it doesn't matter any more.

What are you replacing your MacBook with?

Frame.work DIY 1240p.

You don’t buy or recommend Apple products because non-iMessages are shown in green?

It's not that the messages are in green, it's that videos and pictures sent over SMS are terrible.

My dad sent me a video the other day, and it was 176 x 144 @ 10fps.

Technically, videos and picture are sent over MMS.

I recently was a part of my fathers wedding. His new wife sent me tens of pictures and videos that I was excited for because I'm bad at taking pictures.

Each and every picture and video had absurdly low resolution, to the point that they were useless and unviewable.

I don't know why apple struggles to do something my damn flip phone from 2005 could do no problem, other than doing it on purpose.

MMS (flip phone from 2005) is not sending 4K 10MP photos and videos.

I do not think any chat protocols promises sharing multimedia at original quality. iMessage is the only one I know of, and that is only when both users are on wifi.

If the goal is to send and receive full quality media, then messaging protocols are not the proper way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

RCS was designed to fix this, but Apple won't implement it.

No, I don't because they are increasingly a company that doesn't listen to its users.

The messages being green isn't the problem. The fact that they take 10+ seconds to send and media quality is straight out of the 90s is.

Tried an iPhone for a month when my Samsung S21 went in for repair. The perceived sheer lack of features and big UX gaps and missing features instantly made me profoundly dislike iPhone.

Just my opinion.

Can you be more specific? I feel that an iPhone user might say the same about android if they were to switch.

Sure, one missing simple feature is to be able to use keypad to do alphabetical search (for contacts) at the same time. Ex: You could not type "42779" for "HARRY". There is also nothing like Secure Folder on iOS as well AFAIK.

A few off the top of my head.

The keyboard swiping is off the charts awful compared to Android. It has no idea what word I want unless I'm incredibly specific, it recommends words I'm highly unlikely to use, adds punctuation almost randomly in its word suggestions, gives me multiple choices from the same stem.

You can't just press the cursor into the middle of a word, you have to do the hold and swipe thing.

You can't record your own calls. WTF, it's my phone?! I guess I'm supposed to just buy another iphone to record the audio onto from via its microphone.

As far as I can work out, Facebook messenger links don't open, full stop. Unless your default browser is Safari.

Want to choose how many icons you have on your screen? Nope. Smaller font size? Nope. Long press on an image to do a Google image search? Nope, not even to open in a new tab.

> Smaller font size? Nope.

You can do that actually.

> Long press on an image to do a Google image search? Nope, not even to open in a new tab.

It won't be as convenient as a simple context menu option, but technically you can use a Shortcuts app to create a shortcut for reverse image search.

I started with a first-generation iPhone to replace a series of Palm Treos, and have had various iPhones since then. I've tried a few Android devices, and felt like the interface was more confusing. I'm sure I could learn it with putting in some time, but maybe it's largely a matter of what one is used to?

This was a big issue for me. I got a galaxy S3 when it came out to replace my iPhone, and it was a pretty miserable experience. Way too much need for customization, very few preinstalled apps, and really the device just became a time suck and using it. I don’t want my phone to require a lot of my time.

The iPhone has been really great at doing what I need it to do, without absorbing my time tweaking, or learning. It does have limitations, I wish to God I could get rid of Apple Maps and set google maps as default, but that’s Apple for you.

I personally consider "very few preinstalled apps" a big plus! Uninstalling useless apps (if they are even uninstallable) is always a drag.

To each it's own I guess...

I like vanilla Android and currently own a Motorola exactly because of this. Installing just what you need is trivial anyway.

UX gaps? Are you talking about android? The UX is highly inconsistent in vanilla android let alone across apps…

How is that a bad thing? I remember android 2.x apps having the coolest UIs, nowadays android apps all use the same boring material design components. You can still find some 2.x apps on the play store though, they're a refreshing blast from the past.

Websites still have a bit of originality, given the vast variety of UI frameworks (and now canvas apps allow for even more versatility).

You're missing a huge point: Even though all those apps had different looks and feels and even did things differently, Back always GOES BACK. It's a global interaction and just makes so many things so much easier than a la cart back buttons for each interaction in random places, or whatever "gestures" are.

I used Android for years and despite liking the theoretical flexibility in practice the iPhone is better for the way I actually use the thing.

I agree here. Android is really fun to tinker with different interesting features, hidden options, all kinds of customization etc.

But my iPhone just works.

