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Comment by rooster8 | Hacker News Reader

Been using since it came out over a month ago. The biggest annoyances are:

1. You cannot tap on any links in iMessage. You have to hold your thumb down on the link, copy it to clipboard, switch to Safari, paste

2. If someone posts a gif in an iMessage thread, it doesn't show up

3. All inbound requests for FaceTime calls seem to be automatically blocked, even when they are coming from people who are favorites in my contacts. I haven't looked into why yet. Maybe it's because I don't have their phone number saved with a `+1` prefix in my contacts?

Other than that it's hardly noticeable, and I think it's fantastic that we now have this option.

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The linked article says

> Incoming FaceTime calls are blocked unless you have previously called that person or contact.

So you may have to call them first, even if they are a favorited contact.

Thank you! TIL that I never initiate calls with the most important people in my life.

Can meet in person, after all, right?

Seems well thought out. It prevents someone from maliciously adding their phone number to, say, your mom in Contacts.

It's more that there are plenty of people who have others in their contacts, who rarely or never want to receive facetime messages from said contacts.

Is this really a feature people want? I can’t imagine any situation where I’d want to allow unsolicited FaceTime calls (99% of the time it’s some kind of spammer)

This is a strange one. Presumably a few people in the target group for this would know a few people also in the target group - how do they intend to bootstrap trust? Or is it just a calls b, b's device reject call - b can now call a? Then after b call a, a can also call b?

If so, it sounds like a very complicated way of marking contacts as "super favorites"?

You can receive incoming calls from accounts you have called. Presumably, the bootstrap looks like two people try to call each other, one is rejected, one goes through. Then either can call the other in the future.

> 2. If someone posts a gif in an iMessage thread, it doesn't show up

This sounds like a positive for me. I disable animations in chat whenever it’s an option.

#1 sounds great. I hate how I can't open a link from iMessage directly in Firefox Focus, which is my normal practice. In the process of copying the link, I have to long press, which causes Messages to pre-load a preview of the page in a standard webview. I don't know what this does for privacy, but I wish there was a way to disable just this behavior.

It's possible to disable the preview, clicking somewhere on the grey bar IIRC.. at least when I used iOS.

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