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Comment by warning26 | Hacker News Reader

I'd argue that iMessage is one of the most monopolistic elements of the iPhone. With their market share as large as it is, and with only one remotely viable competitor, they should be forced to open up an API allowing other people to create clients.

(Anyone remember the glory days of GAIM/Pidgin and multi-account messengers?)

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OTOH I bet the majority of users have no idea that imessage and sms are different things. Iphones show up blue but thats about all the average end users notice about the protocol.

I've got to hand it to Apple for implementing it that way; the seamless UX works so well. The fact that Google never built a competitor that functioned similarly is utterly baffling.

I think part of the reason was also to put messages on data. when the iphone came out you could get unlimited data from att, but I think you still might end up with a plan with finite text messages. Being able to text over wifi or 3g would save you from running up sms. blackberry had something similar too.

> (Anyone remember the glory days of GAIM/Pidgin and multi-account messengers?)

Such things still exist, and even include iMessage ;-)

It’s vastly more complicated than “apple opens an api”. iMessage does a lot more than just messaging, and key components of apples spam and fraud story are tied to individual devices.

For Apple to open iMessage, would require that android manufacturers enroll the devices.

I use an iPhone, and I try to get all my friends to use signal

I like that Signal is open source, but I dislike their insistence on shutting down third party clients, because I believe third party clients are almost universally better than first-party ones.

In addition, their continued reluctance to add an export or any kind of meaningful history backup is also a negative.

The chat landscape is dire. I view Signal as a least bad option for my friends to use.

I think telegram is a great tradeoff. Not as secure (by default it is not even e2e), but their clients on every platform are just slick and very great.

Yep, they've started nagging for donations too. Signal, no means no.

You can just not donate.

By her own admission she was on an unimportant part of the project when she joined in 1965. She was recorded working on completely unrelated stuff in 63. When she was actually promoted to leadership the work was already done

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