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Comment by aabajian | Hacker News Reader

The blue background on messages sent between two iMessage users has to be one of the most brilliant vendor lock-in strategies. It is an artificial form of discrimination. I feel a slight annoyance whenever a non-Apple user forms a group chat as I know that person will limit the messaging functionality.

In my opinion, the "monopolistic" aspect of it comes down to the fact that they tied it into an otherwise open messaging system - SMS. You cannot separate SMS messages from iMessages (to my knowledge). So, the only way to know a message was sent via SMS is the green background for incoming messages and the green background plus the "sent via SMS" for outgoing messages. This creates a disdain for SMS, and anyone who uses it over iMessage. It is such a strong feeling, that having green messages makes you "uncool", especially in the younger crowd.

On the other hand, I think the long-term sequalae of the blue-green message is to push people to use stand-alone apps like WhatsApp and FB Messenger. I think it'll be a hard sell at this point to convince a jury that iMessage is an overt monopoly.

The main question I want addressed is: If SMS messages can be directly shown in iMessage, and are not secure, then the argument of not allowing "insecure" 3rd-parties to integrate with iMessage goes out the window. All I want is Android messages to be shown in iMessage. Sure we can make them green, but at least they will be sent over the data network and not SMS.

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> On the other hand, I think the long-term sequalae of the blue-green message is to push people to use stand-alone apps like WhatsApp and FB Messenger

I find it amusing that in 2024 people in the US still talk about WhatsApp as a future step. Where I'm from already 10+ years ago every single person you know would have a WhatsApp account.

With WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram etc. I think this is pretty much a solved problem in the rest of the world, really only the US is behind here.

These are all available in the US but it sounds like you have the same problem we do. There are way too many of them and they aren't compatible.

In most countries one of these is the one everybody uses, and it works on every phone. In the US, the country is split, mostly by economic class, between people on iMessage and “the rest”.

I’m not saying “whatsapp is effectively a monopoly in $country” is great, but it’s better than the US situation. You can buy a $50 phone and use the ubiquitous messaging app.

I live in NZ, there's no standard here. It's damned annoying. I've heard that Facebook Messenger is the most popular, but I only know one person who uses it and I don't have an account myself.

In the US there is only iMessage and regular SMS. SMS is interoperable with iMessage. People are just making a much bigger deal about the green bubbles than they should.

>People are just making a much bigger deal about the green bubbles than they should.

If you didn't grow up Gen Z you don't really understand. It's just another of the endless ways you can get bullied indirectly for being "poor" or "nerdy".

Peer pressure is a real phenomenon, and there is a point here when that peer pressure is manufactured by the company itself to get people to buy their stuff.

>I’m not saying “whatsapp is effectively a monopoly in $country” is great, but it’s better than the US situation.

Ah, so it's better to have a monopoly than not have a monopoly?

Also, what are your thoughts on the "US situation" given that the US is suing Apple for having a monopoly (literally the headline of the article)? Sounds like the rest of the world.

Can I ask why the rest of the world, particularly the EU, which is supposedly so "pro-consumer", isn't breaking up these monopolies held by billion dollar corporations in their countries?

1. The monopolies literally make no money - WhatsApp is run at cost and doesn't turn a profit.

2. You are not gonna have universal phone-number based messaging that is E2EE without a monopoly. Even RCS has monopolistic gateways. Decentralized/federated systems suck and don't easily work with phone numbers.

3. If you keep breaking up chat applications as soon as they reach a certain size, you're not helping consumers in any way. People use WhatsApp because it's good, reliable, and E2EE. Breaking it up provides literally no value to consumers.

There are differences between monopoly and centralization, and usually the government steps in to resolve such distinctions as a party that is (theoretically) serving the people instead of profis. That's what SMS was supposed to do and why they invested billions on landlines to support it.

But government most like molasses and sms is decades behind, so tech surpassed such standards. It's not a preferred result but an inevitable one.

>Can I ask why the rest of the world, particularly the EU, which is supposedly so "pro-consumer", isn't breaking up these monopolies held by billion dollar corporations in their countries

Is this rhetorical or have you not in fact heard about the DMA more or less doing the same thing the US is doing here, but years prior?

The big obvious problem here is that an EU country can't just order a US company to disband. And the result of anti-trust to begin with isn't to destroy companies, they want to level the playing field and open the door for more companies to compete properly.

I hope WhatsApp is the past and RCS is the future.

Insane to me the amount of WhatsApp evangelism I read on this site. Sure, let's trade international protocols for Zuckerware. What could go wrong?

SMS/RCS are flawed but can be improved. Advocating instead for Meta-produced software is irresponsible and reckless IMO.

RCS does not support any end to end encryption. Yes you can send end to end encrypted messages over it, same as over SMS, but it's not part of the protocol. I don't hope RCS is the future, I don't want my ISP or any intermediate party to read my text messages, thank you.

I hope a protocol that has built in E2E encryption is the future. RCS is dead on arrival without that.

It's a shame there isn't a standards body Apple is working in right now to address this.

See also: my penultimate sentence.

WhatsApp is literally built on the same protocol Signal uses. Signal engineers helped integrate it into WhatsApp.

Carriers are basically infinitely evil all the time. I'd much rather be at the mercy of a Silicon Valley company than an "open standard" that leaves anything up to the telecoms.

I never thought I'd defend ISPs... (especially since an ISP destroyed my credit "on accident" 10 years ago) but there is no comparison to Facebook.

ISP's list of evil acts: failing to update infrastructure, failing to protect against intrusions, general technical and customer service ineptitude, absolute fealty to state requests for information (both official and sometimes unofficial), hijacking web requests to inject ads, and adding surprise undisclosed fees on a seemingly-random basis.

