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Comment by rezonant | Hacker News Reader

I think this is kinda technically a win for Beeper. I would've expected another 100% lockout to be Apple's priority. They were instead only able to block 5%, which sounds like a heuristic being applied, and possibly not even an intentional block of Beeper (in the sense that some anti-spam service may be identifying some Beeper users).

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

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My father has an iPhone 8 which did not receive the latest iOS update. I can iMessage him just fine.

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.

My mom has an iPhone 5s running iOS 12 (current is iOS 17, so the software itself is already five years old), and iMessage still works well.

I started using a 5s as a temporary replacement phone for a while a couple of years ago, and I couldn't register to iMessage, but I didn't dig really far (it was a generic "registration failed" iirc). It might have been a fluke and not old phones can't register anymore.

That doesn't seem hard, people like your father can be allow-listed, he's not signing-up out of the blue. (I'm wondering if this "works" because the early adopters were hackintosh types who were already on imessage and not abusers. When the H3rb8l V18gr8 crowd shows up, that is the end.)

Now then.. if I am a professional spammer (which I am not), what stops me from buying a second hand mac or a second hand iphone (for $150 each) and start 'doing business' with iMessage? Unless it's an issue of 'iPhones can't be JB-ed like Androids can be rooted to run all shorts of malware/spamming softwares'.

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.

> what stops me from buying a second hand mac or a second hand iphone (for $150 each) and start 'doing business' with iMessage?

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.

I have never received a single spam message through iMessage, but regardless. If they have to keep buying new phones all the time as they get blacklisted, in order to keep spamming, the economics of spamming changes.

That does raise the bar a little bit but it's probably mitigated by the combination of targeting higher spending users and the additional trust iMessage provides.

The difference between being able to send unlimited messages for free, and having to get a new phone every hundred or so texts is pretty large. Free vs 1 dollar per spam text.

I did recieve some spam messages there, so Apple's claims about muh security etc. already is bogus

> Unless it's an issue of 'iPhones can't be JB-ed like Androids can be rooted to run all shorts of malware/spamming softwares'.

We're also talking about old, non-updated iOS versions here, jailbreaks are more likely to last when they target these versions.

The whitelist would be on the phone number/icloud id and not tied to the device.

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.

The what crowd?

Spam.

I’m not talking about your father but I really doubt that the millions of people running 6+yo phones would care a lot about this. They could still send SMS, it’s not like they would became suddenly unreachable.

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.

The whole point is moot, even though I agree with your take.

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 believe that thus far it's a win for apple - all they need to do is introduce the perception that beeper is not 100% reliable, which is the kiss of death for something as potentially important as a messaging service.

Oh no, if the alternative is getting rid of your Android phone and go buy an iPhone, it needs to be a lot worse than that.

the alternative is just continuing to sms people from your android because at least you know the messages are definitely going through, green bubble or not

You still face such problems as being left out of group chats.

I think that's a great thing, actually. I'm included in too many group chats as it is. Group chats are awful.

Is this really a problem? I seriously doubt many people are going to leave someone out because they use an Android phone. I certainly won't because I like communicating with people and people are far more important than technology.

That's nice of you, but by all accounts from the US (where iphone is dominant): Yes, it's a problem. The visual marking and decreased integration/service towards users of non-iphones is pretty obviously part of why Apple has such a big phone market share in the US - if not, they wouldn't fight tooth and nail to keep those anti-features. There's plenty of examples of Apple being quite open and friendly to integration when it benefits them, and here they aren't, so it isn't.

It’s not just about market share. In Scandinavia about 90% of middle class people use iphones, but this whole blue-green bubble nonsense is a total non-issue. We have group chats in whatsapp, fb messages or sms, nobody cares.

This makes me wonder, what’s the iMessage situation in Japan? Their smartphone market is also majority iOS, sitting at above 60% (while it is only a little bit above 50% for the US)[0].

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-...

LINE absolutely dominates the Japanese market in instant messaging and beyond (it's a super app like WeChat or KakaoTalk).

Yeah, I was familiar with LINE and Kakao, and I like how similar the setup is for SK and Japan.

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.

Interestingly enough in Korea, the iOS market share is fairly high among some demographics, especially young professionals with enough disposable income. Android (Samsung, at this point) phones are seen as an option for boomers or younger kids.

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.

Yeah, I suspect there is indeed something special about Kakao compared to LINE as well.

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...

Same in Australia, and my friends in the UK.

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.

> In Scandinavia about 90% of middle class people use iphones

Whoa, citation needed there. I don't use one, and most people I know don't use one.

That's an exaggeration but I assume 70-80% in upper middle class would be realistic? At least in Norway and Denmark, maybe a bit less so in Sweden.

The numbers differ a bit in different sources, but seems to be around 60% for Sweden. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/sweden Based on that upper middle class being a bit more common seems likely.

Regardless, the original point stands regardless of it being 50% or 80%.

