Hacker News Reader

I guess I'm old in that I basically never use emoji unless the platform changes something like :-) to one. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

SMS has supported Unicode since the very early 2000s. I remember getting SMS messages in Thai on my Nokia 7110 GSM when I was in Thailand in 2003. So there's no technical reason why iMessage fallback to SMS doesn't support emoji.

I received an emoji from someone using SMS ("green text") on my iPhone today, so it most certainly does support it.

I'm not talking about the ability to put emojis in text messages. I'm specifically talking about the way virtually all messaging apps these days (iMessage, Android RCS messaging, Slack, etc.) have the ability to do emoji reactions to previous messages, e.g. long press and add a thumbs up, heart, barfing, whatever.

> At the end of the vacation my good friend said flat out (jokingly, but still with a point) "Dammit hn_throwaway_99, just get an iPhone".

My friend groups mostly communicate on WhatsApp (a lot of them are either international, or Americans with significant overseas travel). This is the first time I have ever been glad to be a WhatsApp user. Oh, and messages, photos, and emoji reaction show up just fine cross-platform.

Asking a friend to get a $xxxx device because the company you use is unwilling to make their silly messaging application cross-platform is extremely out of date.

SMS has always been pretty broken for group chats and multimedia. I don't think we can blame Apple for that

We could blame Apple for not making an Android iMessage app, though

Rumor has it that, despite Apple's public claims, one reason why is that iMessage is tied to a physical device. This helps keeps spam, malware, and banned devices all under control. Expanding to Windows and Android by definition means that iMessage can no longer have that per-device tie, which undermines these controls.

This is a total bullshit reason. Literally every other messaging app, including well regarded secure ones, have cross platform versions available.

Yeah, and that's exactly why I've never received spam through iMessage even once over many years (despite being active in a bunch of group chats and 1:1 conversations).

All while I receive whatsapp/telegram message spam on a fairly regular basis, despite not being active in any groups or channels on those apps (and in general, opening them maybe once or twice a week at most). The only reason I even use those 2 apps is to talk to select few old relatives of mine who are not very tech literate and who just happened to learn how to use those apps +a couple of friends who simply insist on using those apps.

I have the opposite experience for what it's worth.

To make sure I understand it correctly, you actually receive imessage spam, not sms spam? Because regular sms spam (green bubbles) could still arrive.

Oh yea it’s normal, but so what? Still sends me a notification

Then your point doesn't apply to iMessage. You receive SMS spam, not iMessage spam.

But iMessage has done nothing to lower the amount of spam I receive so I don't see any benefit.

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me

1. It's multi-device at least when we're talking about non-phones; that's one of its better features, being able to use it from your Mac or iPad

2. You can make an iMessage account without having an iPhone; just having an email/Apple ID and some other Apple device to use it from

3. If you had an Android phone, presumably you wouldn't also have an iPhone at the same time? And even if you were using it on an iPhone, it seems like nothing stops you from being logged in on a second iPhone

But points being:

1. RCS is now available and a standard. iMessage already "degrades" to sending SMS messages to those not on iMessage. There is no reason they can't better support RCS.

2. While MMS groups were missing a ton of features, there are just things now that are much worse as an Android user interacting with an iMessage group than it was previously in an MMS group. I.e. I never used to have issues with dropped images before, but in an iMessage group it's like a crapshoot whether my photos get delivered.

There's many reasons not to support RCS.

It is a bag of standard parts thrown together by a bunch of telecommunications companies in a desperate attempt to hold on to their 50c per message cash cow.

If you spend more than a minute actually looking into it, you'll realise that Apple would basically have to run it in a virtual machine for security, and then hand over control to a bunch of telcos that can't even all agree on what is and isn't included in RCS.

Still better than SMS/MMS. But apple can come up with a new standard if they want. Or... they can port the one they've already invented to android.

> It is a bag of standard parts thrown together by a bunch of telecommunications companies in a desperate attempt to hold on to their 50c per message cash cow.

But in the US (the market being discussed here) basically all US mobile plans include unlimited texting anyway...

Well then, why not use whatsapp or whatever the rest of the world is using?

Hard for me to disagree with that. The reason I have an iPhone is that I was having trouble with the family group chat when my mom was in the hospital.

Whenever I go in vacations with friends we talk. Rarely, we talk over the phone, otherwise we talk in person. Never text. That is the point of going together and not separately.

Seriously, do you not know any other app than "Messaging" and "iMessage"?

The sarcastic tone of your response is annoying, given that it misses the point.

Yes, I do, and I use them. But when I'm amongst a group of, say, 9 other iPhone users, who happily all already use iMessage (and already have existing chats among different subgroups of the members), telling everyone they need to switch over to a different, unfamiliar messaging app doesn't go over very well. It's difficult enough to attempt this among adults; it's not surprising that teenagers would laugh in the face of another kid who attempted a "Hey guys, let's all use Signal!!" request

No sarcasm