Facebook's: Where to even start.

Burying internal research directly linking Instagram to teen suicides (including a majority of teens surveyed saying they wish Instagram didn't exist even though they use it 5+_hours a day).

Running nonconsensual psyop experiments on unsuspecting users and measuring their emotional responses like unpaid guinnea pigs (in fact, because of Facebook's revenue model, it was like users were paying Facebook for the privelege!)

Cambridge Analytica and the 2016 election.

Straight up lying about Facebook Video view numbers (overstated by 60-80%!) to fraudulently entice advertisers and content creators, then covering up the lie for over a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video#Facebook_metric...

It's like comparing a molotov cocktail to a dirty bomb. Yes, both are evil and bad, but we can tell there's a difference there, right?

---

To go beyond list wars, it's also just a matter of scale. You can be a mini-Hitler but if you're in an empty room you're not going to do that much damage. If you're at the Superbowl, though...

The largest US ISP is Comcast at about 30,000,000 subscribers.

Facebook has 2,900,000,000 monthly active users.

The sheer scale is also the problem. Scale gives them unfathomable power and access. It should make every non-Meta shareholder uncomfortable IMO. If there were only one mega-monopoly-ISP for the whole of the US, I'd feel similarly uncomfortable. But that isn't the case, in fact more ISPs seem to be starting up recently.

Put another way: An evil act from an ISP would hurt X number of people. An evil act from Facebook would hurt X^5 people. And I believe Facebook's acts are in general more evil than an ISPs.

You left out the fact that ISP’s are effectively a monopoly in most regions of the US, which is a problem even if it happens to be a different company holding the monopoly per region.

Also, ISP’s have been caught brazenly selling raw realtime user location data which ends up in the hands of bounty hunters: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/t-mobile-sprint-...

This is far worse in my mind than anything related to FB and Cambridge Analytica. No, Facebook was not selling literal location pings to anyone.

Exactly my point. Everyone knows that "Facebook sells your data" but what's actually demonstrable is Facebook uses your data internally for ad targeting purposes, which I'm fine with. Verizon, AT&T, et al are at just as problematic a scale (if not more!) and they are literally out there exchanging CSVs for cash.

Supporting open standards and getting mad about Cambridge Analytica in the same breath is incoherent. The critique here, and the response that Facebook and other tech companies actually undertook to placate the outrage, was that the platform APIs were too generous, and users should not have been allowed to delegate their accounts’ privileges to third parties not vetted by the platforms.

> let's trade international protocols for Zuckerware. What could go wrong?

To be clear, you want to use "international protocols" that aren't even E2EE by default over WhatsApp, which is built on the Signal protocol with the help of Signal engineers?

To be clear, I am fine delaying my personal use of E2EE for several years as the GSMA and Apple work together on adding it to the spec.

If you are a political dissident or in a vulnerable position, I don't know your situation and my advice may not apply.

In the meantime, my texts have been unencrypted since I've owned my first phone. If continuing the status quo for 2-4 more years means that Meta does not become even more entrenched and powerful, so be it.

My emphasis on "international protocols" was to highlight how big an advantage that is when we're seeing countries including the US building up their own Great Firewalls and tightening export controls. If WhatsApp came from China we might be talking about banning that instead of (or in addition to) TikTok right now. Regardless of the merits, that's just the direction countries are moving in now.

It's a bit harder to just ban SMS. You can try, but it's a hell of a lot harder and there's going to be more holes to drive vulnerabilities through.

Man, giving up your privacy because you dislike a company is... some decision. You do you.

Traveling with family it’s been nice to use the WhatsApp but it’s ui is and the onboarding was so bad - took about 10 tries to get it working … I’m amazed how many people use it… but pretty hard to compete with 0 cost service…

This "Zuckerware" is powerful enough to defeat judges, governments. It works just like Signal, same end-to-end encryption implementation.

Network effects make the perfect solutions dead on arrival. It's pointless to complain. I'll just count my blessings instead: never in the history of humanity have so many people used something this secure to communicate with each other.

Except that non E2E chat archive backups are on by default

I didn't know this, and it blows a pretty big hole in arguing for WhatsApp as some kind of E2E paradise.

Yeah, a decent litmus test is if you sign into a service from a new device and without much effort all your chats/messages/history or whatever is there, the security is weak.

I got off WhatsApp years ago so I am not sure what's changed but back then if you signed on from any random browser, it was able to sync everything instantly and you'd see all your messages. This was after they claimed that it was E2E encrypted. What was explained to me at the time was that you share your encryption key with Facebook and hence the syncing.

Chat backups are end-to-end encrypted now. You're right that it wasn't encrypted for a long time though.

I'm not claiming it's the ideal solution. I'm claiming it's much better than lots of other things that came before. There's no point in having a perfect solution if the people I know don't use it. Everyone I know uses WhatsApp. It's a fact that life could be much worse than it is. They could be using SMS.

Most people with a phone have a phone number and can thus use SMS (literally the opposite of a "perfect solution," mind). I can't think of a bigger network effect than literally every person that owns a cellphone.

Maybe other countries should catch up to the US and make texting free.

> I'll just count my blessings instead: never in the history of humanity have so many people used something this secure to communicate with each other.

Alternatively, never in the history of humanity has so much of our core, private communications been captured by a single for-profit entity. An entity with a rich, recent history of serious moral failings (Cambridge Analytica, internal teen suicide studies, etc.)

