Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
They can certainly escalate with protocol changes, but they still have to contend with older Macs, iPhones and iPads which are out of the support window losing access-- so if they want to update the protocol they either have to issue out of band patches for these devices or cut them off too.
This is assuming you can actually iMessage on iDevices that are out of software support -- maybe our iOS friends can let us know.
EDIT: This take seems more plausible (that this is intentional by Apple): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38648030
> Why does everyone care so much?
You seem to both care about it, and also wonder why other people care about it ?
Otherwise, looking from the sideline it's fascinating seeing Apple fighting this battle that they brought upon themselves and have no chance of winning.
I think Apple will almost certainly win on a purely technical game of cat and mouse.
I think you need to adjust your definition of winning. Blocking 5% of messages is a 'win' for Apple. I won't use a messaging service with a 95% success rate. I won't migrate from iMessage to Beeper. I will submit, Apple would have liked a more decisive victory.
Right now, they blocked a part of Beeper mini, and nobody expecting a rock solid service would join Beeper Mini so Apple's won't be losing any of their core customers.
But the news cycle keeps going on, Beeper Mini is still there for those the group of users that wants it alive, and I wouldn't be surprised if next week for instance actual iMessage users came out to complain about getting kicked out of the service as colateral damage from the whole additional filtering.
And of course this whole publicity for Beeper is a door opened to any other company to give it a shot, as Apple is playing the cat and mouse game, and not taking any more drastic option.
Apple isn't losing either, but they're now dragged into guerrila like battle with no upside for them.
They won't be losing _any_ of their customers. For the most part[^], nobody using Beeper Mini has paid Apple for anything... otherwise they wouldn't need to use Beeper Mini.
[^] Yes I'm sure there's at least a few people with an iPhone and a Windows PC or something that see this as "iMessage on Windows".
For instance if you have a mac and an iPad but use an android phone, iMessages will go to both Apple devices but not where you want it the most, on your phone. That's the kind of pain point that pushes a group to fully move to another service if the android members have enough weight, but would be fine if there was a reliable android client.
based on the history of tech-related cat and mouse games, then Apple will probably lose.
Just like Sony could not prevent people from pirating Playstation DVDs, Apple itself could not prevent iOS jailbreaks, music labels could not prevent CD ripping, etc etc etc
if there are enough people who are strongly motivated to bypass whatever protection, eventually they will probably bypass it.
This tension is at the center of the it all, and why Beeper Mini exists in the first place.
I doubt that. iMessage is a free service if you have almost any Apple OS product (iOS, iPadOS, macOS). You aren't making ongoing payments for the iMessage service.
You could say you paid for iMessage in that you bought a device that worked with it. But you do not pay for iMessage.
On what is paid and what is free, Beeper mini is free, iMessage is free (as we've learned from the whole saga, you don't even need an icloud account). Using someone else's public facing API without consent is rude, but hey, our whole industry started with kits to plug into the AT&T network with unauthorized material, and as of now no money is changing hands.
Yes I’m sure “can anyone use other services as their product backends for free, directly against the TOS of said service” is going to be a really interesting and complicated legal question…
I don't want an over the top chat app, I just want to text people.
How do you want Apple to indicate if this chat participant is costing you money by the message or free?
Everyone's concerned about teens. Presumably teens know that T-Mobile and the other carriers give the family plan adults the ability to read their dependents text messages. As a teen I would want to stick with the encrypted bubbles your parents can't read and tell my parents about, thank you very much.
It's not punitive product design. It's seamlessly integrated and meaningful, both on chat leaks and on costs of messaging: Blue sky, text safely. Green could literally cost you.
Teenagers know that blue = iPhone and green = non-iPhone/SMS and that blue offers significantly more features and functionality vs SMS (delivered/read receipts, group chats, stickers, rich media, memojis, etc), which is the overwhelming reason why blue is preferred.
So lowering the cost of 3G made it more economical if your friends had iPhones as now you could spend €20/month for '1GB' (which was mostly iMessage & web browsing at the time) and avoid spending that simply on SMS. (excuse the price inaccuracies if any, it's been a while since I had that iPhone 3GS)
And even now, on T-Mobile (as that’s the one I use, so the only one I can verify myself), if you have an account with multiple lines (e.g., a family plan), you can go into your account, click “Usage”, then “Text messages”, and it will show you all text info for all lines on the account (but no actual text content). And not just for “kid lines”, but for all regular lines as well. You can look by individual line or download that data as a bulk file.
I just checked my t-mobile account, and despite it not showing the text content (which t-mobile certainly has access to, unlike imessage; t-mobile cannot even track metadata for those individually), it shows an entry for each text with the phone number with info on who was the sender vs receiver, timestamp, and other metadata.
Luckily, T-Mobile only shows that I had 8 incoming messages (all of them were just automated verification code texts) and no outgoing messages this month, because pretty much all my messaging these days is either on discord or imessage.
Even without the actual text content though, that metadata is still some very sensitive info that teenagers almost definitely wouldn’t want their parents to track. Hell, I am not a teenager, have nothing interesting in that data (doubt anyone would care to know about existence of those 8 automated verification messages, and neither would I be embarrassed if someone did), and still absolutely wouldn’t want anyone else to be able to see that info.
I'm not convinced that handing everything to a different company is a solution, but I'm glad you found a plan you're comfortable with.
I stand corrected though, you are right, i don’t think the content of messages has been ever obtainable. At least not since 2006 when it became explicitly illegal for carriers to provide that info to anyone (including the customer paying for the phone line) outside of special circumstances like a court orderc subpoena, etc. (so practically it isn’t an option for the heavy majority).
However, it is factually true that i can get metadata (datetime of each text, phone numbers of both parties, who sent who how many messages, etc) about texts being exchanged from my carrier by just clicking through a couple of menus in the app today. I checked that right before posting my earlier comment. And it is also factually true that despite the carrier not being allowed to disclose to me the content of those messages, they themselves indeed have have full access to the content in plaintext.
All your messages have been recorded by the government, since the government has been collecting all push notifications on iPhones, and iMessage runs over push notifications
what? sms is a basic phone function, how is supporting sms "embracing" anything?
If you, as an iOS user, don't want to use iMessage you simply go flip the toggle. If you "just want to text people", it's just that easy. Really.
Got stats to back this up? I have 3 friends who use iPhone's that do have that toggle flipped.
- 1.36 billion iPhone users
- 1.3 billion iMessage users
Happy to explain. First thought, why do you care so much?
> Nor do I want it.
Why? What about exclusivity makes the world better? Why shouldn't I be able to communicate well with someone using an Apple device? Why should someone using an Apple device not want someone to communicate well with them?
Sure there are other systems. But switching costs are so high. Especially with iMessage, folks are going to use what's provided them out of the box. It doesn't seem like a reasonable ask to get everyone en masse to agree to & switch to a lone cross-platform system. What's really needed is standards & interop. You should be able to use what you like, be that iMessage or RCS or Signal or XMPP. But none of these options should be locked out of working with others.
I'm so baffled by the strident defenses against possibility. From someone whose name is @unstatusthequo at that, going to bat for status quo lock in seems like a low and dark comedy. Un status quoer, un status quo thineself. Don't triple down on the fixed & limited!
Or CASL in Canada?
Or the "Spam Act" in Australia?
Or the PECR in the UK?
Yeah, what we need is more regulation. That's been solving the problem.
I think you got it in the reverse order.
“User has an android phone” doesn’t indicate “possible spammer”. However, “spammer” typically indicates “user has an android phone.”
iMessage is apples system, we live in an app world, you don’t have to use it, most people use WhatsApp so just download that, Google users have to download it too because it’s a third party service. How is downloading a free app a high switching cost? You can use it alongside iMessage. Most people use
There is plenty of freedom of choice without a third party app hacking into another system. Get a grip.
> most people use WhatsApp
I only know of one person who uses WhatsApp and it's to keep on touch with folks in Brazil. No one uses it here, from what I can see, and no one has offered to share WhatsApp ever.
The ease with which you suggest yeah everyone can just use an obvious easy to agree upon other central alternative is so facetiously ridiculous and painful. Everyone has a mish-mahs of preferences & existing accounts. It not just that you've deeply shirked what the actual switching costs are (since everyone will pick different things), it's that having these crazy anti-cirumvention laws is stupid, that not having adversarial Interoperability like what Beeper is doing is a sad corporate lichdom sucking the lifeblood of what should be the most vibrant sector of our age: communications technologies. Babel fell, and these merchants of disconnection have been keeping us from communicating with each other ever since, to make a couple more sales. Vulgar pieces of anti-human garbage, just disgraceful.
That being said, the reactions in this thread are way over the top. A lot of Android users in this thread seem to think there are a huge number of Apple users who refuse to talk to Android users or that iMessage is some sort of messaging nirvana. Both are not true.
The other elephant in the room is Apple created iMessage, Apple pays for the service's costs, and therefore Apple has the right to decide who can use it. Third parties do not have the right to use it. It's sad that sone non-Apple users feel entitled to use iMessage.
This is what people were saying before Apple cut Beeper off the first time. It would be great if there was just one mistake that they made and fixed, but I'm not holding my breath.
Those were not protocol changes. The iMessage protocol remains unchanged as far as I know. What I'm referring to above is changing the protocol and updating all clients to use the new protocol so that Beeper is left catching up. This could involve adding new DRM mechanisms or even adding cryptographic remote attestation requirements.
The result is that as an iPhone users I feel sometimes feel left out because different friends circles on Android turn to different secured messaging services (WhatsApp, FB messenger, Telegram, Signal, etc...).
