Laptop of the magi: an annoyed iMessage antitrust anecdote
maya.land
maya.land
Hopefully the RCS support also fixes the "oops, I bought an Android without turning off the magic parasite SMS replacement and now I'm banned from texting iPhones" problem.
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Until RCS has native and mandatory encryption (for both 1-1 and group chats), it's just one more really poor attempt at data mining by all involved. Google claiming they want everyone to be all-in on RCS while simultaneously only supporting encryption through their non-standard extension is a bit of a joke.
Say what you will about Apple, at least they're pretending to care and insisting on it.
https://www.techradar.com/phones/iphone/breaking-apple-will-...
>Apple says it won't be supporting any proprietary extensions that seek to add encryption on top of RCS and hopes, instead, to work with the GSM Association to add encryption to the standard.
*Personally I think Apple should just create Messages for Android and charge $5/month or make it a part of their paid icloud offering and just embrace services. I get they want to sell iphones but it feels like they're in a bit of a RIM situation at the moment. You can keep fighting the inevitable but only for so long.
Ironically enough, if RIM had opened up BBM and email a decade earlier they might still be around today.
I'd move to Android in a heartbeat if they did this. I think that is the reason why it will never happen.
iPhone = for rich people Android = for poor people
Thus if you’re a teen and you have a green bubble, you are poor.
No, teens are mostly using other services like Snapchat, IG, WhatsApp, even TikTok for messaging their friends. iMessage is for communicating with old family members.
As you talk more you use more of the native features that are also integrated into imessage, I.e Facetime. No need to download and create an account on Zoom and Skype, It’s a tap away.
You’re together and you need a way to share info , pictures, videos whatever. Not only can you do this via imessage but you can also do it via airdrop. Nice , instant, and easy.
it isn’t just imessage. it’s implicit understand of what it all brings that makes it an option of the American teenager.
None of my family members understand that iMessage isn't just SMS.
I'm between the UK and Australia, and haven't received an iMessage in years, literally. I get SMS on a daily/weekly basis for 2FA things.
It probably has something to do with the fact that outside the US, iPhone market penetration is low, so it's assumed that sending someone an SMS will be an actual SMS, not always upgraded to iMessage.
I'm not in the US but I use WhatsApp and android and thought it was some kind of iPhone SMS thing.
Is SMS in the US different from other countries?
The fragmentation isn't ideal, but it's better than the vendor locking.
Thanks for clarifying.
There's stuff like Beeper that allows for consolidation of multiple services, if you don't like having to use multiple apps for different people.
The difference is that in most other countries people don't use SMS to talk to other people; receiving SMS messages from automated systems is AFAIK still very common everywhere.
RCS is another one of these shit shows. As I said elsewhere on this thread, I used an Android recently for a couple of months (just so I have a right to bitch about it) and when I switched back it broke SMS for me. I was only using SMS to activate WhatsApp.
I have zero issues communicating with people in Asia over Line or Europeans using WhatsApp. But I can't reliably text the people living in my same town, lol. Welcome to the USA.
Very recently I’ve also discovered that if I ignore the “log in to iTunes/iCloud” messages for long enough then I won’t be able to send “SMS”-eses anymore, which, when you think of it, technically makes sense but which I found puzzling nonetheless and it took a few hours of head-scratching to figure out (it’s not very intuitive to think that you need to log in to a different platform in order to send messages through the same interface that I had used for more than 20 years before without ever having to do that).
Just as bad if not worse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messenger_(software)
I presume if they named it Facebook Messenger, more users might shun it.
1) the travails of those who buy android aren’t my concern as an iPhone owner
2) there are a million popular messaging alternatives
3) this is market revenge for “android has the market share and apple has the market share profits”
4) the kids will move past blue and green bubbles before any lawsuits are settled
5) the technically superior solution will prevail
6) are we still talking about this?
