Hacker News Reader

Comment by _justinfunk | Hacker News Reader

Could you explain why you think apple is the bad guy?

They support SMS as the standard carrier-supported messaging protocol (in the states, not sure globally). They also have a private protocol for apple devices which they fully own and control. And they have now announced that next year they will be supporting RCS, the next-gen carrier-supported protocol.

I think it's fair to say that Apple has been slow to adopt RCS - but I don't think that makes them the bad guy.

(SMS is insecure, iMessage is a lock in that they use to their benefit, RCS has been on Android forever, etc etc etc)

View on HN

> iMessage is a lock in that they use to their benefit

This is why I think they are the bad guy. They aren't passively benefiting from an iPhone network effect, they are actively and aggressively prevent workarounds that users can do to get around their lock-in.

During the 90s, Apple was the victim of similar behavior by Microsoft, and most tech people correctly vilified Microsoft for this behavior. Now Apple is acting as the villain and we should call that out.

Apple restricting a free service to Apple's own users is not even remotely the same as Microsoft's various forms of skullduggery and I don't know how you can make the comparison seriously.

It has never been easier to switch platforms, and the gulf between iOS and Android has never been shallower. Android users not having access to one also-ran messaging service is not some sort of fundamental injustice, and Apple is not a villain for building features that they think will appeal to their customers. It's sort of their whole business!

In case anyone thinks its an overstatement, no, it's not.

The only reason iMessage isn't available on Android, is because Craig Federighi explicitly wants it iPhone only to lock users in to iPhones.

https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1589450766506692609?la...

Right. But it’s a service Apple created to add value to Apple devices. It’s subsidized by people purchasing those devices.

Why should they have to give it to Android?

I just don’t see that quote as a smoking gun. Why isn’t that Apple‘s choice to make?

From a legal perspective, they don't have to. From a legal perspective, the world's largest corporation can aggressively lock out non-iPhone users to try to further increase revenue.

But from an ethical perspective, it sucks. I own Apple devices and Android devices and I have friends on both. Why should my life be more painful just so Apple can squeeze out a tiny bit more money?

Apple is ethically obligated to give free services to people who don’t buy their products?

Ethical? Say you launch a product that uses cloud services (ie servers and storage). If I reverse engineer your protocol and launch my own (paid) product on top of your service, is it unethical for you to shut me down? Isn’t it also unethical for me to create a product on top of your infrastructure without getting permission or providing some kind of payment?

IMHO, Beeper is the one with an ethics problem.

It also shows that the privacy campaign is just a business tactic.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise of course, but the Apple reality distortion field is real so I think it’s worth noting.

I think if iMessage was a separate app that came preloaded on iPhones, it would be reasonable to ask why Apple has to make it work with Android. But the fact that it is THE SMS app built into the OS, in my opinion, is the only reason it’s so ubiquitous in the US.

You don’t get to say, “we compete just like any other messaging app, we shouldn’t be forced to integrate with anything” while also enjoying OS-level integration to the point where many (most?) people were onboarded into the iMessage ecosystem without even realizing it.

As the Microsoft anti-trust case established, defaults matter.

edit: even a separate preloaded app could still be considered anti-competitive if it’s selected by default, cf. Internet Explorer

Isn’t that what Google did with their messaging things? Wasn’t the same app as SMS? Isn’t that how they’ve deployed RCS?

The MS case wasn’t all about defaults. I’m not sure any of it was about defaults. The thing that killed them was deals saying you couldn’t offer competing programs or had to pay them regardless of if you put Windows on the machine (so it was a waste of money to ship anything else). Plus changing code to break competitors.

Google doesn't have "messaging things" anymore. The default messaging app supports SMS/RCS and that's it.

They tried the unified SMS/proprietary message protocol approach with Hangouts but that was short lived. I'm not even sure if it was ever at any point installed by default on a majority of Android phones.

After Hangouts, they tried Allo which did not support SMS and was not a replacement for the default messages app which did support SMS.

I didn’t notice your edit earlier.

The issue with IE, besides the “don’t install Netscape” contracts, was that they undercut Netscape’s price by charging $0 which is impossible to compete with. Essentially dumping. I don’t think it being default was also an issue in the US case, but the 90s was a long time ago.

You’re 100% right about the power of defaults. That was a big issue in the EU which is why MS had to include the first-run browser picker. But I’m not in the EU and didn’t follow that case so unfortunately that tiny bit is all I know there.

For me, the issue is it's hostile to Apple users - too.

Ie i can't use the message platform i pay for on many of my devices unless every single one of them is Apple. I use Beeper to use iMessage from my Linux desktop.

Well from some logical point of view I don't know if I have a good case to argue off the top of my head, nor do I want to come up with one.