I firmly refuse to give my personal ID to all theses companies just to keep in touch so I often default to sms/mail (or I get left out of group chat).
iMessage is not perfect but they did get the sms fallback right and with upcoming RCS support maybe it'll be easier to bypass theses competing closed and incompatible walled gardens.
So from my point of view, the whole "blue bubble" tyranny look like a joke. Apple kept conformance with SMS/MMS standards from the beginning and added a secure layer on top. I wish others services just did the same.
Did they though? It’s unreliable.
Other than this point, I very much share your position.
> I wish others services just did the same.
Signal did, then someone convinced them that the risk of accidentally sending an SMS which you thought were an encrypted message, was bad enough to break messaging integration on Android.
I wonder if whoever convinced them of that maybe didn't want it to be so convenient to use.
I think bundling different protocols in the same app is a bad idea in general. Besides the security and functionality problems, it just creates confusion. The whole iMessage/bubble-color mess wouldn't exist if Apple made it clear to their users that the iMessage protocol is different from SMS and incompatible with most phones.
Signal always warned me very clearly if it was forced to send a message via SMS, and even pushed me to invite the recipient to Signal. It made sense to support it still, because it's the second most basic service in the Android world (after calls), and now that Signal doesn't offer it, it can't be the default service any longer.
Signal's task as I see it isn't just to protect your communication, but encourage widespread use of strong encryption so that you don't stand out for using it. For that, there are tradeoffs. I think being able to handle the forced insecure communication for the user, clearly marked as such, was a great tradeoff for the sake of wider adoption.
What % of iPhone users do you think understand the difference between SMS, MMS and iMessage protocols? I bet most don't. But if iMessage had its own separate app, they would know it's an Apple-only protocol. And that would make them less likely to exclude non-iPhone users and more likely to use cross-platform alternatives. It's not like all iPhone are jerks, they're being mislead on how "texting" in the default iPhone app really works. That's what I meant by confusion.
iMessage is not a "secure layer on top", it's a totally separate proprietary protocol and it requires an Apple account to work. It just happens to run in the same app as SMS/MMS messages, which has its pros and cons.
Not true.
“The “magic” is that you don’t have to sign up for an account, or create a new username or account identifier. You just send a message from your phone number to another phone number, and if both numbers are registered for iMessage, the message goes over iMessage instead of SMS, even if you don’t have an Apple ID. Beeper had that working last week. Now, Beeper users need to have an Apple ID, and sign into that Apple ID within Beeper. (Beeper should actively encourage users to create and use an app-specific Apple ID password[1] for Beeper.)”[2]
You're not left out because of what kind of phone you use. You're left out because you refuse to use messaging apps that are available for your phone.
Whoa, citation needed there. I don't use one, and most people I know don't use one.
Regardless, the original point stands regardless of it being 50% or 80%.
Even in the metro you can go days without seeing one.
Despite that, I am yet to hear about their version of the whole “blue bubble exclusion” controversy. It could definitely be just due to the japanese users not being super active on western internet, and not necessarily due to that controversy not being a thing in Japan. But it could just be a non-issue in Japan.
Can anyone with knowledge of this chime in?
0. https://www.pcmag.com/news/ios-more-popular-in-japan-and-us-...
Thanks to your point, this way we can easily see that despite SK being android-dominant and Japan being iPhone-dominant, both are not heavily into iMessage and prefer their native super apps instead.
Which provides a solid data point in favor of those claiming that the iMessage proliferation and dominance don’t necessarily have a direct causation stemming from iOS/Android dominance in a given market.
So in practice my wife uses FaceTime quite a bit with her siblings, and falls back to KakaoTalk when needed. Her iMessage usage isn't zero either, but mostly 1:1, group chats happen over KakaoTalk, since you know everyone will be there.
I don't know if similar patterns are seen in Japan.
Out of my friends who moved to Japan, pretty much not a single one of them uses LINE aside from rare one-offs. But with Kakao? Hell, everyone I know who even traveled to SK uses Kakao on regular (not even talking about those who moved there) pretty much as the main app in general for so many different things.
EDIT: oh wow, this sent me down a pretty interesting rabbithole. Apparently 85% of people under 30 in SK had an Android as their first phone, with 53% of those people having switched to iOS since then[0].
0. https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/30-south-korea...
Blue / Green bubble is a total non issue.
We use Telegram or Facebook Messenger.
Facebook Messenger and FB Groups are the main form of comms for School networking.
Whats App is huge in the Uk by all accounts.
I have friends in LA who say the blue / green bubble situation is a non issue for them, and they use Android.
However it might be an issue for other non Middle Ages demographics and so on.
Still, I have a suspicion the drama over bubble colour is hyped up but the US media.
SMS is a disaster, so it’s best just to leave out the green bubbles.
The videos are genuinely useless, I don't know why Apple bothers. It sends like 240p "90s security camera" quality video. I can't tell who anyone is, I once thought a bear in a video was a wolf.
Iirc, Android pops up some kind of "this video is too large, do you want to share it with Photos instead?" modal that converts it to a Photos link instead of sharing directly. That's not perfect, but it's a damn site better than sending a video that you know is useless.
Just pointing out that effectively, it is the same "problem" that SMS has with dropped messages that happens quite rarely (both are rare, actually).
This is hearsay based on prior threads, but I haven't read a word against it.
There are millions of people out there running old iPhones like that. If Apple just decided to cut them all off iMessage they would do far more damage to their brand than Beeper could possibly manage.
I get Apple's "this is our toy, you won't be making $2/month/user on us".
But "keeping the spammers out" it's a bit.. weird..?
Can someone please describe the WHAT is the technical advantage of Android users to spam over iPhone/Mac users to spam.
That’d be pretty difficult to get second hand, especially when you can just spam over SMS.
They could even release a new iMessage protocol with another bubble color and let the blue ones become uncool.
Nothing, that's why iMessage is full of spam already.
What scammers do is buying boxes of old half broken iphones and they turn them into relays exactly as you said.
We're also talking about old, non-updated iOS versions here, jailbreaks are more likely to last when they target these versions.
Apple could even be generous and still allow group chats or whitelist existing accounts.
Also, you have to take into consideration that iMessage is pretty US centric, the rest of the world wouldn’t really care about this.
There were plenty of confirmation from other users in this thread having their out of the most recent iOS version iPhones (someone mentioned their iPhone 5 currently running iOS12, with the most recent one being iOS17) working just fine with iMessage.
I’m not saying they should, but knowing Apple, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they decided to do it.
I have also had iMesages be sent to the wrong recipient. In one ongoing case, my aunt and uncle frequently receive each other's iMessages, suggesting it's related to their group carrier plan but it's hard to say. The extended family all knows to use SMS instead, which reliably goes to the intended recipient. They are both retired and always together so they haven't reached the point of getting a new plan.
What data made you make that association? Seems unlikely. If that happens, then apple would have to be routing messages incorrectly, but that would be a massive bug/security issue... especially considering how E2EE works.
The only way to submit a claim was to click on a button in my icloud account that did not exist. I live in a big city and visited 3 Apple stores and spent about 15 hours in them in total, but none of them were able to help me get the claim filed so I had to give up. One of the supervisors did refund the ~$15/mo that I had paid for the AppleCare+ insurance, but I had to buy a new phone.
It's pretty easy to see why they wouldn't include theft + loss coverage unless you pay for it...
I have never, to my knowledge, had a message sent to me lost (which I would have found out because my family members, who would have been the ones to try and fail to send it to me, would have mentioned it), nor lost a message I sent (except for obvious cases where I had insufficient signal, and the app clearly notified me of it).
I have never received a misdirected message, had mine misdirected, nor heard of anyone else doing either.
In all the criticisms of iMessage I've seen recently—in this Beeper situation, and a little longer ago when Apple decided to support RCS—I have seen no one else say that they've had issues like you describe.
Obviously, this doesn't mean that these things can't happen. But it does suggest that Your Experiences Are Not Universal.
I expect message loss is actually a pretty regular occurrence, in absolute numbers. I wouldn't be surprised if thousands or even hundreds of thousands or millions of messages are dropped every year. But in the end that means that the delivery rate would be something like 99.99999999999%, which is actually pretty damn good (and it probably isn't that good; I'm just throwing around numbers here).
I call shenanigans.
I could’ve expanded, I’m pretty much de facto “IT Support” for a lot of the friends/family I’ve spent those years communicating with using iMessage so I can pretty confidently say it has never happened to any of them either. I could go on to say that if it was a widespread issue this wouldn’t be the first we are hearing about it, and it absolutely would’ve been covered in some sort of tech news - possibly even the regular old news.
But sure, let’s go with self centred.
It's a little weird to so strongly believe that a rare, intermittent bug (no one suggested it's "widespread") couldn't exist with a messaging service that gets a ton of traffic and has to support nearly a billion and a half people across the globe. May want to examine what biases lead you to having such a negative response to something like that.
Also consider that even if you have 1000 friends for whom you are "IT support guy", you've still interacted with fewer than 0.0001% of all iPhone users. You are several orders of magnitude off from a representative sample, especially if we're talking about a rare bug.
They're explicitly claiming "this happens all the time."
Doesn't feel like some rare issue. Googled it by curiosity, and there's a ton of "help" articles and support post on people randomly seeing messages disappear or not getting delivered.
I worry that sounds accusatory but that’s not my intention, I’m curious and too tired to attempt to reword it.
And what are the chances that the actual recipient ends up being the spouse of your expected recipient? Sounds more like they logged into each other's phones or something.
