What is currently not interoperable between the majors mobile OS makers?
Some others:
- Find my device features including Bluetooth ping networking (airtags, Tile, Android's upcoming network)
- Airdrop/Nearby Share
- Bluetooth LE proximity pairing (at least I doubt this works when pairing cross ecosystem)
- Carplay/Android Auto
- Airplay/Google Cast
the EU is fundamentally interested in these changes regardless of consumer welfare. this is sour grapes because they fail at tech by every conceivable metric and by degrading everything to a common feature set and commoditizing certain standards, they hope to give domestic companies a prayer. that it prevents innovation and improvements is merely a secondary concern for the hard-headed anti-Americans in brussels.
The same is also true, say about AirDrop, if apple makes it "Open" and they have to make a breaking change for security or whatever reason, they can't feasibly even make an update available for non-apple devices let alone enforce it.
Now "Apple" has broken your non-apple device and along with it their reputation.
Open is good, but the cost is non-zero.
This argument is silly. You could use this line of reasoning to justify why all computers should use the same OS from the same vendor. Of course then you'd have a monoculture where implementation bugs that cause vulnerabilities are universally exploitable, instead of only exploitable on machines running that vendor's software.
Far from it, actually.
If a part of your user base uses another service, you’ll inevitably have to add workarounds specifically to cater to users for that service. It’s just a fact of life when multiple groups have to implement a spec. If you aren’t willing to add workarounds, users will think your software is broken when they should be blaming someone else.
For example, Firefox maintains a few workarounds for websites that ship in the browser. They aren’t the web developers responsible for the sites but someone has to make it work.
Interoperability is not free.
Honestly, this reads more like marketing spin to cover anti-competitive behaviour than a forum post.
Another way to read this: Apple has a superior product because they perform anti-competitive practices and don't allow other companies to out-product them. And when they do, they buy them/shut them down before anyone is the wiser.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406303/imessage-android...
In short, Eddy Cue proposed in 2013 that Apple owning the best-in-class messaging app would be a win, and even mentioned the cost being low. Phil Schiller shut him down, arguing it would remove a barrier preventing iPhone parents from buying their kids Android phones.
That reads like anti-competitive motivation to me. In particular, it looks like tying, where two unrelated products are connected artificially. The wikipedia article on anticompetitive behaviors has a section on tying, and mentions another case involving Apple that bears some resemblance involving iPods being artificially restricted to only playing tracks either from iTunes or direct CD rips.
So I think the anti-competitive angle has some real merit.
The innovation claim, though, I have a harder time with. I don't see how releasing Messages for Android implies design-by-committee. They could just release it, like Beeper Mini just did, but without the reverse engineering part.
As much as I think Beeper's work on iMessage is important, apps like that do not and have never solved this problem. Because then you have different contact identifiers to contend with, the inability to make groups amongst those users, differing features, and the list goes on.
If you look closely at what I'm saying here, it's easy to compare it to what iMessage users say about why Android users create problems for them, and that's true. That's why messaging interoperability is important.
I cannot remember the last time I've received a non-spam SMS. The whole iMessage thing feels so alien to me. My girlfriend is an Apple fan-girl and has never used iMessage in her life. I kinda wanted to see what was special about it and when I asked her about it, she had no idea what I was talking about.
You can definitely make the argument about innovation in the messaging space, but RCS is very extensible. RCS Encryption definitely needs to be standardized, but I recommend you check out how Google layered it on top of RCS [1] including handling fallbacks for corner cases like switching your RCS client away from Google Messages before the system realizes it.
This is to say that RCS is pretty flexible, the key is handling the fallback paths in the extension design and working with other vendors to standardize promptly, so we don't end up with the same kind of broken mess that the carriers made.
[1] https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf
Certainly not every iOS app has a custom Airdrop integration either.
Every time I've nearby shared it's worked just fine. What phone do you have?
Another Apple ecosystem that can be used by non-Apple devices. OpenHaystack [0] has been working well for quite a while.
You can buy tags from AliExpress for $5 that implement it. I've been using a few for a couple of months, and no issues so far.
You are referring to being able to track devices via the Find My portal on Apple.com or your Apple devices, but I am referring to being able to merge the networks so that Apple devices will forward pings onto Android's Find My network and vice versa.
The last commit and release is from october.
Are there any headunits that only support one or the other? The cheap Chinese unit I got last year supports wireless for both. It would be nice to have an open protocol though, so third parties could develop alternative UIs.