The back button is so engrained in my use of my phone now I honestly can't consider another way of using a phone anymore. Reaching across the phone to the other side (for righties) or hitting a manual button, or even the double tap on the back, just can't compare to the ease of hitting back on Android.

Ha! This is actually sound advice though. My mother needs a phone and left to her own devices her friends of the same age would probably convince her to buy a cheap Android (which would end up frustrating her eventually), or she just wouldn’t even buy a phone at all.

So I buy her phones. I pay for her service, and I pay for AppleCare, some peripherals and other services that make it useful. It’s the least I could do for her giving me life. She gets a camera too, doesn’t get caught on one side of the digital divide and more importantly, she retains the means of having a social life as she gets older.

> My mother needs a phone and left to her own devices her friends of the same age would probably convince her to buy a cheap Android (which would end up frustrating her eventually), or she just wouldn’t even buy a phone at all.

My parents do that. Have plenty of money but just can't bring themselves to spend more than ~$300 on a phone. And, to be fair, if they spent double or even triple that but still bought Android they're correct that it wouldn't be an improvement, since the UI's the main problem.

> So I buy her phones.

Having watched my parents' experience over the years, I assure you you're doing the right thing.

Remember how much shit Microsoft got when they did crap like this with Windows and IE?

I guess Bill Gates just wasn't charming enough.

Turtlenecks go a long way

Typically to the chin.

Somehow I don’t mind this time. I like what Apple is doing and the UX they have been able to achieve so far.

I wouldn’t want to force them to adopt some third party protocol, especially if this is initiated by Google (who has a history of failed text/chat products).

They don't have to change their protocol, they'd just have to port to Android

I assumed the latest idea was for Apple to adopt RCS

> But Apple can adopt RCS—the modern industry standard—for these threads instead.

Source: https://www.android.com/get-the-message/ , published around the beginning of August as far as I recall.

They already support good, old-fashioned text messages, they could just do it without being petty.

Messages is a complex app. I imagine adding a new protocol (with its own quirks) and ensuring it stays compatible with everything else is in the best case not easy.

Microsoft’s market share was substantially higher then Apples is in their relative market segments.

I'd say higher, but not substantially. iPhone dominates the premium smartphone market, and iTunes is massive too.

when looked at by manuf. this isn't true at all.

The comedy of this whole thing is that if the roles were reversed, and Google had a dominant messaging platform and a popular line of phones that kept Apple users "outside of the circle" a la "green bubbles" or otherwise, it's hard to imagine that they would actually do what they are asking Apple to do.

I don't think Google is a benevolent actor by any means, but they do have a history of build iPhone versions of their apps with a first-class experience. At times the iOS version has actually been better/ahead of the android version (although that's usually a short term thing).

What product has Google made that they don't make available on iphone? Apple definitely has a history of only supporting their own system, while Google doesn't. I think it's wildly cynical to assume Google would do the same thing as Apple if the roles were reversed. One company has a long track record of behaving like that, while the other doesn't.

If it enables Google to sell more ads, they will port anything to any platform.

They would make 7 different messaging apps managed by 3 different business units, disband 4 of them, combine the remaining 3 into 2, deprecate those 2 and create 2 new ones, combine those 2 into 1, then suggest a vague international standard while rewriting that 1 into a new 1 that's incompatible with all the old ones.

Then complain that the competition is not "interoperable".

(Oh wait, that's actually what happened.)

I don’t get why RCS has to involve carriers. Apple could implement iMessage without involving carriers, so it should be possible to implement a messaging protocol which doesn’t rely on them (but also isn’t proprietary). By involving carriers you’re making it harder (impossible?) to create a client to be used on devices not on the cellular network. I just don’t see the point.

> By involving carriers you’re making it harder (impossible?) to create a client to be used on devices not on the cellular network. I just don’t see the point.

On the contrary, RCS allows you to text over Wi-Fi, which SMS does not.

Can I use RCS without a phone plan?

Does RCS work for devices that do not have a phone number? My reading suggests it does not, that there is still a carrier dependency.

iMessage has no carrier dependency, no phone number dependency at all. Kids all over the world use iMessage over Wi-Fi without working phone service at all.

RCS involves carriers because the username is a phone number. iMessage also involves carriers when using the phone number as the username (there's verification of the number that you usually don't see).