7) F Google
8) if I had to pick “n” regulatory interventions in technopolies today this one definitely wouldn’t rank, given just about any potential value of “n”
9) climate change gov & ngo interventions deserve this much iterative, insistent, passionate discussion far more
Edit: Adding one more..
10) Apple’s E2E RCS implementation will spank and embarrass Google’s version of same
note that this was the dark pattern at launch, the "don't agree" button disguised as a negative link is now disguised as greyed out text on their premium pixel UI.
For a proper comparison, you should display that next to the opt-in UI displayed to users when their SMS messages are converted to iMessages.
"Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association. We believe RCS Universal Profile will offer a better interoperability experience when compared to SMS or MMS. This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users."
This doesn't include encryption, that's a Google extension and is not part of the GSMA standard. Indeed, I suspect we'll see only the bare minimum implemented by Apple.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/apple-announces-rcs-...
I guess we'll have to wait and see.
I'd argue they are, if you think you're texting someone and they aren't actually receiving those texts.
Wait, I thought the problem was that it did not look like SMS and that someone somewhere was unhappy about green bubbles? Could you people make up your mind?
- "Apple's target demographic". People like my parents, who just know "Open Messages to text people" and don't understand that Apple basically slid themselves in between every iPhone-to-iPhone text conversation
- "BMW drivers". Extremely vain people looking for ways to not talk to the poors, who are angry that any sort of fix to this problem would decrease their ability to be classist assholes. Classholes.
- "Android users stuck in iPhone families". People angry that their iPhone using friends keep texting them "Liked an image" and then asking why the images they texted them look like ass. Me.
- "Whatsapp's data suppository". Western Europeans who would much rather the Americans just shut up and go away[0]. Green bubbles cost them so much money (because European carriers are horrible scum of the earth) that they all migrated to Whatsapp way before iMessage got any traction in Europe.
Of course they're all going to have different opinions. We will not 'make up our mind' and it is downright insulting that you demand we make up one opinion with four minds.
[0] Which seems to be the argument for a lot of other things America likes, like human rights, immigration, freedom of speech, and more generally, liberal democracy.
The blue bubble is the essencial first world problem
From what I've read elsewhere, the main reason was SMS charges: many years ago, it cost money to send SMS texts in most countries, while in North America the telecom companies were faster at offering free texting (or at least flat-rate). So elsewhere, various chat apps arose and caught on: LINE in Japan, WeChat in China, KakaoTalk in Korea, WhatsApp elsewhere. Now that everyone is used to these services and they've become so popular to the point where they're basically mandatory to participate in society, why would anyone want to go back to SMS? The only problem with the messaging apps is that they're all separate from each other so they're silos, but unless you have a lot of friends spread across different countries, that's not an issue. And these apps don't disciminate based on which phone you own.
More than anything I believe it's more related to social circles than specific countries. I use Signal, but in frequent, because that's what colleague around the world use, and I have two friend on Signal, but that's it. It's not something I consider standard. I know people who use WhatsApp pretty extensively, but again only within a limited social circle. A lot of people use Facebook Messenger, but I've never seen anyone expect that I have it installed. SMS is still the default, and sometimes it just happens to be delivered via iMessage.
Messaging software is fully determined by who you want to send messages to. It tends to unify across groups that interact, so knowing someone's nationality will tell you their messaging software with high confidence:
China: wechat
Taiwan, Japan: line
India, Australia: whatsapp
Russia: telegram
USA: facebook messenger
and so on.
Especially when Americans talk about Europe "not using iMessage" it is frequently assumed that we're on WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Viper or something like that, the sad truth is that Facebook Messenger is probably the biggest platform in many countries and in top three in the rest. That just not the platform that those most critical of iMessage wants to be on either.
My chat network is pretty global and iMessage, Signal, and WhatsApp seem to cover all bases in practice.
Solution: another proprietary service
This is just Internet Explorer again, disguised.
I'm just sad Apple didn't push for iMessage to become THE messaging standard. Google is still trying with RCS. Hopefully it takes off.