Meta can and will molest WhatsApp to suit their needs. Be real careful with that auto-update. Call me Chicken Little but I would never have made a comment like this 10 years ago. Facebook's behavior is a matter of history now.

> RCS is the future

It's really not. It's a step up from SMS, but the real future is true end-to-end encrypted communications. Signal is the next step up, and then hopefully we'll eventually get really secure messaging where the core OS doesn't help leak out your information.

> > RCS is the future

> It's really not. It's a step up from SMS, but the real future is true end-to-end encrypted communications.

I thought this was a board filled with futurists? Can we really imagine no future scenario where the RCS spec gets E2EE?

At least Apple seems to think it's worth trying. And I think they'll succeed.

This kind of annoying defeatism is why SMS took so long to upgrade to RCS in the first place. "Eh it sucks right now and there's no use working together to make it better, lets just lock everyone into our own app and move on." If this mentality never changed we would not be enjoying RCS's benefits at all.

And to be clear, over 1 billion monthly active users are benefiting from RCS features _right now_ (and a good chunk of them are enjoying Google's proprietary E2EE). Look at a line chart of RCS adoption and tell me again it's not the future.

The reason it took so longe is because carriers are still involved with RCS, and carriers suck.

Every successful messaging protocol aside from SMS does so by routing around the carrier and sending messages over data. iMessage, WhatsApp, telegram, signal etc.

Yeah, although I do like RCS, for instance my network dragged their heals in updating to latest specs and was always broken and patchy at best, until they just gave up and handed all their RCS infrastructure over to Google to run directly. Networks are surprisingly bad at implimenting tech.

> I thought this was a board filled with futurists? Can we really imagine no future scenario where the RCS spec gets E2EE?

The quality of posts on this site notably declines when Apple needs to be defended. You get posts lacking intellectual curiosity abundant, seemingly not putting in the work to think critically about policy implications, what's best for the industry, or even how technologies work. You'd be forgiven for thinking you were on Reddit on these threads, as the typical respondent fails to read the other threads, fails to learn from each other, fails to be deep and thoughtful about their position, their arguments and the positions and arguments of their fellow chatters.

You see the same misconceptions and the same falsehoods long debunked on every previous thread discussing these matters regurgitated with confidence. And it's another struggle to try to educate on these issues.

Thanks for approaching this with curiosity and a desire to improve these standards, it's so unfortunate so many who would claim themselves technologists would embrace the status quo and ignore what's possible in the future.

Google implemented E2E four years ago. While they could have got started (and announced that they had gotten started) on the path to standardization of standard E2E on day one, it takes a lot of time for this stuff to be developed. It goes a lot faster though when Apple and Google work together, because the usual stakeholders (GSMA) are forced to move faster.

What Google's approach proves is that it is perfectly possible to layer E2E encryption on top of RCS in a way that does not require a carrier to add their own support, which is something I am sure Apple is interested in. For details on that here is Google's white paper: https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf

> I thought this was a board filled with futurists? Can we really imagine no future scenario where the RCS spec gets E2EE?

"Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Signal isn't a step up, because it centralizes communication.

(linearized) Matrix would be a step up.

Matrix is strongly persistent, thin client; Signal is ephemeral, thin server. They cannot replace each other.

It doesn't really matter, because you can replace SMS with linearized Matrix. Signal can't, because it's centralized

Signal the protocol can be and is implemented by third parties. Signal the platform, is different. Keep in mind Signal's only centralised part is thin server that acts as a relay. Matrix is a thin client protocol that relies on server to enforce soundness rules.

IDK what's your point. A encryption protocol isn't enough to replace SMS. Linearized Matrix is, and uses the Signal Protocol, though MLS probably would be a more future proof solution

Why is E2EE the argument people keep jumping to with RCS? The bigger problem is the reliance on carriers, that's far worse. Far fewer people are talking about that issue (thankfully there are some in the comments below, I've never seen anyone on Reddit mention it)

> Sure, let's trade international protocols for Zuckerware. What could go wrong?

Whatsapp uses the signal protocol, not sure why you would prefer RCS to that.

I have two questions about RCS.

First, the pricing model. Similar to SMS, RCS is a service provided by carrier. Many carriers include unlimited text messages in their phone plans, but not all carriers do that. And that's only for domestic messaging. When it comes to international communication, would carriers handle RCS like an instant messaging app or charge users per text message like SMS? That could be a huge number on the bill.

Second, the structure and server. Currently, most carriers have given up on making their own RCS infrastructure and let Google's Jibe run it. If iOS joins RCS, and RCS is implemented globally in the future, how would messages be transferred between different carriers, different cloud platforms, and different operating systems?

RCS is trash. No E2E by default should make mentioning it on a site like HN an instant dismissal. Secondly it's effectively owned by Google (or as good as) and it relies on the carriers (the same people who brought us SMS). Why people want to run headfirst into the arms of carrier+Google is beyond me, especially for a "standard" that is anything but and will undoubtedly wither on the vine. Carriers will not make any improvements (see SMS/MMS) and Google will probably lose interest when they turn their attention to their 10014124120412412th attempt at a chat app.

Oh I definitely agree with you that I hope WhatsApp is the past. I sure do hope for something open, not sure if RCS is the solution here though.

In any case, iMessage share the exact same issues and also adds the issue of locking you to a single platform, so at least WhatsApp solves one issue that iMessage has.

> WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram

These are not good options to have secure and private communication.

Signal and Threema should be the choices given.

Also Matrix.

It's interesting that two actually secure apps were missing from that list

What's wrong with WhatsApp end to end encryption?

Closed source means trust me bro

Read the small print. Your messages are encrypted, but you are syncing your entire contacts list (phone book) to FB/Meta.