In the upper middle class in Copenhagen it’s more than that, seeing an android phone is very rare.

Even in the metro you can go days without seeing one.

Aren't you part of the royal family?

Well in Europe Android is dominating the market (but with a very fragmented experience depending on Android version).

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.

>Apple kept conformance with SMS/MMS standards from the beginning and added a secure layer on top.

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.

>it requires an Apple account to work

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]

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102654

[2] https://daringfireball.net/2023/12/beeper_mini_is_back

This. A "secure layer on top" would be something more like HTTPS over HTTP.

> as an iPhone users I feel sometimes feel left out because... I firmly refuse to give my personal ID to all theses companies just to keep in touch

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.

And yet here we are, in a thread about a service abusing Apple's servers to make something available to the opposite crowd who feels left out because they refuse to use messaging apps that are available for their phones.

Look I think Beeper Mini and the whole thing is silly, but no, Android users are not refusing to use the apps available for their phones. iMessage is not available for Android.

I can understand not trusting FB, but you have to give out the ID you want people to be able to find you by. What you give to Signal is probably less than what's in the phone directory.

> 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.

Signal is strongly focused on secure communication, so it never made any sense for it to support SMS/MMS.

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.

Well imessage does the exact same thing. It doesn't seem to confuse the users. More basic protocols as a fallback mechanism can be a good idea, if you understand the risks (and of course, if you allow the recipient to use the better protocol!)

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.

>Well imessage does the exact same thing. It doesn't seem to confuse the users.

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 perfect but they did get the sms fallback right

Did they though? It’s unreliable.

Other than this point, I very much share your position.

This is a problem, out of band communication is always a second titer and always overlooked, always incomplete. We as developers see this every day with documentation running out of date in relation to code. The same way the out of group communication falls behind the primary channel.

One Android user means you can no longer send images, video, gifs, or emoji. You can’t react to messages. Sending and receiving no longer works on wifi, so it doesn’t work well in many workplaces.

SMS is a disaster, so it’s best just to leave out the green bubbles.

iPhone users can react to messages when Android users are in a chat. Also, I would not call SMS a "disaster". It works well for text messages and images. These are the two most important things for most people. Also, I have sent images to Android users and they have never complained about image quality. I really think some people are overstating the importance of iMessage. Does it add some nice features? Yes. Is it amazing? Nope. Also, I suspect that the discrimination problem is more of a people problem. Basically, the people who discriminate will find something else to discriminate on if they did not have iMessage.

Just to add to this, iPhones send potato quality video to Android. I am constantly reminding my family that uses iOS that they have to send an iCloud link.

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.

If you're (iphone) sending a message to an imessage user (beeper, or someone switched off iphone) with their phone number, and they're enrolled in imessage, an SMS will not be sent and they will not get it.

This is hearsay based on prior threads, but I haven't read a word against it.

SMS is not reliable. Messages are routinely lost.

I haven't had an SMS message get lost in over a decade now. It used to happen every so often, but apparently whatever the issue was got fixed.

I have not had a problem with SMS. I think it depends on the cell phone network companies. Some are reliable. Some are not.

iMessages too. "failed to send" is a real thing, with no notification.

Messages / lets you know if it could not send a message. I do not know if these are iMessages or SMS messages, but I have seen the error message.

Yes, there's an error message, but if you close your phone, it won't notify you that it failed to send. Hours/days later, you might reopen the message thread to find the message was never sent.

Just pointing out that effectively, it is the same "problem" that SMS has with dropped messages that happens quite rarely (both are rare, actually).

Once my now wife switched to iOS at my cost, we’ve had 0 issues.

This could easily backfire. Given the blue bubbles it's not possible to know if you're talking to an Android user, which means from the iOS user's perspective, iMessage is just less reliable.

people are surprisingly patient with messaging,… WhatsApp was down for 2 hours like last Tuesday at 3am and a civil war erupted in Brazil and stuff

Priority? Half the company is on vacation right now!

Hah, that's true. Good strategic timing on Beeper's part I suppose.

> 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

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.

Well they didn't cut off Beeper in the way that would block access to older Apple devices. It seems likely that they found a pattern of access performed (or looked at the identifying information provided) by Beeper in order to target it specifically from the server side.

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.

Apple has on occasion done out-of-band patches for older devices to fix serious security issues, so it doesn't seem too unrealistic.

Note Apple does not fix all security issues on unsupported devices. They only fix really bad issues. I do not think it is safe to use an iOS device which does not have the latest version of iOS.

iMessage generally works well on old versions. I used it just fine on an iPhone 5 running iOS 6.1.4 (from 2012!) last year.

Honestly they could just choose to disable iMessages on older devices. For the vast majority of people using those old devices, it would just change the bubble color and Apple wouldn’t fear any backlash.

I’m not saying they should, but knowing Apple, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they decided to do it.