RCS is also a standard the GSMA (gsm carrier association) came up with and didn't deploy terribly much. I don't think 'it's a standard' stands for much when it's only moving forward because one company is pushing it unilaterally. (It doesn't help that that company has a history of abandoning messaging products)

I keep thinking that one day I'll buy an Apple product. I haven't owned once since an Apple IIc as a kid. The Mac Mini is rather a good price, and works really well.

But then this shit happens, and Apple shows how divisive and exclusive they are. And then I want to stick with the devil I know which today is Linux/Microsoft instead of the one I don't.

There is a solution to the problem of sending videos or collections of photos via SMS from iPhone to Android: go to a video, and click 'copy iCloud link'. Send the link to the Android user, and it's an easy process to download the full resolution file.

I have a family member who refuses to use Apple products out of principle and this is a convenient workaround.

Or using a chat app of some sort. I was surprised that in USA sms is still used.

I do not know a single person in the USA that does not use WhatsApp. It must be older Americans who have zero international connections that are oblivious to other chat apps.

Asians, Latinos, Europeans, Africans, Canadians, everyone is using WhatsApp (or iMessage). No one would pay for exorbitant international SMS/MMS costs.

I do not know a single person in the USA that does use whatsApp. Everyone is either on iMessage or facebook messenger with a few on signal.

That says something about the people you know, but not much about people in the USA.

I have never used Facebook Messenger and don't know anyone who does (although... how would I, since I don't have a Facebook account?), but I use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and iMessage.

Maybe that says something about the people you know, but not much about the people in the USA.

Indeed, that is entirely the point!

Why is iMessage even an issue? All phones can send conventional texts to each other

According to the article, some videos and things like this, and also the phone showing non-iMessage SMS in a different color, an apparent source of embarrassment to teens. But personally I can’t say I have ever noticed this limitation.

But there are other ways to send these media files. Why is apple obligated to provide a solution to android

Well I guess that’s Cook’s argument as well.

Or use a messenger like WhatsApp or Signal

The average Joe does not know the difference between SMS and the more advanced features that iMessage offers when messaging withing the apple ecosystem. All they see is that androids are unable to send high quality images, send reactions etc.

Err yeah they do know. Everyone just uses WhatsApp.

Meta's whatsapp is not great either. Telegram or Signal are better alternatives.

The only good one is where the people you need to communicate with. Which isn’t telegram or signal for me.

But why is this Apple’s problem?

The average Joe does not know the difference between a Tesla and a Toyota, specifically the more advanced features that the Tesla offers. Should Tesla be required to change their system to be more “compatible“ with Toyota?

This whole iMessage android debacle just sounds like sour grapes.

That metaphor doesn't make sense because these are communication devices that are supposed to interact. It's more like if only other Tesla's could hear each-others horns or signal lights or something, but even that's not great.

It's incredibly obvious though. Modern messaging apps send messages instantly. SMS takes at least 10 seconds. Makes a huge difference when people are trying to have a conversation.

iMessage sends high quality pictures and videos, try to send a video thru mms and it is unusable. iMessage also has read receipts, you can see if they are typing. iMessage works over wifi without a cellular connection (which was a big deal, but I believe carries now support this for android phones)

Also iMessage automatically just works by default. You don't download an app and make an account. So for anybody who is not tech savvy they have to do nothing.

Try to explain to my grandma she has to download a messaging app and sign up for an account so I can send her a video. Not going to happen.

> iMessage sends high quality pictures and videos, try to send a video thru mms and it is unusable. iMessage also has read receipts, you can see if they are typing. iMessage works over wifi without a cellular connection (which was a big deal, but I believe carries now support this for android phones)

To add to what you're saying: RCS (which everyone except Apple uses) offers all of those things as well, and offers them in a way that is interoperable with all non-Apple phones.

iMessage doesn't actually do anything that RCS doesn't do. Apple simply refuses to adopt RCS (or make iMessage interoperable) because they want to use the lock-in to drive more sales of Apple products.

RCS does not provide end-to-end encryption, and requires a phone number. That's two things iMessage does that RCS doesn't do.

iMessage existed for maybe a decade before RCS had a widespread rollout? Yes, everyone now uses RCS, but that has only been true for the last few years.

iMessage still has some features that RCS doesn't, and Apple had a 10 year head start on integrating these features into their phones.

> Also iMessage automatically just works by default

I would imagine Apple would say that this is one of the big features of iMessage, and is partly because they control the system end-to-end. I'm sure they could make a system that interoperates with Android and works quite reliably, but it's not quite so easy to argue that they have a legal obligation to build and maintain such a system.