Except for all the US people that keep in touch with Europeans! Source: me (a European) that has a GF in the US. They all get converted to WhatsApp :')

Could also say it was 'solved' 30 years ago with ICQ (OK, I know it was centralized and insecure, but from a strictly user-experience perspective I honestly liked it better than anything that came since) or maybe 35 years ago with IRC.

I miss ICQ, I still remember my number. It was my first instant messenger and even after MSN IM and Yahoo IM got big I still preferred chats on ICQ.

> I find it amusing that in 2024 people in the US still talk about WhatsApp as a future step.

One person said that. Almost nobody I know has any interest in WhatsApp. The infatuation with putting all of your messaging into Facebook's hands is a European thing. What I don't understand at all is why Europeans think Facebook is superior to Apple.

> With WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram etc. I think this is pretty much a solved problem in the rest of the world, really only the US is behind here.

I have a hard time believing that having multiple chat apps is any kind of solution to the problem. The nice thing about iMessage in the US is that it covers about 90% of everyone I talk to. Right out of the box, no asking what ecosystem someone else is using, it just works. And if I'm talking to someone who does not have iMessage ... it still just works, albeit with fewer features.

I heartily disagree that Europe or the rest of the world has a better system. Best would be if every phone from every manufacturer supported a modern protocol equivalent to iMessage or Google's proprietary RCS. Until then, iMessage in the US is the closest things to universal modern messaging.

>The nice thing about iMessage in the US is that it covers about 90% of everyone I talk to.

You are literally the caricature the OP is railing against.

"How gullible are Americans that they think Apple invented messaging?"

two posts down

"I'm not gonna use Europoor trash, only iMessage or bust"

I've been using the Internet since the 80s, I've seen every possible incarnation of instant messaging. I have no illusions of Apple inventing messaging.

And it's pretty rude of you to resort to namecalling just because you disagree.

I don’t know if iMessage makes for an antitrust claim. But you are absolutely right: it covers the majority of my friends and family, and for folks that use Android everything still works well enough.

Why would I ever want 6 messaging apps instead of using the default?

WhatsApp took off in a big way in Europe before it was acquired by Meta.

Android is more popular in Europe than in the US. WhatsApp provided an early way of easy cross platform communication that was superior to SMS/MMS and didn't involve having to share new usernames or anything like that, it just relied on your existing mobile number.

The rest of the world does WhatsApp, Australia/NZ/Southeast Asia/almost all of South America, it's massive.

As an Australian, is this true? Granted, I grew up rural in Victoria, but I don't know anyone who uses it.

It's definitely not true for Australia. WhatsApp use is marginal at best.

You can add India to the list. WhatsApp is so popular here that people talk of recharging WhatsApp when they actually mean paying their mobile internet bill.

Africa runs on WhatsApp (atleast, West Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Egypt, Tanzania...) IME.

> What I don't understand at all is why Europeans think Facebook is superior to Apple.

It is not facebook vs apple, it is cross-platform vs platform specific (if you do not have an iphone imessage is not even a choice).

Sure, I understand the point, but I just don't think it's any kind of better solution. It's different, and has pros and cons. I don't want to install multiple apps just to have cross-platform compatibility. And I have that already with Apple's solution -- sure, iMessage itself is not compatible with Android, but I can still message people on Android phones without pre-arranging a platform to communicate on. Messaging works regardless, no matter who I'm talking to, it just works a little bit better if they happen to be on an iPhone.

To me that's the ideal solution, or at least the basis for one. Would I like everyone to have iMessage capabilities (or equivalent, like Google's proprietary RCS)? You bet. Let's try for that reality. Get Google to release their upgrades to RCS so everyone can use it, make that a standard, make every phone OS support it.

Are people defending WhatsApp, or just saying its widely used? In the places I go, you use it for everything from contacting friends to messaging businesses to schedule appointments. It's unavoidable.

> it still just works, albeit with fewer features.

If it doesn't have features I rely on then I don't see how can I treat it as "it still just works".

> iMessage in the US is the closest things to universal modern messaging.

The key part here is "in the US". What if you want to message someone who is outside the US? To be honest I am not sure about carrier prices in the US, but I am sure the person on the other side of the conversation would get extremely high bills for international MMS messages. Personally I don't see how the words "universal solution" can apply to something that works well in only a single country in the entire world.

I can't speak for everything else, but LINE was not well known for privacy.

Everything people complain about WRT Meta was being done with impunity; their privacy policy basically said that they could read your messages and tailor ads based on them.

I really don't understand why people are crowing about using platforms like LINE and WhatsApp and sneering at Americans; they are not better.

I don’t think relying on Facebook for your entire countries messaging is considered “a solved problem”.

Relying on any one company is bad. But Facebook might be just about the worst.

It's a solved problem as in it's one single problem that is solved. I agree that WhatsApp is a really bad solution overall, just compared to iMessage it does solve the cross-platform issue.

I would also by far prefer a more open solution, but between relying on Apple for your country's messaging to relying on Facebook, at least by relying on Facebook you have one less issue.

> Where I'm from already 10+ years ago every single person you know would have a WhatsApp account.

It's the same with payment system. I hear that bank to bank transfer is still a big pain in the US and that check payment is prevalent there.

It's not really a "big" pain these days, but it was definitely a problem more annoying than it should have been for much longer than it needed to be. The main problem as you can guess, is that US transfers are either fast and relatively expensive, or free/cheap and takes a few days.

Ofc in this case Musk "solves" this problem as Venmo is one of the most popular solutions, as a spinoff of Paypal. just what we needed, to turn our financial transfers into social media.