A proprietary messaging service is fine, it was what people liked about Blackberrys back in the day. The silent upgrading is the problem.
The "Professional Computers person" probably chose not to include screenshots because it would debunk his feigned complexity.
Since he's already claimed that his mother won't receive the messages•, - then the whole faux-drama would have been solved by simply turning off iMessage on his or his mother's device.
(• Which is false: the messages would be sent to her mac, and they'd be visible as unread to him, so he'd already see that there was an issue.)
It's also not some obscure hidden setting to choose a different delivery pathway in the Messages app: it's one button and the -only- option on the screen when choosing a recipient. It's how a normal, not-tech savvy, person chooses a different phone number for a contact that has multiple phone numbers, and iMessage will remember that choice for the future.
And if all of that is too hard, his mother could simply send him a message and the messages app will reply to her phone number, it won't auto switch to her email address. When he composes messages in the future, the Messages app will also put up that SMS pathway as the 1st choice.
This article was written to manipulate people into believing a false narrative, and judging from the comments, it worked great.
Everybody knows when one person in a text group isn’t using iMessage, and they usually hate it.
You're saying it's not? And you're saying everyone knows this? I say incorrect.
This is indeed totally surprising and inexplicable behavior.
Answer: "idk, tech magic." They know there is some way that isn't actually magic, they know there are mechanics, but they don't know or need to know what the mechanics are.
How it knows to display a green bubble or a blue bubble is exactly like that. That's what I mean by it's not a remarkable thing to anyone that the txt app does this. Q: How? A: Somehow. They don't see it and think "Wow, this proves that there are two unrelated back-end systems."
Plus this is the sender writing a message to her email address. Her laptop didn’t steal her phone number.
For your problem: users that haven’t deregistered their phone number from iMessage when switching to a non-Apple phone: there is the option of using a website to deregister, calling customer service, or simply waiting as iMessage will release registered numbers after a short period anyway.
If we all didn't have a decade or so of experience text messaging before Apple built their own messaging platform, maybe this wouldn't be a problem. But here we are.
The solution: one drop down menu and selecting the phone number, or simply deactiving iMessage if they don't want to use it.
Why this matters: The user made the choice to enable iMessage as part of an optional set up process on their Mac. They did this to themselves, and could very easily undo it, but wrote a bullshit article instead. It's a case of "Professional computer person" is either an idiot, or not worth hiring.
Also I'm over-joyed at the "very smart" people in here who seemingly think this is very hard stuff.
This is why you're wrong. It's not about "using the phone number". You as the sender have no way to know whether they have iMessage on their phone or not. You can't say "use iMessage or SMS?" because if they do have it on their phone, you don't want to use SMS.
> The user made the choice to enable iMessage as part of an optional set up process on their Mac.
Imagine explaining to your mom that this is her own fault and it's happening because she checked a box during the setup for her computer. You can't get back to the setup, you just have to figure out how to dig through settings to turn it off.
How would anyone intuit that the consequence of checking that box will suddenly start making text messages that used to go to your android phone suddenly start going to your laptop instead? That's insane behavior.
Moreover, if your suggested fix for this "professional computer person" is to remove the email from the contact, that's not really a fix, is it? Now you just have to hope you remember the email address and that nobody else adds the phone number and email to their contacts.
Software engineers build software for people. If you find yourself suggesting that it's the user's fault for experiencing some unhinged software behavior, you've lost your way. These interactions suck because of iMessage, not because the users are "idiots".
Really? On iOS 17, when I choose a recipient in the Messages app, I can indeed select the dropdown and choose a phone number or email. I cannot choose a phone number that is associated with iMessage but ask for SMS.
But it’s much worse than that. Once I select a phone number or email and start a conversation, it’s very difficult to tell which selection was made. (In fact, I’m not sure a reliable way to tell is wired into the UI at all.)