On the other hand, its because it fucking sucks. It's the largest company in the world (by market cap) which has a revenue of a third of a trillion dollars every year. They can afford to make it free but they don't for their own gain. All their competitors make their myriad of chat apps (that only Americans don't seem to want to use) free and available on as many platforms as possible. The only real reason Apple doesn't is because they want to hoard more and more of their money and become an even bigger company. That just sucks, it's shitty, it's worse for the world. They have hundreds of billions of cash reserves that they don't even know what to do with. I don't give a shit if it's their right or whatever to do it, I still think it sucks and is worse for everyone who isn't a VP at Apple.

Open standards are nice, decentralization is nice, having options and choice and cross-platform things are nice. Having a gigantic company make a choice to create a silo where they're the only ones allowed to use it is not nice.

I totally get the “this sucks it should be better argument”. And I get people wanting laws to fix it.

What I have trouble with are the people who confuse that with existing law say Apple is doing illegal things, which has been sadly common in these threads.

What do you mean by get around their lock in? You mean that only Apple users can use iMessage?

How do you think Apple pays is for that? It’s subsidized through device cost.

I get why people hate the App Store rules and no side loading, etc. but that’s a different situation in my mind.

Why should Apple have to give Android users free service?

> Why should Apple have to give Android users free service?

Who said anything about free? Apple could charge Android users.

That’s fair. No one has said free.

But I have a sneaking suspicion the instant Apple releases a paid Android app HN would be having this exact same discussion, except complaining it’s not free.

I cannot say how HN would respond but Beeper's whole business model is charging users for iMessage.

> RCS, the next-gen carrier-supported protocol.

RCS is pretty old at this point, almost a decade. But its also not as open a protocol as it says on the tin. Android is using a ton of extensions, notably end to end encryption, that are not standardized and the infrastructure is hard to run. Carriers are for the most part using google rcs infrastructure or users are accessing google infrastructure directly because the only relevant RCS users are android users who default to not using carrier RCS servers that don't have the google extensions. So its really an "open" protocol managed by google.[1][2] Somewhat of an upgrade over the closed ecosystem of imessage in principal but RCS isn't the open protocol win that many fantasize about; it feels more like hoping on to a product that's in the late extend and extinguish phase.

1: https://9to5google.com/2023/09/21/t-mobile-rcs-google-jibe/ 2: https://9to5google.com/2023/06/09/att-rcs-jibe-google/

That is the thing about RCS.. it seems like a whole lot more of it is proprietary Google product than many people realize.

I would not be surprised if there was another patent stew going on with Google's RCS extensions.

US carriers only comitted to RCS in 2021 https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/20/22584443/verizon-android-...

The rollout has been pretty slow, fragmented, and annoying.

In large part because of Google's cajoling and creation of Jibe. The carriers view messaging as a software product. At this point because basically every phone is running android or ios thus supporting a lower level carrier protocol is of questionable value for them when anyone can submit an app and run their own infrastructure to support a messaging protocol.

That’s kind of why I’ve been very surprised by this whole thing.

Apple made an Apple service for Apple users.

Because no one else has succeeded in the US at taking over a large chunk of the market Apple became de facto bad and loses their rights.

As almost every thread has pointed out, this situation is very unique to the US. Almost everywhere else other apps have taken over. So it’s not like Apple is PREVENTING people from using other apps. People just like it better.

Just like most people like Google better as their search engine. It has a huge market share too but no one seems mad about that. (Their tying that to advertising IS horrible, but not an angle in the iMessage analogy)

And as you said, Apple has announced RCS support. So I wonder if any of this will even matter much in a year or so.

Anti green bubble discrimination is directly responsible for the rise of large amounts of incels in America.

Make no mistake, it’s a meme among gen Z about how if a man has an android phone, they better hide it for at least 3 dates as a woman seeing them having an android phone is enough to get them ghosted on subsequent dates.

There are literally hundreds of articles written about green bubble discrimination in the dating world. Before the knee jerk downvoted, please google my claims and read some of them.

Idiots who are rejected by women will blame anything except their own behavior.

There are plenty of men who have android phones who date women with iPhones.

Even if the bubble color were the same those men would be rejected anyway for not having an iPhone. I guess the government should mandate all phones look the same to prevent further discrimination against those without iDevices.

I'm picturing a guy on a date who just won't shut up about why Android is better and she should get rid of her iPhone.

"She dumped me because I use Android!"

Well, that's partially true...

That probably does happen.

But, also, some people are shamed for simply using Android as well.

https://gizmodo.com/im-buying-an-iphone-because-im-ashamed-o...

A lot has been written about the perception of "green bubbles". It's well documented.

And if this were true and getting a women is important to the individual, than just get the iphone until you get the girl. People spend money to show their value to mates through cars, clothes, jewelry, haircuts, etc ad infinitum.

No one is entitled to affection from any other person. Thinking otherwise is the only thing responsible for the rise of incels. Blaming “green bubble discrimination” is only one of limitless deflections from that underlying problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com