Zelle is a much better solution nearly identical to what a bank to bank transfer is, but it's not quite as prevalent.

What I find amusing is that all of those WhatsApp users don't know or don't care that they are uploading their entire list of contacts (with phone numbers) to Meta/Facebook and syncing it every day.

That "end-to-end encrypted" advertising has done its job, and most people don't want to be bothered with thinking too much anyway.

WhatsApp is a gold mine of real-world social graph data for Facebook/Meta. If you think for a moment how much you can infer by merging that data with other information you get from people using other FB apps and sites, it's incredible.

> With WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram etc. I think this is pretty much a solved problem in the rest of the world, really only the US is behind here.

I don't think this is accurate. In ANZ at least it's fairly uncommon, and I'd imagine there are a number of other similar countries. I would be surprised if the number isn't 100m+ first world users who don't fall into that bucket, not including the US.

> This creates a disdain for SMS, and anyone who uses it over iMessage. It is such a strong feeling, that having green messages makes you "uncool", especially in the younger crowd.

The thing is, I think it's perfectly fine, reasonable, and correct to have a disdain for SMS. The problem is that people transfer this disdain onto anyone they are "forced" to communicate with over SMS.

> I think the long-term sequalae of the blue-green message is to push people to use stand-alone apps...

Defaults matter. The friction to using iMessage on a brand-new iPhone is zero: it's right there, front and center, and doesn't require anyone to download anything new or confer with family and friends to figure out what the "right" other messaging platform is.

> ... like WhatsApp and FB Messenger

Oof, no thanks. I'd rather not be pushed toward using messaging apps owned by a company known to do shady things with user data. I've managed to get a few friends and group chats off those platforms and onto something else, but unfortunately there are still a few on them that I don't want to just cut ties with.

I find this whole debate over what is essentially the background color of chat messages to be rather silly.

iPhones implement SMS/MMS, which are both standards set forth by the GSM specification. That's the level of message exchange the underlying protocol offers. RCS is the "next gen" SMS, which is also being implemented. SMS/MMS/RCS does not support E2E encryption.

Apple then offers iMessage as a seperate service, on par with WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger, etc. It is literally just a messaging service running over the internet, using some form of identifier to identify you, which might be your phone number, like signal, or your email.

iMessage also offers proper E2E encryption, which is hit or miss with competitors. The challenge with E2E encryption is peer discovery. iMessage has made encryption easy, to the point that nobody thinks about it, but that's really what the blue bubble indicates, that your message is E2E encrypted.

There is literally no monopoly there other than Apple offering the superior tool. There is open communication with other phones, using SMS/MMS, which is the lowest common denominator when you're talking phones. That is literally the level of capability you can guarantee when talking over GSM.

> I find this whole debate over what is essentially the background color of chat messages to be rather silly.

Are you aware that it's actually so serious that Apple officially uses it in their marketing? They quite literally say "iMessages are blue. So you're not." and most notably: "SMS texters will be green with envy."

https://beast-of-traal.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/2022/01/i...

Any evidence of that image in context? It really doesnt look like it abides by Apples strict design standards, so unless proven otherwise Im inclined to think it is fake.

It's real. https://web.archive.org/web/20140708162715/http://www.apple....

Thankyou

Most ads target teenagers. Doesn’t mean 55 year old joe shmoe gives a damn.

So what ? Your reply doesn't make it about anything else than the color of the messages.

It's no different than WhatsApp creating an add saying "I give the same color chat bubbles to everybody".

It is essentially a dispute over people wanting iMessage because people delivers the superior tool. iMessage does nothing that any other messaging client doesn't already do, but with fewer users.

You cannot separate SMS messages from iMessages (to my knowledge)

I have only had an iphone for a few months, and I haven’t tried it yet, but when I enabled imessage I had the option of using an email address instead of my phone number. and From an android users perspective texting an iphone user is terrible, because they are incapable of sending quality photos, i suspect they just default to over compression for mms

…on a side note, the overall iphone experience is not great, everything just feels like it is trying to stop me from doing what i want. Not that android was all that better, but I definitely felt a bit more free with even simple things like how copy/paste works.

I’m actually thinking I will switch after my iPhone 8 packs it in. iPhone is now about extracting money not providing the best phone. Every app has an in app purchase. Let us have root to our iPhones so we can install open source projects.

It seems like DOJ might force Apple to make separate "SMS" and "iMessage" apps, and perhaps forbid preinstalling iMessage so users have to download it from the App Store when they get a new phone (giving it equal footing with its competitors). This would diffuse the claim that iOS is downgrading Android users within the same app.

I would prefer they just require Apple implement RCS (which they've already agreed to do), and -- crucially -- require feature parity with Android's RCS implementation. Which means standardizing Google's proprietary E2EE extension, and implementing that as well.

While I'd prefer being able to install a standalone Android iMessage app over the current situation, I really don't need or want another chat app.

The only open question (in my mind) is if Google's E2EE extension is intrinsically tied to Jibe. If it wasn't designed to eventually become part of the RCS standard, it could be real messy trying to open it up after the fact while remaining security.

Apple is adopting the Universal profile. If GSMA wants to add E2EE to that profile then they should. I believe that there was some talk of Apple working with GSMA to add or improve encryption on that profile. AFAIK rcs is licensed out to OEMs and so there are a number of different implementations around. In my opinion it would be better for all if there was a secure standard in place - for all to adopt - instead of hoping that everyone works with google to try to get googles proprietary implementation working.

I’m sure RCS messages would stay green though, so it’s less than clear that your proposal addresses the alleged social lock-in.