> suggesting it's related to their group carrier plan
Extremely doubtful it has anything to do with their plan. iMessage is over the top: only the first SMS activation message has anything to do with your carrier -- after that it's all sent through Apple's servers.
I would bet there is at least one overlap or misconfiguration there.
That’s the whole point. You’re using it for non-critical things.
See https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8063349?sortBy=best
1. The sender cannot connect to the imessage server 2. The receiver does not connect to the imessage server, on any of the devices registered to receive at that particular address.
I know both methods happen since I didn't used to have data and I would receive SMSs when someone sent me an imessage and I was out and about.
It is self-seviced https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/
And what you link to is what I meant by
> assuming you forget to go through Apple's iMessage deregistration system.
If you don't receive iMessages it will automatically fall back to SMS (unless the sender specifically turned that feature off).
While neither mechanism is perfect, the RCS model treats lack of delivery to the handset as a potential problem, whereas iMessage ignores it. iMessage assumes your phone is just off, which for most people you are texting, is an unlikely scenario.
For users who actively turn off their device for certain activities, you have the opportunity to just wait, and when it arrives the error will clear, or send it as SMS and it will pick it up when the handset does turn on. But while the message is in flight for any length of time, the UI treats it as "something is wrong".
This means whenever you return to the conversation to check for a response or text more, you'll be reminded strongly that the message never arrived for them. And you always have the opportunity to resend on SMS during that time.
>Apple previously issued a (somewhat uncommon) statement about Beeper's iMessage access, stating that it "took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage." Citing privacy, security, and spam concerns, Apple stated it would "continue to make updates in the future" to protect users. Migicovsky previously denied to Ars that Beeper used "fake credentials" or in any way made iMessages less secure.
Not commenting about the ethics of all this, just wondering why technically Apple can only block ~5% of Beeper Mini users instead of all of them? Could this potentially be tied to the use of an email id as the iMessage handle?
I wonder if it might also have anything to do with govt action. I believe a US elected rep recently tweeted in favour of Beeper. Apple cares much more about PR than they'll admit, and server costs for them are negligible.
From Beeper's perspective, they now have to figure out why only those logins were blocked and if they need to patch something or not. Apple could be wasting their time and blocked random users out of spite.
Time will tell.
oh wait. i drifted off back to the 90s software cracking days.
After you de-register it the buyer can register it with Apple under their Apple ID.
But Beeper Mini isn't asking users to bring-their-own valid hardware registered Apple hardware ID tied to their Apple ID, they're doing something different/unknown behind the scenes
It seems like one side of the debate says "I have experienced this, and the product features seem to encourage this behavior" and the other side says "No one really does this, you just have a few insane friends who happen to use iOS".
Feels like gaslighting when you've experienced this sort of behavior yourself, and not even from tweens who aren't well adjusted to the world, from your middle aged and up friends and family who are bought into that ecosystem.
That said, I've only seen this green vs blue debate reported on in the context of American teens. Even if it is accurate in that group (questionable), that group make up a tiny portion of global smartphone users. Even if the actual group who care are double that, it's still tiny.
As such, it seems unlikely this is such a critical thing that Apple bigwigs are sitting around discussing this group.
It's not simply a MeanGirls experience of not being cool enough. Most Americans don't use or have 3rd party apps like WhatsApp, so most people will fall-back to SMS, which is objectively a much worse experience. I feel like the adult equivalent is getting group dinner with a friend with severe allergies or dietary restrictions. You care about your friend, and you want to invite them, but the effort to include them is high and sometimes you want to try a restaurant you know they can't eat at, so you skip the invite. I'm a vegetarian, and I know my friends skip me outright in the steakhouse dinners.
50% of Americans have an iPhone, and that is even higher for teenagers (almost 90%). That means >50% of people have this superior group functionality built-in (can't beat defaults). That means for teenagers, most of your friends will have iMessages, and most will be able to do effortless group chats, and its a statistical dice-roll to see if someone doesn't have an iPhone. You become "that guy" that causing disruption, and you'll 100% be ignored sporadically.
Again, the issue isn't "I don't wanna see green bubbles", the issue is "I don't want to bother with a third party app for this conversation". Since most people don't regularly use 3rd party messaging apps, there's a coordination issue to be solved picking the app and confirming everyone has it, OR falling back to SMS which is pretty messy. The alternative is to skip one friend and just fill them in later. Sometimes it's easier, it's not an elitist attempt to ostracize.
Apple also relies on the path of least resistance as well, if someone is having a poor experience in a group chat with their iPhone friends...it just becomes "easy" for them to choose an iPhone the next time they change phones.
Look at other companies, Microsoft porting Office etc to MacOS, Google services like maps gmail etc available on the iPhone. It's only Apple that walls their tech in so that it's only on iPhone - they don't care about profit lost to not expanding their reach because they reinforce their own platform.
Your current lived experiences may not be in sync with people in their teens or twenties. This is a well-known phenomenon called "green bubble bullying" that Apple has masterfully orchestrated to make people force other people to buy their phones.
Apple could block 100% of the people using Beeper and throw Hackintosh users into that as a bonus as well.
The reason they’re not doing that is because it could have unintended consequences as some are using someone else’s actual device serial number and those people would be inconvenienced.
It’s nothing that can’t be easily solved, the moment they reach out to support either in person or via phone/chat Apple can immediately verify if they’re using a legitimate Apple device, but even if it boils down to a small percentage of users you still need to prepare for the influx of support requests.
To do this, Apple uses a scoring model to determine if they can access iMessage and historically they’ve been pretty generous by allowing clearly spoofed serials if the Apple ID involved is in good standing and has a positive history, think of it as a credit score. They can tweak the threshold score and probably are testing this out as we speak to find a sweet spot they’re content with.
Apple could also push out an update tomorrow that would end this once and for all by utilizing device attestation and leveraging Secure Enclave, but this would potentially lock out older devices, something they were willing to do when they upgraded the FaceTime protocol a couple of years ago, but they might not want to do that this time around.
More proof that Remote Attestation is evil and does not exist to serve the user.
More charitably, perhaps you are saying spam will increase over previous levels. From what I understand, Apple does not have any spam prevention technologies in Messages at all, neither for incoming iMessages, nor for SMS messages-- so the only thing keeping your iMessage conversations free of them is the obscurity of the protocol. Perhaps they should just add anti-spam tech like other texting clients have had for years.
The solution to spam is to petition your government to crack down, or do server side filtering. Banning random phones is like playing whack a mole.
I will give you that remote attestation does help anticheat. However, the current state of anticheat in games is so invasive now that you have to install special kernel drivers, and that kernel has to be on bare metal (no hypervisors allowed). This only happened because a specific genre of fast-twitch first person shooter has a lot of closet cheating going on. But it also gets blindly applied to things like rhythm games that absolutely do not need kernel-level anticheat[1]. So every game gets more invasive because of one hyper-competitive game genre triggering an anticheat arms race.
[0] Or at least, for as long as Web Environment Integrity stays dead
[1] Altering the client isn't even the most common way of cheating rhythm game records. For example, a good chunk of the rules for, say, Pump It Up's online leaderboards is "don't have other players play on your A.M.Pass" and "don't hook up a hand controller onto an online cab". Neither of which would be stopped by an anticheat system (and yes, PIU being an arcade rhythm game, there's shitton of encryption on it).
They can; Apple (and others) have implemented Private Access Tokens (PATs) for this.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-captchas-on-iphones-...
And no, web registrations as a must have is an extremely antiquated concept.
You can use device attestation to combat spam by making sure only authentic devices connect to your service.
You can use it to facilitate contact key verification together with a hardware key to ensure contacts know who they’re talking to.
I’ve used it to make sure that introductory promotions are only offered once per device.
On the other end of the spectrum you can use it as a DRM of sorts to make sure ads on your website aren’t blocked.
Just give it a couple more hardware generations to ensure the largest % of older hardware upgrades. Anything pre-secure enclave chip would need to be in the low digits I'm guessing. Then again, if they are going to block Messages, that might be the incentive to get these older device users to upgrade.
One is supposed to try to find a plausible (follows certain rules) but invalid serial to use for hackintoshing and not use real serials, but of course in practice there’s always some number of careless users…
There's been some talk that blocking this for Beeper will also block this for Hackintosh, but are we just talking about iMessage?
Because I have a hard time believing that (A) Apple can't just block this for iMessage without affecting whatever other system services rely on it and (B) That Apple would care if Hackintoshes lose iMessage.
If those two are true, and assuming Beeper Mini also tries to find plausible but invalid serials to use, then Hackintoshes definitely aren't the reason they aren't blocking based on this.
Apple should easily be able to tell when someone has done this.
Not too long ago, however, they moved to a completely randomized serial format, perhaps partly because of iMessages shenanigans.
Server-side there’s a bunch more information used from the Apple ID.
Together it results in a score and the server then decides if it meets the threshold before deciding to play nice.
Why they allowed it is anyone’s guess, but the leading theory is that they valued not hindering established customers over locking iMessage completely down and perhaps the bad PR that comes with banning someone’s Apple ID over this.
But like you said, there are always people who don’t care about others as long as they have theirs.
There is, so far anyway, no reason to go against this best practice because, even though Apple can instantly detect a bogus serial, their currently used scoring threshold still allows you to use iMessage provided you’ve got a non-fresh Apple ID in good standing.
As far as I know, it's not actually known what model numbers, serial numbers, and disk UUIDs Beeper Mini is sending (and no the POC repository doesn't really tell us)-- if you have a source that talks about this I'd love to read it!