In Apple’s very very slight defense, I don’t think this is an intentionally anticompetitive design. I think it’s merely a very poor design. I somewhat regularly have problems getting messages to work right even when all parties have iPhones. It’s damn near impossible to debug, and even fixing it once debugged is hard because you can’t change the settings after starting a conversation and because you can easily end up with multiple apparently identical simultaneously existing conversations, involving exactly the same contacts but different endpoints (emails/phones), some of which work and some of which don’t. And this happens even when literally every involved device is made by Apple, running the latest OS.
iMessage’s user identifiers are just utterly crappy.
Isn’t that an opt-in feature that would have to be enabled on the laptop, not by default?
I think a fair criticism of my post might be that it was written in a moment of obvious annoyance, and failed to spend enough time connecting the griping about the personal experience to larger problems, but it was definitely not "written to manipulate people into believing a false narrative."
> the whole faux-drama would have been solved by simply turning off iMessage on his or his mother's device.
We tried turning off iMessage on the laptop, as mentioned in the post. It does not revert other devices' behavior to SMS.
> Which is false: the messages would be sent to her mac, and they'd be visible as unread to him, so he'd already see that there was an issue.
She certainly won't receive them on her phone, no? It's bad enough, never mind that I'm not around to surveil her computer.
> It's how a normal, not-tech savvy, person chooses a different phone number for a contact that has multiple phone numbers, and iMessage will remember that choice for the future.
Unless, as here, the contact email becomes associated with something that supports iMessage, in which case Messages will stop using the chosen phone number. Neither of us have data to make an argument about how common it is for people to mess with this, so I can only note that I myself have never overridden the originally-chosen contact method before. Either way, there is no signal that someone might need to do this, since, as mentioned, the blue bubbles look to have been delivered just fine.
> And if all of that is too hard, his mother could simply send him a message and the messages app will reply to her phone number, it won't auto switch to her email address.
We tried this, and this is not the behavior we observed. Also, even if this had worked, she would have needed to quickly text... all of her contacts with iPhones in order to get them on the right pathway?
Ultimately, if you think there's no problem here, that's your right. I chose not to include screenshots because a. that would have been more effort, and b. they'd have my mother's PII in them, and properly censoring that all out would have been even more effort.
This whole situation is a PITA that I didn't intend to bring upon my family. The comments here evidence a divide between people thinking this behavior is obvious and people thinking it's highly non-obvious. That's interesting enough to me to feel it was worth having shared.
its sucks
I can see how this is a little self-serving on apple's part.
Maybe she can delete her apple account?
Deregister iMessage on your iPhone or online: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203042
Direct link for convenience (scroll down to “No longer have your iPhone?”): https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/
Edit: oh I see, the problem is with having the email registered with iMessage.
See “Change iMessage settings in Messages on Mac” [1] and scroll down to “You can be reached for messages at”:
Open the Message app on the laptop and click the checkbox to deregister the email.
Or she can change her Apple ID email address online [2] to some other one, which would deregister the email from iMessage.
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/messages/icht39422/mac
But thing is she shouldn't in the first place.
Given that she is in such a situation though, I’m just trying to be helpful by offering some hopefully useful info.
This was ironic in a way because I was just trying to activate WhatsApp with SMS so I didn't have to use SMS/RCS/iMessage!
I'm forced to agree with the blog author here:
> It’s weird to me that people visit this site, read my writing, and use “he” to refer to the author of it… Y’all! I’m not being subtle or secretive here; I am not a covert woman. The name is not a fake-out.
I assumed the author was female based solely on reading the post. But the website is also called "maya.land", and decorated with flowers. Why is everyone referring to the author as male?
I guess other people are likely different, but I hardly ever populate a contact with email addresses. Almost all of my contact cards have a phone number, and possibly a mailing address, but no email. I am more likely to put down family relationships or notes about how I know the person (my kid's friend's parent, for example) than I am to put in an email address.