I'm sure the next major antitrust lawsuit will focus on the set of supported emojis.

End result - Apple is forced to do whatever Google wants.

I find it hard to imagine a company - that cares about its own future - would agree that they are required to implement things that their _competitor_ decides.

That scenario will just hand over the monopoly keys to Google, and we're back to square one.

Square one is Apple preventing users to communicate with android, to leverage phone sales.

Square two would be having an iMessage for Android, or at least not preventing someone else to do it. (Hello, Beeper?)

Square three would be to interact with other chat applications across platforms. iMessage to and from Signal, wechat, telegram, etc.

> I would prefer they just require Apple implement RCS

I would prefer the US Government not dictate to private companies what protocols they have to use. That would be a preposterous overreach.

The DOJ can’t really force Apple to do anything here without a consent decree, and with the case they just filed I’ll be surprised if they even get that much. Although, who knows, maybe a New Jersey district court will be a friendlier jurisdiction for this spaghetti case.

So in order to protect users from a beneficial service they like, the DOJ would force Apple to gut the user experience?

I hope the UX changes are limited to that extent, yes. I’m concerned about another cookie banner unintended consequences situation.

Man that would so awesome. The lack of control over what I'm actually sending the message on is annoying as hell on iPhone's. I want to explictly send and receive SMSes at points.

Possibly split Messages and SMS in to distinct apps.

Have the latter handle SMS/MMS/RCS with options (in its settings area) to enable/disable each of the three, such that any or all of them may be individually allowed (or not).

Then also have an additional pair of options in the SMS app to indicate which other message app can operate as a proxy. Said proxy being able to send or receive SMS/MMS/RCS as appropriate. Possibly have the default set to Messages, but allow it to be set to any other app which has opted in.

Remove all of the SMS/MMS options from Messages, except the 'Send as SMS', which would then try to do the existing fall back when there is no data service.

The default behaviour would be as now. Disabling the 'Send as SMS' option would keep Messages and SMS as two distinct services, and one could then run the that way. Further flipping the config in SMS would allow any other app to be the preferred primary contact point.

I'm not sure how one would handle 'Group Chats' in such a situation.

With such a situation, I'd split the two and operate as distinct systems, iMessages in its own app, SMS/MMS/RCS in the SMS app, all other message facilities confined to their own playpen.

I know some relatives who would prefer to keep the proposed defaults such that everything appears in the Messages app.

The annoying thing about any other messaging service except SMS is that if you're out in BFE, as long as you can ping a tower, you can get a message out ... or in.

> that person will limit the messaging functionality

Don't have an iPhone -- what functionality do they limit?

- reacting to messages/replying to messages

- sending messages over data (obviously)

questions: "reacting to messages"

it's most similar to upvoting, but with more emoji. So imagine if HN had an upvote on IOS, but instead on android it left a full message saying

>__MatrixMan__ reacted to this comment with "Upvote"

Much clunkier. his was fixed with RCS, fortunately, but that was the norm for some decade or so when talking with iPhones.

Oh, do iPhone users also see those messages when an android user is in the chat?

I had assumed that reactions worked fine for them and they were unaware that their iPhone was making them look like a bit of a buffoon to the rest of us.

It falls back to plain ol SMS/MMS. So any features newer than 2008 or so.

The main thing I miss about having an iPhone is the ability to send full resolution pictures and videos over iMessage. In practice, SMS and MMS are seriously limited in the size of files they can send.

Do you not have Android with RCS?

That won't do anything for Android-to-iPhone messages until Apple implements RCS. Almost all of my friends use iPhones.

As an aside: I actually don't have RCS on my Android phone because I run LineageOS without any Google apps, and apparently Google hasn't added an API for RCS, so there are no open source alternatives to the Google Messages app if you want support for it. (Please, correct me if I'm wrong!)

I think RCS is up to your carrier if you're de-Googled.

You don't really need an OS API for RCS like you need for SMS/MMS, as RCS works over IP network. If you want/need to use USIM based authentication, you need a system privilege, so that you can talk to the SIM card.

Someone has written an open source RCS prototype app, but it is only for carrier-provided RCS and I don't know if anyone has even attempted to use it with Google's servers:

https://github.com/Hirohumi/RustyRcs

The person not using iMessage doesn't limit anything, in most cases, now that RCS is a thing on most Androids. Apple is the one that breaks the experience for everyone and then implies it was the non-iMessage user.

> This creates a disdain for SMS, and anyone who uses it over iMessage. It is such a strong feeling, that having green messages makes you "uncool", especially in the younger crowd.

When iMessage was introduced it was at a time SMS and MMS incurred extra charges, or, at best, came out of a fixed monthly allowance.

Making the user aware of whether they were using SMS/MMS or iMessage was actually a technically important feature, not a way to shame Android users.

emphasis on "was". but we're much farther away from those times than we are to when sms more or less became unlimited on every major network.

Is there any reason to change the colours now?

Yes, because kids are literally getting bullied because of it.

How about when you send a video or photos between iPhone and android the quality is abysmal. That is apples doing.

I’d also add that because the carriers SMS is so terrible it was easy for Apple…

My guess is even if iMessage bubbles were green, the sheer horribleness of SMS would still make communicating with Android a second class experience in a way everyone found frustrating. Sure RCS might make that better (I’m skeptical — standards support in the Android ecosystem is very inconsistent and varying in quality), but it’s a decade late. The basic argument is: Apple can’t make anything better for iPhone users until they can make it a standard for every mobile computing platform and competing service provider. About as absurd as it sounds.