Media is a big issue. MMS is potato quality compared to what you can send over RCS.

I can send SMS to up to nine other people in a group with an iPhone. They will not get it if not in cell phone reception range. Any group of 11 or more requires all users to be on iMessage.

My group is more than ten people, and we work in a hospital (large building with heavy concrete structure - cell reception is entirely absent from significant areas, and we often depend on iMessage over the WiFi for delivering information). Any alternative solution (Signal, GroupMe, whatever) would have to be installed by all. Before I switched to an iPhone, I was one of two out of about 30 who didn't have one. This meant that group messages simply didn't get to me, and I discovered (e.g.) that our secretary had cancer when she asked me about good restaurants near M.D. Anderson.

This is bad behavior by Apple, but I decided to be practical about it: I can either be included in important information by buying an iPhone, or I can try to change almost 30 other people who want to keep on using one app for all their text-ish communications. You don't have an option like you do on Android to use Signal, which will send over their own protocol if possible but will revert to SMS for non-users. And, as others have noted, you don't have RCS. But I'm not going to change Apple singlehandedly, and I'm unlikely to force everyone else to use a different app solely to talk to me and one other guy. They'll just keep doing what they've been doing, and we will continue to be out of the loop.

Oh, and hospital IT blocks WiFi calling (but not texts). So far, my workaround has been to set up OpenVPN inside my home network and just VPN my entire phone and iPad through that. It takes a few seconds to connect properly, but it does work.

I switched to iPhone a while ago and while, for me, it was a worthwhile compromise to get my data away from Google while still getting a reliable appliance-like (rather than science-project-like) phone, the text entry system is pretty bad.

"the text entry system is pretty bad"

Have you tried installing Gboard?

What do you miss from the Android text experience?

Reminds me of the time a few years ago when my mom had a problem: her 1 year old cheap Android phone wasn't reliably getting push notifications from LINE anymore. Opening the app would always catch it up, but if she forgot, then notifications could arrive hours or days later, or never. Changing settings to disable battery optimization made battery life worse as described, but didn't fix the notification problem. We switched the family to Signal, which helped for a bit since it's a lighter app, but less than 6 months later that started failing, too. The solution to this messaging problem was, in fact, to buy my mom a new phone (though it wasn't an iPhone, sorry Tim). The point of this story is that while I think the real solution to the reporter's problem is to get one of the many great messaging apps out there, I fundamentally disagree with the idea that we should just forget about having a real messaging standard. A lot of techies want phones to just be internet machines, but they do have some fundamental features that people rely on, namely calls and texts. Apple should remember that when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, he spent just as much time touting its great phone and messaging UX as he did showing off its web browser and other apps.

As someone who works in the telco industry and spent a lot of time dealing with SMS and MMS, I actually find RCS to be almost as klunky. But as an European whose family and friends mostly use WhatsApp (and occasionally Signal), I think it’s time is past.

Sure, Google would (assuming they’re finally settling their messaging strategy) very much like to have full parity with iMessage, and they have been feeding carriers the notion that they might even get some extra revenue out of it, but for most Android users, even SMS doesn’t matter anymore.

A note on the carrier angle: if you have an iPhone and a flat data plan, iMessage can’t be billed. But if you have to have an RCS gateway, then you can bill on a per-message basis again, even if SMS pricing (at least en Europe) has gone sub-cent.

That is what Google has been trying to lobby on, regardless of their outspoken stance on interoperability…

What happened to this HN community. Apple took what was an open standard for interoperability, added "paywall" features on top of it, and its even to the point where people are ostracized for not buying into this paywall.

This behavior should be condemned not celebrated.

It just goes to show how much Google is really really hated.

One thing missing in RCS, it doesn't have web access (not the messages tunneling thing). I don't know whether that's by design or not. It's the only thing I want really.

Lol. It’s not like there is a dearth of platform agnostic messaging. Sure his mom could use whatsapp or signal. Dude tried to emotionally load his argument and win over Tim Cook

In some ways his comment is correct. iPhones can be had for pretty cheap and are functional for a long time compared to their Android counterparts. Most non-techies are more comfortable with iPhones in my experience. Your experience might differ.

I think the funniest aspect of this is that I'm planning on buying my mom an iphone next month to solve this issue.

That's not funny, that's sad.

In the sad world that tech has built for us, you have to find the humor where you can ;)

You don't have to buy her an iPhone

If you want to minimize your tech support calls? Come on.