This doesn't mean that the behavior that he describes, where messages are routed via iMessage to an email address instead of SMS to a phone, is appropriate. But it seems a bit extreme to claim that "her contacts with iPhones, who all have her email saved". I would imagine that a 60 year old woman (I'm guessing at her age) is not super likely to exclusively be friends with people who enter emails for all their contacts.
That's the tenuous assumption you are making here. Lots of people put their email in their contact info: why not, if there's a place for it?
Different strokes for different folks, I guess - she's involved with a couple of organizations that over the peak of the pandemic used videoconferencing software heavily, so everyone needed each other's emails for that. Plus another organization that just runs via email AFAIA. (I'm not saying she's the absolute hardest-hit by this kind of thing; e.g., some of the volunteering she does where this failure mode would be catastrophic is fine because those contacts reach her via WhatsApp.)
I guess (but have not verified) that OP's grandmother could solve her immediate problem by adding a second (secret) email address to her Apple account, and having that as the only address which receives iMessages.
(Not saying this is easy.)
The author conveniently leaves out the process of configuring the Macbook which makes me doubt the integrity of this narration
2. You give up a significant amount of other unrelated features when skipping iCloud setup
2. you give up almost nothing if you don't have other Apple devices and treat your Macbook like a normal computer
Again, the modt important piece of missing information is not provided which makes me skeptical of the article
Creating subtasks in the reminders app is not possible without an icloud account.
There are no _real_ technical or functional reasons (that can't be fixed) why icloud is a requirement for these features but it is needed.
A mac with icloud and a mac without icloud are different in many non trivial ways.
At least for Signal and WhatsApp, the sender can see when the receiver's phone received the message (the single tick mark which means "received by the server" becomes a double tick mark), so the situation when the receiver's phone doesn't have the app anymore (or is turned off) is a bit better. But yeah, it would be best if these apps warned when trying to message someone whose phone hasn't contacted the messaging server in a while.
What you do is hand them the device and say "use this if you want to reach me". Give them a Yubikey to add to their keychain for disk encryption/decryption on the device. Give them a piece of paper with a six-digit PIN on it and ask them every hour throughout the two days you see them for the holidays what the PIN is.
>> "but I shouldn't have to do all this"
"Everything that we know and love is reducible to the absurd acts of chemicals, and there is therefore no intrinsic value in this material universe".
Hypocrite that you are, for you trust the chemicals in your brain to tell you they are chemicals. All knowledge is ultimately based on that which we cannot prove. Will you fight? or will you perish like a dog?
[*] 911 calls still enabled, also note that 911 works without a SIM card.
Pretty sure that's what I did when I had just an iPad a few years ago and was facing a similar problem. It's really dumb and stupid and annoying to explain to people why I didn't get their message.
I really hope Apple holds their ground and doesn’t cave to this pressure to make iMessage more interoperable.
For the longest time nobody batted an eye to iMessage, claiming it’s garbage and suddenly when it’s grown to the size, feature set that it’s at now there’s a mark on it.
This has been brewing for a long time, and it seems GSMA folks are now certain enough that RCS is a replacement to SMS to make some larger waves.
[1] https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/imessage-judge-orders-a...
[2] https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/apple-imessage-android-...
[3] https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/samsungs-response-to-apples-g...
That is not to say there’s no malice. Oh, there is. Hanlon’s razor cuts both ways in this particular case.
The former is a great idea and I believe Apple should be forced it to do it ASAP. There is no reason to for Apple to "contaminate" phone numbers and force their iMessage on anyone.
The latter is a bad idea. Let's not make iMessage better, there are plenty of good messengers already. Let's make it easy to turn off and stop using.
I was under the impression it’s [1] possible but I’m away from my Mac to check.
Worse case one could change one’s Apple ID’s email.
Apple should make this stuff more obvious though
I think it’s best with Apple to log in with an iCloud email address even if you don’t use it.
It's the worse case then, and she'd have to change/remove her email from her Apple ID [1].
Apple should do better and make it easier in this kind of case. They already allow one to deregister a phone number from iMessage via a web page, how hard could it be for them to do the same for an email...