>Sure RCS might make that better (I’m skeptical — standards support in the Android ecosystem is very inconsistent and varying in quality)

Maybe, but my old mom and her old Huawei phone works with zero problems with my brand new OnePlus and whatever mix of phones her friends have. All of them on RCS. The only one that has a problem is a friend with an iPhone that cannot receive images in the size everyone else shares them in. No-one here uses zuckerware - it is all SMS (IE. all RCS except for the few that likes old style Nokias so they get it as a SMS).

The blue background isn't lock-in -- it's branding and fashion. It's labeling the in-group and the out-group. The cool kids with their Nike shoes and the kids who got their shoes from Payless Shoe Store. The Abercrombie & Fitch wearing kids vs Costco or Walmart wearing kids.

The sooner it can be learned that a symbol on a shoe is ... kind of a silly status symbol, the better. Same with blue background or blue check mark.

I fear that's a losing battle. Forming cliques seems to be basic human behavior. It's not so much about the status symbol itself, as it's about being able to "other" people for whatever reason du jour.

This seems especially true for children, who lack the maturity to judge social interaction less superficially. Not saying adults are immune to this sort of thing, of course.

When iMessage was introduced it was at a time SMS and MMS incurred extra charges, or, at best, came out of a fixed monthly allowance.

Making the user aware of whether they were using SMS/MMS or iMessage was actually a technically important feature, not as a status symbol.

At the time most everyone was on verizon which gave free in network sms and mms regardless of your plan. Social pressure at least in my area was therefore huge to get on verizon in particular since it was more dominant. Then that stopped once everyone had unlimited texting from any carrier.

This strategy doesn't work in all the other more sophisticated markets, where WhatsApp/Telegram/FB Messenger/etc are the most popular communication apps.

Time and again seems to be US-only curiosity.

It's not artificial. SMS is terrible on its own, and that's none of Apple's fault. It's not like Android users are getting together and happily having SMS/RCS group chats.

> It's not artificial. SMS is terrible on its own, and that's none of Apple's fault. It's not like Android users are getting together and happily having SMS/RCS group chats.

What? RCS is a real thing that works between Android users. It is Apple's choice to not support (or contribute to it or improve the standard) it because it locks people in and creates a very cozy, very real in-group sentiment.

RCS doesn't work well in practice. Android group chats happen on WhatsApp, not on RCS.

RCS works pretty well and no, my Android group chats don't happen on WhatsApp.

What? Even my old mom uses RCS with zero problems. It is a solved problem and Apple is dragging their feet exactly because of this.

Does your old mom use RCS in large group chats?

Size isn't the issue, but she does use it yes. With friends scattered throughout Europe.

Size is an issue, because with more people in a chat, there's an exponentially higher chance that someone doesn't have RCS or has some issue with it.

I think the problem is uniformity in social groups. Everyone who has an iPhone gets iMessage and it's a seamless experience because it's the messaging app you have on the phone. Google was so poorly organized over its messaging solution that it couldn't push anything by default. Even if your social group is made up of a bunch of Android users, they all have the messaging app they want to use: WhatsApp, Hangouts, Telegram, Signal, etc. Very few people are willing to change because they have their own network of people who have decided on their preference.

RCS is a good idea (sort of), but it's too late. I suspect that Apple moving to Support RCS will make very little difference in terms of messaging solutions, when all is said and done.

>Very few people are willing to change because they have their own network of people who have decided on their preference.

This sounds radical, but: why can't people just use multiple apps? That was the whole marketing scheme for smartphones and yet we decide to corral back into the same little gates as 20 years ago. I have Whatsapp, Discord, regular messages, facebook messages, and probably 3 other stupid abandoned Senior Engineer Google promotion fodder on my phone. Hell, I'll answer of LinkedIn if you so incline. it's not like they don't all just flow onto my notification bar anyway.

And I guess since it's an inevitable question: I'm a 30YO single male. of course I don't have large friend group chats; We barely have friends that aren't busy with their SO's. on the one off per year we need to coordinate we'll pick and choose a platform.

People do use multiple apps, but everyone in a single group chat has to be using the same app.

SMS is inferior to imessage, and less secure, so color coding helps

> You cannot separate SMS messages from iMessages (to my knowledge)

You can message iCloud accounts without a phone number using only the email address

That’s not Apple’s doing. They introduced iMessage as a direct result of telecom companies charging customers for text messages a la carte. If DoJ has issues with those blue bubbles then they should’ve sued telecom back then. This entire suit is a joke.

The problem isn't the messaging service, the problem is the artificial hardware requirement in order to use it. Second would be the inability to make another app the primary/default once you have said hardware.

That’s not what antitrust is about. Functionally speaking, you would not be able to prove there’s economic harm. Apple’s share of smartphone does not even compare to MSFT’s share of PC back in 90/00s.

Anti-trust law has gone through a variety of interpretations over the long history of its existence, and I think your characterization of it is incorrect, even under today's recent interpretations.

This suit seems to follow the interpretation of: "it is bad if consumers are being harmed in some way". Having a monopoly position via market share is not a necessary condition for that to happen.

How were consumers harmed from iMessage? Apple doesn’t stop people from downloading Whatsapp and hundreds of other communication apps. The only semi-valid argument they have is the app store. And even that is 10-20% chance considering Apple’s market share. Even though this is DoJ, this is all a part of Lina Khan’s naive crusade against NATURAL monopolies. Just because she doesn’t understand economics and how the real world operates in 2024.

I am a consumer that was harmed just this week because I wasn't added to a group chat of only iPhone users because I have an Android device.

Doesn't really seem like a platform issue per se since your friends could have easily included you just fine, but chose not to.

