Sen. Warren calls out Apple for shutting down Beeper's iMessage on Android app
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
(Though it's recently developed a weird bug where my Signal messages out aren't delivered to the remote recipient... Such is the nature of adversarial interoperability.)
Steve Jobs went on medical leave from Apple since January 2011.
Wikipedia says iMessage was announced June 6, 2011 by Scott Forstall and launched October 12, 2011.
Steve was at the announcement but died a week before that launch.
⇒ I think it’s unlikely he said anything about it in public.
It is particularly pernicious among teens[1], who drive a lot of this market (and, of course, become adults and bring their habits with them)
[1] (paywall) https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
In my experience as a parent with two high-school-age kids, this is mostly a media-created narrative fueled by Google PR.
I've witnessed their many text chains, all of which are standards-based (green bubble) because some participants are Android users. When I asked about it explicitly their response was "that's not a thing" (at least in SoCal).
Note that I'm speaking in generalities. I have no doubt there are individual elite cliques where the alpha children demand that members have certain types of phones, wear certain types of clothing, ride certain models of ebikes, etc.
It had nothing to do with “green text”. They were annoyed that when people shared photos with the group they came through at shit quality.
Outside of what I’m sure are some articles very in tune to teenage culture (BRB, POS), I’ve literally never heard of this as a status symbol—purely as a functional issue.
IMO that's a "them" problem. By "them", I mean "people who let something as trivial as this have social and dating implications".
I have zero hope for it, but until recently no one was bothering to try. So it was kind of unclear what the situation really was.
Having seen two different folks interop in the last 30 days, it's clear that there's some will & desire & that technically it was feasible. I kind of see it as the market finally ante-ing in. Zero surprise, it's what everyone expected, but the sheer alacrity with which Apple has legally & technically refused any competitive compatibility says the quiet part out loud, that preventing people from communicating across devices is a hill Apple absolutely will throw every last body it can find to hold.
I don’t know if this is a result of Apple purposely making it impossible to excuse yourself from a mixed conversation. It would certainly be possible for them to make the unread count ignore muted conversations.
Beeper isn’t a competitor to Apple, they’re a pest. The type of pest that could be squashed like a bug if Apple ever chose to support Android.
But they chose not to, and while I don’t agree with that, it’s their platform. All this company is doing is cashing in on that.
I’m an advocate for reverse engineering and FOSS, but once you try to monetize like this, that’s a dangerous game.