Freedom to root/jailbreak one's phone is not freedom to use a service, if they don't want rooted phones to use their RCS gateway I don't think they should be forced to allow it.
You don't actually have that freedom - the DMCAs anti-circumvention provision robbed you of the right to unlock your own property. You are merely permitted by the manufacturer to root them, and sometimes, for a 3-year period, the copyright office will let you do it too [1].
The company you are defending, and others like it, use every legal, contractual, technical, and economic means to restrict what you may do, so they can sell it back to you, and so they can control which companies can do it, stopping competition before it can even start. The recent ban on open-source HDMI drivers is another such example [2].
[1] https://www.eff.org/is-it-illegal-to-unlock-a-phone
[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hdmi-forum-to-amd-no...
HEVC is another example of this B.S. in the industry. STOP TRYING TO MAKE PAYWALLED/NDA'D STANDARDS A THING A-HOLES.
HEVC, for example, has public documents how to implement it. You can get all the specs right now. You don’t even need to pay for the standard itself. You do, however, need to pay the people who own patents on algorithms used within the open standard.
Do I like it? No. But when there’s 50-100 patent claimants, that’s where MPEG LA shows up to simplify things. You don’t strictly need MPEG LA if you don’t mind negotiating with every patent holder individually.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_United_...?
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Eur... - The wiki states that because of the "as such" clause, the exclusion of software patents does not apply to software that does anything inventive or solves a technical problem. But those are already requirements of patentability for anything, software or not. In other words, this interpretation of "as such" renders that entire clause totally meaningless - it could be struck entirely from the law, and software would be no more or less patentable. Clearly such a reading is absurd, and only shows the willingness of courts to ignore law for business interests.
These companies often make these advancements because it's beneficial to their bottom line, because they can utilize fewer resources or provide a better product to their customers. They then expect everyone to implement their standards so they can reap the benefit of those changes with all their customers.
Well, when you are developing a standard, there is no guarantee that every person who owns a patent will reveal themselves. There’s no guarantee your due diligence will find them all either. You could develop a completely open standard, someone announces they’ve got a patent, and if they win in court, that’s the end of it being an open standard.
> These companies often make these advancements because it's beneficial to their bottom line, because they can utilize fewer resources or provide a better product to their customers.
That’s just called business. That’s not evil, and if Linux didn’t benefit their bottom line, it would not be usable today (considering over 90% of contributions are from the big evil companies).
I understand your position but please try not to put words in my mouth.
"this same expectation in the Apple ecosystem is why I've received single digit spam from their messaging services" implies it can be justified as an anti-spam measure that open services can't match. But I've received also single-digit spam (cumulative over multiple years, not per year) on the WhatsApp running on my rooted Android. Nor would this even hypothetically stop non-RCS spam.
In general, companies always have some convenient excuse to cover their user-hostile moves. HP bricked printers using 3rd party ink for "security". Uncritically believing them, or even inventing excuses for them, is defending them.
"if they don't want rooted phones to use their RCS gateway I don't think they should be forced to allow it" - so we've established these companies are actively hostile to your freedom to use your property as you wish. But you are willing to disregard any monopoly/market-power abuse concerns, and grant them the freedom that they deny you (you used "should", so I assume you're not giving a mere factual description of what you think the law is). Just like letting Bell charge extra for using competitor's equipment [1] has ill effects on the market (try selling a phone when all your customers will have to pay an extra monthly fee to Bell for using it) and was rightly banned, so does letting the Google/Apple duopoly control smartphone software. Saying they should be allowed to continue to abuse and expand their market power is a defense of these companies, or rather, is a defense specifically of their anti-competitive and user-hostile practices.
The difference between a "defense" that merely seeks to correct facts, and one that justifies behavior, can be subtle (e.g. "this is necessary to fight spam" vs. "this was done to fight spam" vs. "there was no other way to fight spam"), but I think your phrasing put you in the latter category.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System#Nationwide_monopol...
Edit as reply: "I think" and "I believe" do not meaningfully change your position. "I think action X is justified because of Y" and "Action X is justified because of Y" only differ in implied certainty, not in quality.
Why do we have to be absolutists? Why can't I buy into a platform that has the features I want and not the features that don't matter to me? It really weakens your position when you say "actively hostile to your freedom" yet I could have purchased an unlocked, rootable, Android phone. I even have several older ones in a box, my HTC One M8 was awesome. Guess what I chose in the end? Guess what I've had the best experience with? I am enjoying my freedom. Could it be better? YES ABSOLUTELY! Can we do that without being absolutists in either direction? YES ABSOLUTELY!
Apple can't put the genie back in the bottle with macOS, they've been trying though. True root requires a special boot sequence otherwise you really only get pseudo-root. They introduced the AppStore to macOS and it was a huge flop because of how restrictive they made it. Microsoft also tried the same with Windows S on ARM devices and eventually were forced to allow disabling S mode.
Again, I think there is this impression that I agree with any or all of their behaviors. I don't, I'm only reasoning about why and how in some cases it might be one part of a deterrent. Nothing stops me from jumping over a fence, so why put it up to begin with?
Apple simply does not have this restriction that Google is imposing on RCS. Apple's anti-spam comes from a combination of server-side analysis, having a centralized way to enforce bans, and tying accounts to phone numbers, none of which seem to involve banning jailbroken devices as, again: Apple doesn't.
(FWIW, I don't know off the top of my head how Apple ties your iMesaage account to your phone number. I vaguely remember that it involves functionality implemented by the carrier, not just trusting the client, and as RCS definitely has to be supported by the carrier there is no issue deploying such here. Regardless, not only would trusting the client be ridiculously stupid in case it ever got hacked, we can continue to lean into the analysis that Apple does not nor have they ever banned jailbroken iPhones from using iMessage, and so we don't even have to dig deeply: we know their security model doesn't rely on something they don't do.)
p.s. had to do a double take when I saw your name, been a while since I've done anything jailbreak related with iOS but I really appreciated all the work you did when I did. <3
The whole argument that Google has been making for RCS is that it's open. However, that isn't actually the case. You're only allowed to use Google's apps (or Samsung's since they had enough market power to force Google to make an exception for them). RCS isn't an open service. It's just Google's chat service that they got carriers to adopt claiming it was open.
Google used RCS as a trojan horse to get the whole Android ecosystem to move to a chat service they control - and where they receive all the unencrypted meta-data. They block competing apps from getting access. Google got up on its high horse about supporting an open standard when that was a complete fabrication.