As far as I know (I could be wrong), in order to log in + auth to Apple's various protocols that are involved to make iMessage work, you need a valid Apple ID and some sort of valid hardware ID.
If you don't have either of those, how would you be talking to Apple's services?
If their POST /login requires email + password + valid registered serial # of device sold that isn't flagged stolen and not shared across 100 accounts... how does Beeper Mini expect to work?
This feels super against terms of services. Taking a paying Apple user's hardware ID and using it for a non-paying user?
Also, I thought you had to tie/pair hardware ID to Apple ID.
Apple has made it clear that they won't bring iMessage to Android. People who choose to invest in Android phones know they won't get access to iMessage.
It seems a bit entitled behaviour for someone to feel like Apple should be forced to bring iMessage to Android for any reason besides Apple's own choice, and that they know better than Apple on how to run Apple's business.
It is simultaneously possible for it to appear entitled, while also recognizing how extremely restrictive, anti consumer and anti competition Apple is. And in this fight of a trillion dollar company vs something a little bigger than a startup, it's fun to root for the small guys who are hitting back at that restrictedness, sometimes even successfully.
It's a sad state of affairs.
Apple has been able to create their ecosystem by exerting control over it. If someone doesn't like it, they can start their own business giving people what people want. Now, that's another way of pushing against any gigantic company or Apple.
There are of course a lot of companies with lock-in out there, but none with such big network effect deeply intertwined with peoples' communication and personal lives (in the US).
And RCS will solve it all. If group chats and high quality media work, people will only complain about the one thing they hate most:
The bubbles will still be green.
But I am from Europe, we don't care around here and I don't like iMessage that much. Compared to Telegram/Whatsapp, it's slow at loading old messages, has sync issues and only gut swipe to reply this year.
2. I hope you are right that RCS will solve everything once Apple implements it, but I don't have confidence it will. The biggest problem is how they handle group chats: If iMessage group chats cannot seamlessly convert into RCS group messages (without duplication or splitting) then it will solve it well enough. This is unlikely to happen unfortunately
Also, where is the "illusion" about "being better at texting"? Apple is literally coloring the bubbles differently to tell you that _iMessage is not the same_. How much more explicit can it get?
If the deployment is anywhere close to how it went in Australia, RCS will be a bumpy road with many people turning it off to get messages delivered. My usual experience for months now is: send a message, get a "can't deliver" notification an hour later, resend by SMS, next message delivers through RCS and switches the conversation, repeat.
You can send a text to any user, regardless of service. I don’t understand your analogy.
I agree.
But.
The solution to that is to get antitrust regulators to step in and use the force of the law to change things.
Not to cheer on a third party using security vulnerabilities to piggyback onto Apple's service and charge a subscription for it.
Ok...third parties should be able to sell ink that works in your HP printer, or coffee pods that work in your Keurig, or tires that work on your Ford.
tell me if this sounds as ridiculous to you as it does me
It sounds not ridiculous at all. The only difference with Beeper is that there is some marginal cost to handling messages, but we all know that's not Apple's real problem with it.
…third parties should be able to sell
To turn it around, which company do you see this not applying ? What services with a strong position do you see justify to abuse it to lock users ?
You make it sound like people only use iMessage because of the network effect/lock-in, and clearly aren't considering that perhaps said network effect exists at least in part because iMessage is just...good.
They invented a nice thing, made it available on their hardware, and now people like yourself who refuse to buy their hardware for whatever reason are salty you can’t play on the platform so result to juvenile arguments like “I’m being bullied” to try and get your own way. It’s fucking ridiculous and you need to grow up.
EDIT: that should be “resort to”.
It’d be a very different world if nothing was allowed to have unique access to anything. It might even be better, but it would be a long way from this current version of capitalism.
It would be a real problem if Nintendo had a monopoly on good games on the US.
They are. This was perfectly normal and expected functionality once upon a time, back in the days when Adium/Pidgin were still useful.
On the iPhone, the Messages app handles SMS.
It also handles iMessage.
They are two completely different protocols, with iMessage's featureset being a superset of SMS's. If you are conversing with someone else with iMessage (either through an iPhone or another Apple device), Messages will automatically use iMessage; otherwise, it will use SMS. (If you prefer to use SMS, you are welcome to disable iMessage on your phone or other Apple device.)
iMessage goes over the IP network, not a side-channel in the cellular system the way SMS does—so you have to have either Wifi coverage or cellular data available; if you don't, as a matter of fact, it falls back to SMS within the same conversation, provided you are conversing with someone else who is identified by a phone number, and not just an Apple ID.
The graph is almost disjoint. Outside tech nerds, android == poor.
Apple might disagree. https://9to5mac.com/2023/11/16/apple-rcs-coming-to-iphone/
RCS is a replacement for SMS.
RCS is a totally different messaging protocol.
It’s pretty much to iMessage as iMessage is to SMS.
‘Apple has made it clear that they won't bring iMessage to Android.’
This was your reply:
‘Apple might disagree.’ and you then proceeded to supply a link to 9to5Mac about Apple interfaces iMessage to RCS.
TFA states:
“But at the same time, iMessage isn’t going anywhere. It will continue to be the messaging platform used for all communication between iPhone users. RCS will simply supplant SMS and MMS and exist separately from iMessage when available. SMS and MMS will also continue to be available as a fallback when needed, Apple says.
This is not Apple opening up iMessage to other platforms. Instead, it’s the company adopting RCS separately from iMessage”
The very link you supplied disproves your point.
iMessage is iMessage. RCS is RCS, and SMS is SMS.
Sorry, but iMessage is not RCS.
Base RCS for example does not support E2EE. iMessage does.
You can claim they’re the same as much as you’d like, but their only similarities is that iMessage will send messages to RCS and support the native carrier chosen RCS features.
https://www.engadget.com/what-is-rcs-and-how-is-it-different...
Which I never claimed.
> Sorry, but iMessage is not RCS.
The only person who keeps repeating "iMessage is RCS" is yourself.
> You can claim they’re the same as much as you’d like, but their only similarities is that iMessage will send messages to RCS and support the native carrier chosen RCS features.
Less than 1% of iphone users even know what e2ee is. Less than .01% disable that icloud backup thing that makes iMessage e2ee useless for them and their contacts.
If iOS has a messaging system that is capable of things imessage today is capable of and is interoperable with android then the only people for whom the separation between imessage and RCS matters is pedantic nerds, no offence.
On some mobile contracts it's pretty close to free these days, but international SMS's are certainly not. - not sure it's a common use-case but it definitely is a common use-case for me.
Ironically, iMessage not being available on Android causes the other messenger apps to be more appealing. Whatsapp/Facebook Messenger. -- because they can be more ubiquitous across friends.
An Android user and an iOS user could both use a third-party app like Signal. But Beeper Mini's main feature is maintaining encryption for chats between Android users and iMessage users, saving the Android users the need to convince iMessage users to switch to a different messaging app. 1. The benefit of E2EE applies to the users on both ends, including iMessage users. 2. With Beeper Mini instead of an E2EE-dedicated multi-platform app like Signal, only one side of the communication pair needs to install something.
Beeper Mini Apple doesn't want to make an iMessage implementation for Android.
What's entitled behavior is big tech thinking it can dictate how and where we use technology and services. Why should we be roped into serving Apple's interests and ignoring own own? Beeper can pursue their own interests while benefiting users, that's hardly a negative.
I'm sure if Ford dictated how and where you drove your car you'd be outraged, but we should kowtow to the likes of Apple?
I just wouldn't buy a Ford.
Then you really wouldn't buy a Ford. Problem solved?
If no one used iMessage, the value of Beeper Mini is zero. The value is smoothing the interaction with people who assume everyone is using an iPhone, and treat it as an annoyance when they don't. So effectively saying "just buy an iPhone to use iMessage" means "just buy an iPhone so you can talk to your iPhone friends".
When there is broad agreement that apps like Tiktok and Instagram are toxic for teenagers, I have no idea why this aspect of Apple's lock-in hasn't received as much attention. It's way more serious than just some users wanting blue bubbles when your applications are common enough that they can cause social isolation and bullying in schools.
----------------------------------------
"That's who they're penalizing," he wrote. "It's not a Beeper vs. Apple fight, it's Apple versus customers."
Not really sure how this is anti-customer. Apple customers have ample access to iMessage, after all. And as has been noted many, many times, there are many means of accessing secure cross-platform messaging.
It's not really fair that Apple gets to build snares around owning the most successful and important platform in modern civilization. This isn't an automobile where there are 50 alternative manufacturers, this is the "everything" device that handles your bills, employment, connections to loved ones, etc. And there's only one other choice of vendor in the United States.
Apple shouldn't be able to exercise their position (nor should Google) to own every aspect of human life built atop this connection. Mobile internet shouldn't belong to anyone. It shouldn't be taxed by anyone. And yet here we are.
One of the first rulings from antitrust I would expect is non-proprietary messaging protocols.
No, it’s exactly this. There are a ton of manufacturers all providing this product. It just so happens that Apple’s is one of the best, if not the best. And as has been mentioned, there are tons of secure messaging alternatives. It’s just that people prefer iMessage. This is not illegal or anticompetitive.
Imagine if someone claimed they should be let into an airport lounge of an airline they aren’t flying on, simply because their friends are there.
Both tax everything in the world now. They're even becoming official government document providers. They're sinking their claws into all aspects of life and taxing and controlling them.
I don't think you can explain it that way. Network effect is a thing and instant messaging preferences are very regional.
