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Comment by pocketarc | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that there is absolutely no incentive for a company to do this. There is no reason for Apple to work with Meta to make iMessage work with WhatsApp, and for both of them to work with Telegram and Signal so they all work together and share everything.

It kills their ability to add differentiating features, it removes their networking effect moat, and it provides them with no benefit. It's so much more appealing for their answer to be "just download my app".

It happened for telephone and email because they were developed in a different era. It's not going to happen for IM because we're in the era of "why build it if I can't profit from it?".

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Interoperability does not benefit incumbents, but it does benefit entrants.

The cross-protocol clients back in the day used reverse engineering to work. That would not fly today because today's tech culture is less hacker friendly, more litigious. Such a company would not receive venture funding due to its risky nature.

I think there is room for improvement in messaging, but interoperability makes it more difficult. I think it is in everyone's best interest to first ask for better features, let its inventors make a profit, then worry about interoperability once competitors catch up. If the market is competitive, interoperability can be achieved through coalitions. IBM's MCA vs Compaq et al's EISA is an instructive example.

> it does benefit entrants.

Which is why you don’t see successful messaging companies rushing to open their systems.

What company wants to spend the effort to build a successful messaging platform, only to open it and see some nobody come in with feature parity _and_ the ability to reach/convert every single one of their customers?

Open protocols would have worked great if that’s what was mandated _before_ these established products were in the market. Now, it’s going to be an uphill fight all the way, and companies are going to do the absolute bare minimum—-not just what they can get away with technically, but what they can get away with legally (e.g., Apple adopting RCS so they can point to RCS as the common messaging denominator, thus avoiding opening up iMessage itself).

I don't see why we should assume that apple must open iMessage users to others out of pure, market-based economic incentive, or even out of the goodness of their heart. We can just make them do it regardless of what they want.

It'd be better for people (maybe not apple), and the people can decide how their country is run, including requirements on tech interoperability for businesses operating in that country.

Typically we’d need a compelling state interest before we violate people’s rights, no? I mean there’s plenty of authoritarian countries out there to move to if you’d like—we don’t need to become one of them.

You're using the term "people" loosely here (to refer to a single corporation), and there's no "right to run a dominant and deceptive messaging network while allowing no interoperability", but in any case, we'd only need whatever We The People (the actual people, not 1 singular corporate "person" out of hundreds of millions of actual people) decide we need, regardless of what Apple Incorporated, the single "legal person", wants. I don't see how that's authoritarian, though that's an easy baseless attack to lob by those who disagree with We The People.

There are plenty of countries out there that preference corporations over people (I think that's the technical definition of a fascist government). One is free to move there, if they find democratic rule so distasteful.

Personally, I prefer majority rule rule to minority rule, given a choice between the two, and likewise prefer rule by the people to rule by a minority of corporate "persons".

iMessage already works with SMS/RCS, which is low level enough that any messaging service could use it as a method to interoperate with anything else.

What iMessage can’t do is translate a lot of the QOL and UI features, each client will have to adapt to read those on their own.

> It happened for telephone and email because they were developed in a different era. It's not going to happen for IM because we're in the era of "why build it if I can't profit from it?".

Who is going to pay for the bandwidth for 5MB to 100MB photos/videos/gif/files that are sent through the network?

The sending service should do the hosting so they can pass it on to the sender themselves. Receiving services can fetch thumbnails or full images on demand

What incentive does the sending service have to pay to host? The answer to this is the response to:

> "why build it if I can't profit from it?".

Like any protocol, to benefit from its network of users.

They can make the sender pay for hosting. Look how paying to receive spam worked out in the USA.

you already lost me

This makes no sense to me and is probably why we're so far away from a good solution - I pay my ISP for bandwidth to "the network", which includes other devices on "the network". This is the problem, not everything has to go through a "server" which then needs "bandwidth".

Surely, the cost of delivering a packet of data is at least partly function of how far the packet has to travel. Assuming your ISP has to pickup the cost of delivering this packet to every corner of the world, the ISP would have to increase prices to account for this (similar to paying extra for international phone calls).

Currently, it seems like a variety of entities are subsidizing this via things like peering agreements and whatnot to make the use of internet simple for the end user.

So what happens if you send a message with a video and the recipient’s device is not responsive, say because it is out of battery or data service range? Should the message simply be lost or should it be stored somewhere until it can be successfully sent?

That "somewhere" could be a server embedded inside your home router provided by your ISP or another "dumb" mailbox of your choosing. That would of course require regulation or an industry-wide push towards P2P, which is unlikely at best.

Signal runs on donations with a small staff and budget, and even still half of its infrastructure budget goes to sending a verification SMS on sign-up. You can run an open chat network as a tiny non-profit, and any hope of profits is in the same ballpark. For the incumbents it’s a loss leader for other services, and that complicates the whole analysis going on in this thread.

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