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Comment by babl-yc | Hacker News Reader

Selfishly I'm most excited about this project as a demonstration that secure and reliable communication across platforms is pretty straightforward. The only blocker is that Apple doesn't want it to exist.

If Apple were truly acting in their users best interest, they would want their users to have encrypted and fast communication with all devices, through an open protocol or otherwise.

And yes, iOS allows 3rd party apps but not nearly with enough permissions to act as a full Messages+iMessage alternative.

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> The only blocker is that Apple doesn't want it to exist.

This is my main source of excitement around this project. The existence of this project shows that there is no technical reason it can't exist. So, what is the reason it doesn't exist? Exactly what you said: Apple thinks it is in its best interest not to.

There’s also the fact that iMessages have a cost to them. An individual message might not amount to much, but millions of them? Apple is hosting the computing to manage the delivery of iMessages. Should they provide that free of charge to the world out of the goodness of their heart?

As of iOS 6.1 (2013), Apple said APNS had delivered over 4 trillion notifications already. A 2018 paper [0] claimed (with an admittedly-small sample size) that people receive on average 56 notifications a day (delivered, not necessarily interacted with). It's almost 2024. Even going off those old numbers, assuming 2 billion active devices [1], APNS would be delivering close to 41 TRILLION messages a year, and likely growing.

That's a lot of pepperoni, guys. Expensive pepperoni. Just some food for thought.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3229434.3229445 [0]

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1383887/number-of-apple-... [1]

That couldn't possibly have ever been in doubt, though.

Don't WhatsApp and Signal already do exactly that?

> And yes, iOS allows 3rd party apps but not nearly with enough permissions to act as a full Messages+iMessage alternative.

Not an Apple user, but I imagine even though there's some allowances for third party messaging, there's a lot of holes. For instance, what happens if I ask Siri to send a message to a specific contact from my Apple Watch. Will it send it over Signal if I've added a Signal address to their contact card and went the mile to set that as the default messaging app for that user? Curious.

While I don't mix text and voice control that often myself, it appears to be fully supported: https://faq.whatsapp.com/1803878309981730/?locale=sv_SE&cms_... as for what actions an app supports, that appears to vary based on what the developer included.

But do you have to say "Send a WhatsApp message to X" or does it work with "send a message to X"?

> If Apple were truly acting in their users best interest, they would want their users to have encrypted and fast communication with all devices, through an open protocol or otherwise.

yeah that protocol exists. it’s called RCS and it is coming to ios soon. imo apple is allowed to gate imessage behind ios-only if RCS support is a thing

RCS has no end-to-end encryption in the standard, though. That's a non-standard google messages extension. I think a better example would be the cross-device messengers like signal/whatsapp/etc.

Google is slacking here and I hope Apple's involvement in RCS will help to move this forward. Samsung Messages also does not support Google's E2EE even though it supports RCS and pretty much all of the user-facing features Google Messages provides. Based on Google's whitepaper [1] about their E2EE support, I imagine it's because of the identity service they use for key exchange being centralized and internal (when really the identity service a contact uses should be an RCS capability in the extended contact system [RCS terminology here], and they should interoperate).

[1] https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf

I believe encryption is not in the RCS spec yet.

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