Also:
- With same products and quality Apple probably would probably have lower share in the USA if it was a chinese or iranian company.
- Regardless of its qualities the iphone has long been and is still a social class status symbol.
- The conversation on hn is skewed because iphones have slightly higher than 50% of market share in the USA, not 90% yet commenters on hn mention that their social circle is almost entirely made of iMessage users, which means the average hn commenter is of a much higher income and social class than the average US smartphone user. Using hn is mostly like entering a fancy suburb and only discuss with a limited subset of the population.
When did Apple take ownership of the internet? Or are you referring to iOS? Which is actually not even the market leader at all?
My question is, if their ecosystem is soooo much better... Instead of fighting them to make it available on other devices why don't you, I don't know... Buy their devices?
So not sideloading or App Store Alternatives, or setting a limit of the App Store fees, or advertising alternative payments?
(edit: I'm not suggesting any of there are or are not valid reason, just that it's laughable to suggest that messaging will be at, or near the top of the list. Especially from a 5 Eyes government!)
On the flip side, Apple spent a lot of effort into developing their ecosystem. It doesn't seem fair to Apple that other companies get to piggyback on Apple's investments without Apple's permission. I'm not an Apple fan, but, that kind of sounds illegal. Imagine if you were to develop something useful and then someone comes around telling you that they deserve access to your awesome thing just because, even to your own detriment - even when they haven't spent the time and effort building it or contributing to the development process.
That's pretty clear. If Apple's customers want to be able to use iMessage for such communications then (1) the Android user buys an Apple product, (2) a third party makes a cross-platform iMessage client, or (3) Apple open iMessage to other platforms.
Apple is blocking on (2) and (3).
Of course they do. There's Signal and Telegram and WhatsApp. My principal benefit of iMessage is its relative lack of spam. (And when I do get spam, it gets stomped out fast.)
Apple Music blitzkrieging Spotify is bullshit. The lock on subscription payments is bullshit. I happen to think the App Store is fine, but I'll concede that there's a real debate to be had there. But this isn't a material issue.
What is this referencing?
>The lock on subscription payments is bullshit.
I pay for app subscriptions outside of the App store, since it is usually cheaper.
Spotify launched on iOS. Apple saw them competing with iTunes and basically stole their idea to compete with them. That, alone, would be okay. But Apple Music is privileged within iOS and Apple's marketing in a way Spotify cannot be.
Google does the same thing. Unfortunately, with the near zero marginal cost of software, I do not see any way around vertical integration unless the law started arbitrarily segregating businesses.
Also, Apple Music came out 5 years after Spotify, so it had a pretty healthy lead. But regardless, any non Apple vendor competing with Apple's bundled products is going to face an uphill battle.
It predates Dropbox by almost half a decade
a) Spotify didn't invent music streaming. There were many services e.g. Pandora that were doing in the years before. It was a pretty obvious idea once devices had faster bandwidth.
b) Apple didn't steal their idea. They acquired Beats who had launched a similar service soon after Spotify.
c) Apple Music isn't privileged. It comes pre-installed but otherwise you can delete the app and use Spotify, Youtube Music etc.
Any functionality that Apple Music allows over Siri that Spotify does not is, at this point, up to Spotify to implement.
Well, they can't now as a result of blocking Beeper. But they could — using Beeper.
It's one thing to argue that you won't open the platform because it's additional work to support that. But that argument degrades when they're willing to do the work to shut out unexpected uses of the platform.
If they want to ensure safety, they should do the extra work of making it possible to interoperate with iMessage safely. But safety isn't the priority and everyone knows it.
Or, as many in software engineering call it, fixing potential security holes, which is well worth any businesses time.
The house is Apple’s servers The fake ID is spoofed device serials and UUIDs The copy of the house key is the authentication blob
Nobody would blink twice if a prosecutor threw the book at someone like that. Still, somehow, I’m sure many here would complain if the DOJ would prosecute Beeper for violating the CFAA by committing computer trespass or if Apple would sue them for violating the clause prohibiting reverse engineering in the OS license.
Beeper Mini is based on pypush, which they’ve bought, and is clearly using spoofed data in the data.plist[0].
I’ve searched, but I’ve found no mention of them purchasing Mac Minis en masse to support the $2/mo Beeper Mini customer’s texting habits.
Besides, it wouldn’t make sense anyway because they used to tout you didn’t need an Apple ID and instead could use your phone number, and non-iPhone IDs don’t allow for iMessage activation on phone numbers, only email addresses.
0: https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush/blob/main/emulated/data...
They've gone full Microsoft with the naming. Next release will be called Cloud.BEEP Core
Apple claims I'm in control of my messages. They're on my devices. Apple refuses access to Android. Why can't I use technology to make my messages work on Android? They're my messages!
You might respond that this impacts someone else. For example, me using Beeper means that anyone messaging me is impacted. My counterpoint is that the user is always the weakest link. I can share messages sent to me with anyone I like, and that's legally fine to do. So why can't they be shared with a different software service that I trust? (People use all kinds of 3rd party email clients which could be untrustworthy, and yet we still mostly trust email.)
I as a Signal user want to communicate securely with Facebook Messenger users. Therefore Facebook must allow me to reverse engineer their services and make unauthorized systems to allow me to create a service to send messages to Messenger users from Signal.
My point is nobody has any problem with the myriad of other messaging platforms that are completely closed, but all of the sudden iMessage is the bad guy because you don't want to have a green bubble with iPhone users?
That's entirely wrong. A lot of people are angry with every closed messaging platform, which is why people are still maintaining the matrix bridges to Discord, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Signal, all of which are still a cat-and-mouse game, violating the ToS of those services.
Those bridges are actually what Beeper Cloud, their primary product, later was also based on.
And these bridges originally are based on the libpurple backends for Slack, Teams, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, AIM, ICQ, Google Chat, Skype, etc, all of which were created through reverse engineering.
So, yeah, fuck those closed services, messages want to be free, and enough people will care that we'll break all of those services.
That's precisely what Signal started out as :)
Before Signal existed, it was common to use Pidgin or Adium with OTR to send encrypted messages through SMS, Google Chat or Facebook Messenger.
TextSecure – the original name of Signal – was created to improve upon OTR by allowing it to better handle situations where one user was offline while the other tried to send messages. Originally it only supported sending messages via SMS, not via their own servers.
the advertisers/carriers also dont use "send an imessage" - its simply "unlimited texting" that gets stuck in folks brains (albeit i have not watched tv ads in some time, maybe its been updated to exact app names lol)
It's also, does this message cost money or not.
Blue sky, text freely. Green could cost money by hitting your SMS message bill.
This color difference matters even if you don't care about security at all.
. . .
Second:
> That's pretty clear. If Apple's customers want to be able to use iMessage for such communications then (1) the Android user buys an Apple product, (2) a third party makes a cross-platform iMessage client, or (3) Apple open iMessage to other platforms. Apple is blocking on (2) and (3).
Option 4, run any other app that's on both platforms, which is what most of the world does anyway, including any iPhone user I know in the US who chats regularly with anyone International. For EU it's WhatsApp, China WeChat, and in USA it's privacy minded Signal, PTA parents Facebook Messenger, etc.
Given no cross platform is blocked, you'll see many iPhones do not have Messages in the launch bar, but one of those others.
This seems ... fine!
Is this still the case since they stopped sending the "gmm1990 hearted XYZ" messages, and instead integrated the tapbacks? I really don't see a difference unless I'm in the air (and so cannot connect to the cellular network).
1. Yes I would love if iMessage went Android and all my Android friends were able to react, thread convos, and all the other perks that iMessage allows, BUT the color of the message doesn't matter to me. I'm ok with the green bubbles too.
2. If iMessages was available on Android, I and every iPhone user I know wouldn't be like "finally, I can leave Apple!" iMessage is a perk not the main draw. The wider ecosystem and walled garden that non-Apple users apparently hate so much is not-surprisingly lovely to those of us all in on it.
2. This might be the case for most people, but I have heard people did or do switch obly due to iMessage. To be clear I don't think there would be a huge exodus, but it is a major lock-in feature in the US. Or at least that is what I have read.
In fairness, i am a 5+ device apple customer and i can't use it on my two primary desktops. I use Beeper to write texts on my primary computer.
Apple feels anti-me. I pay for products and unless i'm 100% into the ecosystem they fight me. Sure, they don't owe me an app on every platform i like - but they're also fighting me developing my own, too.
For example: I've tried to get friends and family on Telegram and only succeeded in getting a fraction of them. I also feel that they're using it just to appease me and don't use it with others.
SMS/MMS/RCS/iMessage have default apps on phones and people tend to not seek replacement or simply can't (iMessage) This is what Beeper is trying to fix by introducing an app just for Android users to connect with iMessage users, thus challenging the Apple walled garden.
I haven't jumped on the Beeper wagon because I don't know the consequences of this tug-o-war. Would I lose secure messages if the iMessage rug gets pulled out while my number is registered? It seems I would unless I deregister my number. It just seems too volatile to me but I'm a fan of Pebble and wish the Beeper team+founders the best. I'll be keeping my eye on this.
I have an iPad Pro, a MBP, a MBA, and an iPhone X. I can send and receive iMessages on those devices.
But I cannot access iMessage on the devices I use most often:
- my main computer (a desktop running Ubuntu)
- my main phone (a Google Pixel)
I don't feel I have 'ample access to iMessage'.
The point of a secure instant messaging protocol/app is to be able to communicate securely with people. If the company providing said app make it on purpose difficult for its customers to communicate with people, it is penalizing them.