Oh, like when my mother had to spend over a year using her phone only while plugged in because the battery was so underspecced for the task that it literally could not boot the phone despite showing 80% battery, and everything else about her phone basically stopped functioning, and she couldn't buy a new one because they're $1000 and she's an average person without a shitload of money to burn?

Oh wait, that was her iPhone, that she bought because she needed a more modern phone that wouldn't cause her issues like android.

Is there a word for self inflicted schadenfreude? If so, that, I suppose.

There might be a fancy run-on German word, but I would just go with "an average day in my life".

Its the truth though, My grandmother was struggling greatly with androids UI, couldn't figure out the app window, got confused by the back button etc. I bought her an IPhone and she hasn't really bothered me since. Apples UI/UX just works for many people.

I bought my mum an iPhone (after buying her a Xiaomi phone) because Android is just slow after a while of use. Gets slower and slower over time.

So iPhone warns their users when someone else is using a superior phone. big deal. i dont see the problem here.

He is right on multiple levels.

If your mom is suffering the buggy, slow, bad UX of an android phone, be a good child and buy her an iPhone. It’s objectively better unless you are harboring some irrational grudge.

The walled garden is Apple’s thing. They have no reason to interoperate with Android unless they are legally forced.

And why are you sending SMS anyway? There’s a universe of messaging apps that are far more feature complete than iMessage.

Yeah idk why people are still texting. This must be a North American/European thing? In Asia and Latin America nobody texts.

Only US specific I think. In the EU, everyone uses WhatsApp, Facebook messenger or some other App depending on the country.

Every thread like this, people pop up in the comments and say, "Nobody in my country texts at all, we all use XApp," but amusingly, XApp varies by thread/country/day. Sometimes it's WhatsApp, sometimes Signal, sometimes Telegram, sometimes LINE, sometimes WeChat, sometimes Facebook, sometimes something else.

you should really step out of your bubble every so often, sounds like you're projecting your experience onto everyone else without really thinking about or considering what life is like in other places

Oh I have a decent handle on that I think:)

I mean if your mom is texting with SMS, she’s in North America. If she’s texting with a lot of iPhone users your family is in a certain economic position already. If you are on this site you are in a certain economic position and get called in for a lot of family tech support. If your mom has an android, supporting it is probably not worth your time in terms of the hourly rate you usually get. On top of all that, an iPhone SE is one of the best deals in phones and its long support life will save money over a parade of crap cheapest-available androids.

I am just speaking to my audience.

No GP is right. You say:

> It’s objectively better unless you are harboring some irrational grudge.

That seems absurd. I'm in NA, and economically could buy an iphone. Most of the text messages I send are automated in a ruby script that runs in termux. I also have a few apps that I use that make my life easier, but require being side loaded as well as rooted.

Are you really saying that iphone would be objectively better for me? Unless things have radically changed in iOS, it seems like I would lose a lot of features that I currently rely on to save me lots of time and give me a much better UX

Are your children going to be buying you a phone any time soon and do they complain about your unwillingness to learn to use a messaging app other than SMS? If no, then I don’t think you are in the group of people I was talking about when I said an iPhone is objectively better.

The context of my comment was important in that it was a response to Cook’s response about buying the questioner’s elderly mother an iPhone. It is an objectively better UX for that person. It is a product obsessively made for that person.

The context in language is important. It is impossible for me to have been giving a universal axiom because Android developers exist and an iPhone would not be objectively better for that.

What do you need a ruby script for? Please enlighten me.

As I mentioned, I use it to send text messages using the termux API. I can type out a text once and use the script to iterate over a list of recipients (adding a 1 second sleep in between so my carrier doesn't block/throttle it). It can also be used to read and respond to messages in an automated fashion, with branching logic based on whatever I want.

I've also used it for other things like automating the downloading/unzipping of audiobooks, pushing photos/videos (or metadata about those) to my web service, and more.

Basically, I use it for whatever I want to automate. I don't think of my phone as an "appliance." To me it's a general-purpose computing machine that conveniently can sit in my pocket and go with me everywhere.

I've never understood why people want to embrace the idea of them as appliances. They are fully capable of being general purpose, they are just (intentionally) limited. Makes me think of a bird (born with wings), where someone intentionally ties the wings down so they can't fly even though they have all the hardware needed for it.

Damn, that's so cool. My phone has termux and is rooted as well but I never tried automating anything in it. Can you interact with other apps using termux, because I don't use sms/mms?

I currently use it to access my PC via Tailscale and ssh.

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