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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.)

The what crowd?

Spam.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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