We are not talking technical difficulties, we are talking unwillingness to let a secure channel stay open and making so that communication with people is less secure.
If, say, a random cheap Motorola with Beeper could keep them in the same groups as before, Apple would probably lose a (small) chunks of its clients.
This is news only in the US. Literally everywhere else in the world (where iPhones don't have a supermajority market share), third-party apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, etc have been used for the past decade, with no problems whatsoever. My own WhatsApp account has been active for a decade, with chats going back exactly that far.
Like, it's n=1, but still, my experience is quite broad.
I’m currently in Indonesia however, and it’s universal both privately and corporately.
90% of my Messages app is SMS threads, and the vast majority of my messaging activity is Slack, Discord and Facebook Messenger.
My teenager and his friends don't even use iMessage, they use Snapchat almost exclusively to communicate. Someone messages them on iMessage they read it and then respond on Snapchat.
I’m oddly surprised that iPhone owners are ok with this.
I doubt Beeper Mini is on the radar of anyone high up at Apple. Some engineering team responsible for the services that back iMessage is just spotting and dealing with one of probably many malicious actors.
RCS support has also already been announced by Apple for 2024.
It could be a bug in our client code, and I could be cutting off paying customers. It could be some weird and/or poorly written software by a customer. It could be some bizarre WAN accelerator issue at some giant company with real devices.
I would presume that at least someone at Apple knows that the traffic is from Beeper, and what Beeper is. I would expect that it hit the desk of a mid-tier Director at least (would you or your manager be comfortable implementing heuristic blocking without telling a director?).
It still may not be a strategic decision, but I wouldn't assume that decision makers aren't aware of what's going on.
What kind of spam are people (presumably in the US) getting outside of iMessage? I’m in the EU, I get very little SMS spam (mostly for telecom’s clumsy attempts to find more ways to monetize me).
I also have Viber, Telegram, and FB messenger, and the spam is virtually zero on Viber (less than an “offer” a month, and it’s from the likes of Coca Cola, not herbal viagra) and literally zero on the others.
Is spam significantly worse elsewhere?
So yes, spam is a serious concern. WhatsApp spam exists as well, but since there's a central authority, unlike with SMS, it's a lot harder to avoid being shutdown.
I see SMS/MMS spam in spurts; I'll get one or two spam messages a day for a week or so, and then nothing for months. On Whatsapp, I get a few spam messages a month. I've never seen spam on GChat or FB Messenger. I don't use Viber or Telegram, so can't speak to those.
We do have facility for DND with Deparatment of Telecom but seems to come up short as mine is in DND but receive several messages and calls through out the day.
I have had the occasional iMessage spam too but haven't seen that in years.
Luckily Google has added anti spam features to Google Messenger for years now and it filters out 99.999% of them. Once in a blue moon, a txt will slip by and i have to mark it as spam.
I don't think their interested in replacing iMessage directly, if that's your question.
they could and so they did.
The release of Beeper Mini certainly gained publicity for Beeper Cloud, and I don't see why Beeper Mini would cause Beeper Cloud to go defunct.
[1] Beeper Cloud: https://www.beeper.com/cloud
[2] Beeper Mini: https://blog.beeper.com/p/introducing-beeper-mini-get-blue
I never use SMS, and no one in Mexico does either. My friends in Europe seem to largely use WhatsApp as well. So it really seems like Americans are outliers in their choice for iMessage / SMS.
So, wouldn't this push Americans to WhatsApp?
In Switzerland, free texts to non-Swiss numbers is expensive/rather uncommon. Instant Messaging is free to anyone the the world. Thus, SMS are dead (except for 2FA).
If I am reading the articles on Beeper correctly, they've applied a pretty brilliant hack to gain access to the iMessage network without an Apple ID.
That last part seems key (pardon the pun).
Can someone explain this to me? I feel like this technical issue is really in the weeds, so I'm sure there are multiple nuances I'm missing...
"I don't understand..."
"Can someone explain this to me? "
For instance, wouldn’t this have to be reported as an unauthorized intrusion (getting access to a user’s messages without using their ID) ?
Also, nothing I’ve read has any criminal aspect to it (ignoring DMCA stuff).
Given all the issues with SMS security and spoofing, you’d think this would be an issue, but nobody has brought it up.
Seems unlikely that given all the coverage that I’d be the first and only person to notice that, which is why I don’t think I truly understand it.
If you recall, Aaron Swartz was hounded to death using that law after accessing JSTOR's servers without permission.
The iMessage platform is probably the strongest lock in on iPhones. Break that and the phone market gets competitive again.
If so, create your “status symbol” message app and you can go buy apple or google after, lol
In America. The rest of the world doesnt give a shit.
> Break that and the phone market gets competitive again.
See above.
So... I don't think this is just among nerds and tech elitists.
"Green text" will get you turned down for dates and ostracized from friend groups, especially in middle and high school but even (for dating) into adulthood in some cases.
Yes it's stupid, but people have turned far dumber things into status symbols like gigantic massively overpriced pedestrian-crusher trucks.
The benefit of the Apple walled garden is that the spammers are kept out, because they can't get fifty SIM cards, plug them in to a "SIM box"[1], and start sending hundreds of thousands of scam messages via iMessage. This is easy in an uncontrolled, open-source ecosystem, but is prohibitively difficult in Apple's ecosystem where you need a physical device with a unique cryptographic ID that can be locked out by a central authority.
Yes, it's an "exclusive club" where members pay to keep the general public out. The general public doesn't like this, but that is what it is. Inherently, allowing "anyone" in would void the exclusivity and invite an unrelenting flood of spam.
At best, Apple could open up iMessage to other vendors that have similarly well-controlled devices with good hardware cryptographic attestation, but there aren't any.
[1] https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-man-charged-with-...
If they do have a way to enforce 'authentic' devices, the only step after that for beeper to take will be to ask users to purchase the cheapest iphone that still works for imessage and to extract its serial/key/whatever to import into the android client.
Is it ethical? Not in my opinion. Facetime and iMessage were introduced under the guise of becoming open at some point, however that was because they lost a patent lawsuit iirc[0]
it's worth focusing on the differences between iMessage and Internet Explorer (which was the last monopoly battle that anyone cares about).
The truth of it is: across Apple devices, while iMessage is installed, the alternative message systems are just too successful to argue. The overwhelming majority are using facebook messenger or whatsapp anyway. So there's no evidence that Apple is curbing another industry.
Apple is also not in a monopolistic position except on their own hardware, which is true for everyone (including Blackberry with their messenger).
If that should be taken up by the DOJ or some other body is up to your interpretation of the law.
Outside there are people with different tickets screaming to be let in because they know someone in there and it’s not fair that they can’t go in.
And Migicovsky is on the side trying to dig a little tunnel into the lounge.
iMessage is a perk of using an iPhone. You want to use iMessage? Get an iPhone.
I don't oppose it but I do wonder why people can't just use a different client? Same with the usb-c nonsense, walled garden lawsuits,etc... when alternatives are viable, is it right to be intolerant of what you don't like? If I want to start a closed source proprietary crappy messaging app and I don't want other clients to talk to it, why would someone have a problem with that? But again, I think beeper's work is cool, I just have a hard time understanding the whole anti-apple sentiment. I mean, why support apple at all on your messaging app if you don't like them? Does apple or do apple users owe everyone else participation in their ecosystem?
I just can't reconcile the attitude with the attitude of liberty for all.
The only reason I can think of that Apple is willing to let this go on is to plug holes in their system shown by a relatively benign opponent.
Can this product or a different product let me enter my number and let me participate in texting? Maybe a paid app?
(Could I build this with service otherwise?)
Like, my dude, it was an impressive technical hack, and you really pulled the tiger's whiskers when you went to prod with it, but dressing it in politics and greater mission and "freedom" with bald eagles and shit? Meh.
Unsiloing messaging isn't some quick fix. It would be like saying "we have all these forums like HN, Reddit, Twitter, SpaceHey, Facebook they should all share a global identity system and be able to be used all by a single app with the same APIs." Like we can't even make a generic ActivityPub client.
Since the old and proprietary protocols are only sustained by the network effect, they lose users, and eventually support for them gets dropped.
It's a method of transitioning from a collection of proprietary systems with their own network effects to an open one, by temporarily supporting both. For obvious reasons the operators of the proprietary systems don't want to be subject to that competition, which is they same reason they shouldn't be allowed to shut it out.
https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=
No iMessage, of course, but you might find it helpful to see the list of supported clients.
Before the there there the proprietary networks (Aol, CompuServe and others) along with BBS, IRC, Newsgroups, etc.
I literally don’t remember a time in my life where messaging hasn’t been fragmented.
I used it exclusively for years. It supported all those things (or I should say if someone had multiple ways to get to them, Adium supported at least one of them).
Back then a lot of services also used XMPP but that has been readily abandoned - Slack used to do XMPP, doesn't any more. Google used to do XMPP, doesn't any more...
I suppose one reason for it is E2E encryption.
There certainly was: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/989-msn-messenger-2-5-1
Apps like Trillian, Pidgin (Gaim), Adium actually allowed chatting across many platforms on the client side. To some extent they still can, with add-ons.
Modern XMPP is really great, Conversations is a fantastic client, supports E2E encryption, is open source, and makes minimal use of resources.
Beeper Cloud and Element One do this through matrix bridges, but Beeper has been trying to move this entirely into the client again, which is what Beeper Mini is an experiment for.