Apple owns the delivery mechanism. I don’t believe that a third party using their ecosystem will last long. Nor do I want it. There are plenty of cross-platform things out there. Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp. Why does everyone care so much? Google can paint their Android robot blue. Then maybe all this silliness will end?

Because Apple embraced texting by supporting SMS, then extended it by forcing all the text conversations that they could into their own proprietary infrastructure, and is extinguishing it by using punitive product design to create pressure on communities of people to all use their products so that everything goes over their proprietary network.

I don't want an over the top chat app, I just want to text people.

>Because Apple embraced texting by supporting SMS

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.

Making iMessage which handles SMS, but by default transparently upgrades you to another protocol is the first two parts of EEE. Realistically, no normies flip that switch.

> Realistically, no normies flip that switch.

Got stats to back this up? I have 3 friends who use iPhone's that do have that toggle flipped.

2022, est.

- 1.36 billion iPhone users

- 1.3 billion iMessage users

https://www.demandsage.com/iphone-user-statistics/

https://www.usesignhouse.com/blog/imessage-stats

How do you want Apple to tell iPhone users whether their messages to someone are being recorded by that person's telco and made available to other plan holders on that phone plan?

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.

I have recent experience talking to non-techie younger people recently about this very issue and none of them were aware of the security differences of SMS vs. iMessage.

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.

Plus the cost. Over here in the EU, back in 2010 (?) SMS was an expensive thing, you would pay dearly for each or have to buy a "50/100/500 SMS package" or similar.

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)

Back in 2010 iPhones were expensive status symbols in the EU, approximately nobody bought them to save money on SMS. In some markets the really heavy texters bought Blackberries for a while just for BBM, but that got killed pretty quickly by Whatsapp.

T-Mobile does not give primary account holders access to messaging content of other lines, regardless of the relationship between users.

It doesn’t anymore, but it used to for pretty much all phone carriers in the US.

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've been with T-Mobile for twenty years and in that time it has never released messaging content to account holders. Their cybersecurity record may be trash, but misinformation isn't really helpful.

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.

Just to be clear, I wasn’t trying to criticize t-mobile. Been their customer for the past 8 or so years, and I wouldn’t have stayed if I had some serious reservations about them.

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.

Did you get this before?

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

Actually no, the end to end encryption on iMessage is envelopes inside the push notifications. The message content is not readable, even if you intercept APNs messages.

And it wasn't a blanket capture of push notifications anyway, right? Nobody has confirmed so far this is a Room 641a situation

> Nor do I want it

> 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.

> 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.

My definition of a win for Apple would be to have the problem go away and the attention dissipate. That's how it went for Nothing's attempt for instance, where it was instantly ridiculed and everyone forgot about it.

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.

> so Apple's won't be losing any of their core customers.

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".

Beeper mini is not ready for regular use, so it's not even a question, but I think there's many potential use if it was any good.

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.

> on a purely technical game of cat and mouse

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.

Apple wins when you aren't allowed to message somebody using beeper, rather than you switching to beeper from iMessage

I care about it because lack of iMessage is still a very good heuristic for spam. Not perfect anymore, but I reckon this will make it much worse.

Your advice was "There are plenty of cross-platform things out there. Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp", but you don't seem happy to take it and move away from iMessage either.

This tension is at the center of the it all, and why Beeper Mini exists in the first place.

What? I pay for iMessage. You’re just arguing for the right to use products for free, and in Beeper’s case to create monetized products that use others’ products for free.

> What? I pay for iMessage.

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.

Do you think this is a relevant point somehow?

I'm arguing that the crux of the issue is a lot more than just "why don't they use something else ?" The same way you see value in iMessage, other users also see value in iMessage. You may want them to go away, but to my eyes that's the same weight as other users wanting to be there. I'll be standing in the corner with the popcorn to see how it turns out.

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.

Beeper Mini wasn’t free. It became free the first time it was shut off.

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…

> Why does everyone care so much?

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!

They're using "buying an Apple device" as a spam filter, rather than using democratic means to put good regulations that are anti-spam.

Regulations... like CAN-SPAM? TCPA?

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.

Yes. They switched to that ~2020/1. You can no longer make a Genius Bar appt by browser on an Android phone; you used to be able to. Seems grossly unreasonable to assume "user has an Android phone" indicates "possible spammer".

> Seems grossly unreasonable to assume "user has an Android phone" indicates "possible spammer".

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.”

No, I described it the way Apple implements it; I'm aware of the Bayesian ridiculousness. Anyway, I object to Apple enforcing "all users of non-Apple phones as of 2020/1 can no longer make service appts [for an MBP] from the Apple webpage".

What a complete load of nonsense.

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.

It's easy for individuals to switch, but that's good for nothing when your friends and family use other services.

> 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.

I agree with you. This obsession with iMessage does not make a lot of sense. Apple created a better messaging experience because they wanted to add features to SMS. This is good and it makes things better when both people have iOS.

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.

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