If Beeper Mini succeeds, it'll soon also support Signal, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. If Apple succeeds, messaging will remain fragmented.
Or maybe referring to RL. You know, actually talking to someone on phone or in-person. Although then you have to deal with different accents, dialects, languages, and even regions specific lexicon.
Yes, and you could combine them all into a single multi-protocol messaging app like Adium, Trillian, Gaim, Pidgin, etc. to provide a single convenient unified experience.
But because Apple decided to make their messaging system a marketing tool instead of an interoperable app, we don't get to have a Trillian equivalent today.
They are both issues! Fragmentation in messaging is a real problem in the US, and iMessage has for a decade been the closest to a solution for iPhone users. Users' frustration with fragmentation pushes them into the app where 1) they know the message will get there, and 2) there's a 50% chance the experience won't suck. iMessage's existence in a fragmented market and refusal to interoperate all but guarantees the fragmentation will continue.
The folks complaining are a vocal minority of Android users. Everyone else doesn't care.
the original apple messages app did AOL messenger and others.
then it gradually forced you off of them into imessage.
This is one messaging app on one brand of phone. Nothing stops you from using another phone, or multiple or other messaging apps. And messaging apps aren’t restricted by a “default” in quite the same way a web browser is. I have friends on WhatsApp and Signal and Instagram and I message them all without any appreciable difference in effort.
Any service online is under no obligation to allow for widespread interpoperation - that would be madness.
Lol, "madness". The Digital Services Act in the EU would like a word.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-06/apple-ime...
Messages on iPhone is interoperable with any other mobile device - it supports SMS!
and isn't RCS support coming too?
In the case of Bell, the universal lines already existed, the problem was that Bell owned them all and wouldn't let anyone else use them. That was a "monopoly" so there was an argument for breaking it up so that everyone could use the lines.
In the case of iMessage (and others), the creators are deliberately building out many different incompatible "lines", and not letting anyone else use those lines. And now people are coming along and saying because it's not a "monopoly", we can't do anything about that. But the real goal was the same in both cases - making universal communication possible. That's what we're all frustrated about here, and the fact that there are dozens of apps trying to wall off competitors is part of the cause of that. Apple is a target because iMessage is the largest such "private line" in the United States.
What gets a bit lost in the conversation for iMessage is that the protocol/infra and implementation get merged into one. This is approached in many countries for telcos by splitting the companies providing the lines from the companies providing service on top of them. It's not perfect, but it's better than previous approaches.
Interestingly enough, one of the outcomes of that case was IE for the Mac.
Do you realise phones cost money and not everyone can afford an iPhone?
In the US, iMessage market share is much higher because back in the aughts we didn't have the sky high SMS rates which forced so many users to other messaging services in other countries.
They are making supporting argument for Apple, unfortunately, if any regulation happens.
Don't get me wrong, I love that these guys are poking the bear. I wish Apple would do something to let me send high-quality photos and videos to my Android-owning friends via "text". But I don't think the government has a place to force that issue. Plenty of alternatives exist.
(…which naturally leads to the question: why is there no Lambda-like serverless compute substrate that allows your function to speak a connection-oriented protocol, by externalizing the connection-hold-open and per-connection book-keeping state into the routing layer, such that your own function in the system could scale-to-zero? Exactly like Pusher did for websockets 15 years ago, but routing to a vertically-integrated serverless compute layer rather than a “passive” PHP/CGI-ish REST backend. Seems like an obvious extension for Cloudflare Workers…)
Fastly Fanout + Compute?
(disclosure: Fanout tech lead)
I'm talking about a routing layer that could allow a serverless function to be the backend for an arbitrary stateful TCP protocol, e.g. IRC, SMTP, FTP, PGSQL, etc; where the service doesn't need to add support for a new L7 protocol for functions to use it; instead, the support for the L7 protocol is part of the function, the same way it's part of a regular network daemon.
I would imagine that this would work like the following:
- the logic for the L7 protocol's connection state-transitions lives within the stateless function;
- each call to the stateless function is handed the pre-transition L7 state, and returns the new post-transition L7 state, with the routing layer persisting this state between calls. (Compare/contrast: Erlang gen_server state management, between the gen_server module [routing layer] and the user-supplied delegate module [compute layer].) Any arbitrary compute node can then handle each "step" of the computation... but only one compute "worker" at a time will ever be tasked with handling messages for a given connection, because each call requires an input L7 state, which depends on the output L7 state of the previous compute-step;
- the function declares in its metadata what L4 protocols it accepts (TCP/UDP, maybe SCTP or DTLS, or TCP+TLS, etc); the routing layer then manages flows for these as portable persisted state-machine-state resources on virtual IPs owned collectively by the routing layer mesh — similar to how a distributed wireless AP or eNodeB manages established flows across its listeners;
- likely, the L4 state lives in the same persisted (distributed KV?) store as the L7 state, but just isn't passed back to the serverless function — except for maybe SNI info in the case of TLS. (This would make sense to me because you're never going to update the L7 state without also updating the L4 state. I can imagine a connection-listener state machine that touches the "L4 part" of a backing data-structure in response to most L4 packets, but then, when it's built up enough of a buffer to have a complete L4 message†, it would pass the message to the L7 and get an L7 update in response, and then commit a new L4+L7 state together.)
- And yes, the †ed part above means that another required part of the serverless function's metadata, would be a definition in some language of a lexer/parser for recognizing+extracting toplevel L7 messages from the carrier stream, such that the routing layer would then use this lexer/parser to know when it has one or more lexically-complete messages in its buffer to be pushed down atomically to the compute layer. (I say "lexer/parser" because mostly this code wouldn't have to parse messages — the L7 is still receiving just a stream of bytes it's expected to parse itself; but it's required to be "just a stream of bytes" sliced to consist of exactly one L7 message per call. So for most protocols, this would be cheap: most stateful protocols are either "newline is always toplevel break" or they're binary length-prefixed, and these can both be delimited by a dumb lexer, or even a fixed-buffer DSP-alike. Sadly, though, some stateful protocols require full parsing to know where each message ends. So the routing layer would need to support both — probably with a lot of "function compilation time" grunt-work put into recognizing when the routing layer can apply less than a full Turing-complete parser to the task.) Probably for most protocols this could look like an abstract-DSL version of something with capabilities equivalent to a Wireshark dissector definition or eBPF bytecode; and that in turn could be abstracted over with something like a "buildpack" / "cloud-init" sort of strategy, where instead of supplying the code yourself, you supply the URL of a repo that contains the code.
Currently, Fanout supports HTTP in addition to WebSockets. We consider the system to be generalized, in the sense that the user can build whatever they want on top of the available primitives, and we can always add more primitives. Most people are implementing "web" protocols (REST, SSE, GraphQL, etc), so what's available today gets us pretty far. You're right of course that we don't support arbitrary TCP protocols.
I suppose the reason we don't support bare TCP is Fanout is optimized for implementing pub/sub-style interfaces with minimal compute. In that context, it is preferable to work with coarse-grained input in order to avoid per-session processing. However, with Fastly Compute now in arms reach, I think we could embrace per-session processing, in which case implementing arbitrary TCP protocols could become practical.
Your idea of supplying custom L7 parsers to the routing layer is clever, and is not too far off from some things already on our mind. For example, our routing layer supports inspecting requests using custom rules supplied by the compute layer, though this is not yet exposed to Fastly users. Relatedly, the routing layer has an internal component that parses TCP streams into messages (by known protocol) and ships them over an IPC without caring about their content. So it's not too much of a jump to imagine how we could get to user-supplied L7 parsing.
As much as I would like to see Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and the like not have so much power (socially, economically, most likely at the government level as well), I think the only way we'll actually make any progress towards the problems that allow large companies like that and allow their negative consequences is to attack some of the specific aspects of our current system they abuse to their benefit, and not them specifically.
For example, very strict privacy laws and control over tracking to curtail the biggest problems of the data companies, laws about control over your own devices and what you do on them (software) and with them (repair) for the hardware companies, etc. Otherwise we'll just see some other company take up the same practice and have all the same problems.
Because it would be the most sure-fire way to be certain that it actually gets done, whereas "the market" is less certain and prone to manipulation tactics such as lock-in. Returning to my original question that you kind of dodged, why not let them intervene?
I've been wondering if we can already see the foreshadows of Apple's next move, actually: CKV is already only possible between modern (iOS 17.2 or macOS 14.2 and above only) devices, and their RCS implementation will presumably not be end-to-end encrypted.
I could see them opening up "legacy iMessage" (i.e. non-CKV, non-ephermerally-encrypted) and integrating RCS, but assigning new color to "modern iMessage" exclusively. That would credibly count as opening up their service, while still preserving a distinguishing feature for Apple devices, and even nudging people to upgrade some old devices.
Can you change the SMS app on Apple devices now?
This thread is about asking the government to step in to allow 3rd party devices into iMessage, which is decidedly outside of SMS, but gov won't step in because iMessage isn't a monopoly on messaging nor SMS. It's a monopoly on... it's own protocol/service?
Android users always get a message an iPhone user sends so to claim gov intervention monopoly on the basis that the end user can't change the SMS app isn't an argument.
People tend to misinterpret what it means to be a monopoly for antitrust law. The obvious example here is United States v. Microsoft Corp., where the inability to remove Internet Explorer was at issue. Being unable to set an alternative messaging app with equivalent functionality (such as Signal) on a mobile phone is at least as cumbersome to the user as being unable to uninstall Internet Explorer, despite the ability to install competing browsers. The iMessage case is arguably worse because the competing browsers had the same features as IE. Apple uses its control of the handset to disable other messengers from supporting SMS on iOS.
Also relevant in that case is that Microsoft was argued to be a monopoly not over all computers or even all desktop computers, but over intel-based personal computers. This illustrates that the scope of the market in these cases is often smaller than one might initially think.
The FTC has a page here that goes into it [0].
> Then courts ask if that leading position was gained or maintained through improper conduct—that is, something other than merely having a better product, superior management or historic accident....Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.
In this case, forcing users to use iMessage for SMS decreases the likelihood that users will install an alternative messenger with a smaller feature set due to Apple's control over the OS.
That reduced likelihood compounds quickly because the popularity of a messenger tends to scale with the square of the install base.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
For discussion, using MSFT vs US as the central point, it seems as if US was arguing that Windows and IE were "one and the same" or at least inseparable as concepts while the US gov said no way.
Applying that central argument to this situation doesn't feel the same in that, if US gov tried to apply the same argument it would lose in this case.
When I think "phone device", I think phone calls and SMS are inseparable ideas to the device itself. That they are functions that belong to the phone. Probably stems from my days of owning a Nokia or Razor.
But maybe that is an out dated concept and my thinking needs to change because any program should be able to control the phone's SMS and calling function via API.
I'm unsure is all I can really say.
Having a monopoly is not illegal.
Here's an explanation of the verdict from a lawyer familiar with tech and antitrust.
> EPIC WIN | Why Google Lost and What it Means For Apple
What I DO care about in that they intentionally degrade the experience for communicating outside their garden.
Maybe it'll get better with them finally supporting RCS, but I doubt it. If only they were compelled to let users install an SMS handler app of their choice, then this whole "green bubble" thing would instead be a "geez, why is my iPhone so shitty at handling SMS" thing instead.
If the third party phones allowed users access to Ma Bell's network, switching systems, etc, without paying Ma Bell - then it might be equivalent.
I'm pretty sure that would be considered theft of communication services.
It's more like phone manufacturer X that accesses Ma Bell's network creates phone with slightly better call quality that only works with other X phones and is worse with anyone else's phones. And they start doing that once they have >50% market share.
Servers handle routing and storing. iMessage will deliver and store the message to server, and then to receiver when it is online.
It is major cost when there are millions of users on, top of notifications.
User pays for ISP, only up to the closest link.
Aaron Swartz was hounded to death by the Feds for unauthorized access to a website and charged with a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
He wasn't even trying to turn a profit.
SMS still gets through, and other apps still work. It seems weird to focus so much on this and not on just using something that fits your use case, but maybe I’m missing something.
Thankfully, here outside America, this isn't an issue: absolutely no one uses SMS or cares about this stuff.
They aren't. The bubble color thing is an exaggerated claim and a lot of whining from a bunch of clowns. No one actually cares in the US except for a bunch of children (who are always prone to following trends for the sake of following the trend) and a handful of immature adults. The rest of the country doesn't know or care
We can disagree about solutions, but strawmanning stuff is dumb, and then dismissing the problem that you strawmanned is even more dumb
The strawmanning is done by the people claiming iPhone users are, as a whole, excluding Android users from their communications over it. That's what I'm rebutting, not that MMS sucks. Only children and immature adults do that. The vast majority of people don't care. They either use MMS and accept it sucks or switch to another service, they don't exclude people over it.
Anecdotes about mean girls on Tinder dumping Android users don’t really seem compelling, either.
However, there are a lot of people who are impacted, and it's not always the case of the mean girl on tinder dumping an Android user. I know people who have group chats with family and friends, that will be left out because the iPhone is programmed to downgrade the entire group's chat if a single member is an Android user. This makes it so that messages don't work all the way, quality on images and video is garbage, and other legitimate usability concerns. Are super snooty, it's that it truly is very difficult to communicate from an iPhone to an Android phone.
Of course everyone can switch to Signal and this is a moot point, but millions of Apple users use iMessage and aren't likely to switch.
Doesn’t this mean that most people simply don’t care?
I would suggest that is exactly what Beeper is doing. Not the end users ISP / WAN connection obviously, but certainly Apple's iMessage infrastructure (servers, switches, bandwidth, etc).
iMessage is not a simple P2P platform.
It is now a petty, but prevalent status symbol of being better than others, namely perceived "poor" or otherwise lesser android users.
And most young minimum wage employees with very little money and no "status" also use iPhones.
It is not a signal of poor/status, it is a signal of weird/not weird, without commenting on the validity of that, of course.
For example, people do not opt out of dating Android users because they think Android users are poor, they opt out because they think Android users have a higher likelihood of being sufficiently "weird" such that they do not want to engage.
WhatsApp. WeChat. Line. Kakao. Facebook Messenger. Most of the world has switched to these dedicated apps.
Only glimmer of hope is that gen-z/gen-alpha is really into Discord (at least all the ones I know). Might finally bring down the iMessage group chats.
But I share your view about Discord, I think it’s one app positioned to be the “American WeChat” in a few years if they don’t screw it up.
Yeah, not going to happen. Discord is turning in to a dog and pony show.
Should discord be forced to interoperate? Bearing in mind that of course forcing them open will undercut their whole business model - but that whole model is built on gouging consumers for trivial technical features that cost nothing to implement or support.
Similarly, while there is choice in the market (just like apple and android), it still doesn’t change the network-effect problem. If my friends are on discord, and I’m left in some group sms side chat, that’s not really a substitute, right?
Now layer on 30 years of brand warrior sports-team mentality and abrasive interactions in both directions, and you’ve roughly got the iMessage problem. But of course everyone likes discord…
I mean why shouldn’t I get to use discord for free like everyone else? And I also should get the paywalled features since it’s an arbitrary and abusive paywall and the environment has been designed to tacitly funnel you into using them. Isn’t that like, super abusive?
But we like discord…
This is particularly bonkers to me given how expensive Samsung flagships are, but I guess Android occupying the sub-$600 range really enforces in children (physical or mental) that Android = Poor
Of all the interesting points in this situation, this is not even close to being relevant
I buy iPhones for a number of reasons:
- Ecosystem which has been explained at length so often you'd have to have your head under a rock to not know what it means
- Ease of transfer of data between phones/tablets and replacements, along with constant sync
- Excellent build quality
- The OS is consistently good (not perfect, but good) and devices in general have a long life from purchase to replacement. I just recently had to FINALLY replace my gen 4 Watch with an SE, that I originally purchased in 2018. That's FIVE YEARS of daily use.
"An Android" by contrast can be fucking anything from a $20 Aliexpress special farted out with spare parts from NIGYEHO Ltd. and an ancient version of the OS that barely runs on the hardware, to a mid-tier perfectly acceptable phone that will no doubt be nearly bricked in the event you try and update the OS, to a multi-thousand-dollar premiere Samsung powerhouse that would utterly spank most iPhones at most functions and will probably last you ten years if you take good care of it. And what irritates the shit out of me is Android users that treat the last one like you get it at the price of the first one, and then call Apple users elitist for buying a very similarly priced phone.
It is truly mind-bending to me how effective Google's marketing has been to paint themselves constantly as the scrappy underdog fighting the conformist and snobby Apple fanbase, which is not to say there aren't any pricks who swing their iPhone around like it makes them hot shit, there almost certainly are, but to say that's the norm is completely outside my and anyone I know's experience of the matter.
Moreover, since you admit those people exist, why wouldn't you support interoperability between iMessage and other platforms? It would only benefit you as a user since it would allow you to message your friends that are on Androids, and wouldn't be to your detriment at all since you're not doing the "snobby" act yourself. Where is your defensiveness coming from? It sounds like you're on the same team as GP.
Arguably you should care about neither then.
> Moreover, since you admit those people exist, why wouldn't you support interoperability between iMessage and other platforms?
There is interoperability. SMS texting is built into the same app. No, you don't get reactions... because that's not supported on SMS. No, you don't get replies for the same reason. However everything that is possible in the SMS standard is implemented in Messages completely normally, the sole difference being the chat color, and personally I'm fine with that because it lets me know immediately that Messages only features are going to be a no-go for this particular conversation.
> Where is your defensiveness coming from?
Implicit in the notion that iPhones are merely fashion accessories is that those who buy them are foolish. You're free to say I'm getting defensive, I wouldn't say you're entirely wrong. But if you really want to talk anecdotes, I have pages upon pages I could write of various experiences of having my credentials as an network engineer questioned because I don't have an android device or that I prefer a Mac computer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS0SItAzEXg
Keep drinking your kool-aid.
EDIT: not sure i'm being downvoted? i'm genuinely curious because i never use SMS or iMessage myself and haven't for some years so this seemed very niche to me, even randos i meet out in the world all seem to just chat on discord and insta (I'm in the bay area but most of my friends are not tech bros)
I have a couple friends that just want to use Discord and not everything is together in the same app on all of my devices (iMessage,including just texting is on all of my apple devices).
I remember desperately trying to fix this with… what was that big multi client app for Mac years ago? Hate chats not being in the same app.
Edit: found it. Adium! Which shockingly has been updated in 2021.
40’s, male, Ohio, software engineer, for reference.
ETA: this doesn’t count work, where we use teams and slack, but I don’t have those loaded on my phone.
It's obviously not a huge deal, but it's pretty badly executed.
In my mind texts quickly became like voicemails, something older people would use cause that's what they know but not something I'd want to use regularly if given the option.
iMessage has pretty much the same feature set as Whatsapp so US users don't really have a reason to migrate at this point.
It keeps happening.