No they couldn't. As soon as they add me, they can no longer remove or add people to a group chat.

It sounds like "I am a car enthusiast who was harmed this week because I wasn't invited to join a Ferrari owners' club since I drive a Lamborghini."

People excluding people is the problem. Not the product.

As soon as my friends add me, they can no longer remove or add people to a group chat? How is that not consumer harm?

Sounds like you need new colleagues. Why would you wish to be part of such a snobbish group? I fail to see why anti-trust law should be brought to bear on issues concerning teen fads. How about wearing the right kind of sneakers? Branded purses, handbags? Parkas? Should uniformity reign universal across all consumer products lest someone, somewhere be excluded to a faddish distinction?

It's not snobby. It's a recognition of the ridiculous walls that Apple puts up around their garden.

This is not one group. This is every single group of American iPhone users. Try to get off iMessenger if you want to see it for yourself.

No it isn't. Nearly all of my group chats are mixed iPhone/Android skewing towards iPhone. We use Facebook Messenger

Blame your friends, I am in plenty of mixed group chats to no issue.

As a European living in the US, I've found that it's nearly impossible to get on American's group chats without an iPhone. Hence I've had to shift my friend groups to be mostly other foreigners.

The Americans all say that to get in, you need an iPhone. So definitely a smart monopolistic strategy from Apple.

Remember everyone, your bubbles are green because you have an iPhone, not because the person you are texting has an Android.

Agree, but its also more importantly the (...) bubbles that people have become addicted to. Green doesnt show that.

So when you see (...) and then it goes away and comes back a bunch of times - peoples fear and anxieties project into that (...) -- and its that fear dopamine that people are addicted to wrt to gree/blue...

where people are annoyed at green when they basically send a UDP txt - whereas blue is a TCP txt, so to speak...

What I want to know is how there’s any legal basis to compel any business to implement and service specific, arbitrary software features. It would be one thing if there were a law that mandated a class of messaging apps interoperate on a certain standard if they use certain regulated communication networks. But “Apple messages must implement interoperability with Android messages” feels very hamfisted as an expression of that, and doesn’t strike me as legally defensible.

Sure it is. Anti-trust law gives the government (assuming they prevail in court) broad authority to require that a specific company take specific, tailored actions that the government believes will make it so the company can't abuse its market position to harm consumers anymore.

There's a long history of this, with Microsoft being a fairly recent, famous example.

I think you’re responding to a more basic question than I posed. I think I made it clear I understand the government can compel actions…

> that the government believes will make it so the company can't abuse its market position to harm consumers anymore

… and that I don’t believe “Apple must support Android messages” is that.

Since you mention Microsoft, I think it would be equally indefensible if the government had ordered “Microsoft must create a Windows Subsystem for Linux” as a remedy for their market abuse. Or a much closer analogy, “Microsoft must create a Windows Subsystem for Macintosh”.

I would find it much more compelling if the order were something like “Microsoft must maintain stable interfaces for Linux and/or Macintosh vendors to produce a functioning Windows Subsystem”. But it seems pretty absurd to me that the government could just mandate arbitrary labor on arbitrary products on behalf of their competitors.

In all of these arguments, I haven't heard about any harmed consumer yet. Half the things Apple is accused of actually benefit customers, at least in my opinion.

So you have not read anything about kids being bullied in schools for having green bubbles? And you don't think your Spotify subscription is more expensive than needed since Spotify has to give Apple 30% of their revenue (and Apple Music does not, what a fair competition)?

So the technology of a global company must be hobbled and regulated because of US parents being so foolish as to allow their teens access to age-inappropriate technology? Did I miss the "teen fads determine anti-trust results" section in the legal code?

I don't know, take the high road even if it costs something if you know your decision is causing the bullying? But no, greed wins.

Spotify doesn’t even let you buy Premium in the App on iOS anymore, it’s the same price for everyone. So no, it isn’t increasing prices since Spotify isn’t giving a 30% cut to Apple in the first place. As a consumer there’s literally no way for me to funnel money to Apple via Spotify. Spotify could choose to charge 30% more for an App Store IAP, but they’d rather be hostile to consumers and just offer nothing through that mechanism.

That's Apple being hostile to consumers, not Spotify. And the fact that Apple Music does offer subscriptions and doesn't need to pay 30% was appreciated in Europe with $2B just to make a point to Apple that they absolutely need to stop their BS.

So we’re just going to collectively agree to pretend that Spotify is more expensive due to a made up 30% cut they don’t actually pay?

I don't understand what you mean.

The complaint was that a Spotify subscription is more expensive due to Apple taking a 30% cut. Which they don’t do, because Spotify elected to not use IAP at all. I don’t understand this complaint either, since it’s fictional.

I don't have an iPhone, Spotify was just an example, where Apple is in direct competition with another app and abuse their position as the phone manufacturer to charge fees from their competitors that they don't charge from themselves. Do you think Spotify wouldn't like to be able to have the nice UX of IAP if that didn't cost XX% of revenue?

And in the past they used to allow, apparently their deal with Apple was 15%. Why should Apple earn 15% of all revenue on Music streaming for a service that isn't even their service.

You might be right, I still don't see Spotify being cheaper for Spotify customers if Apple let Spotify users sign up through their iOS app. What's the customer impact? The inconvenience of switching to a web browser for a one time transaction? There are tons of other reasons this happens all the time in other situations.

> I don't have an iPhone

Yeah, we all knew that. You and about 95% of the other complainers in this thread obviously don't know what you're talking about and keep getting exposed as bad faith actors. It's tiresome and only serves the opposite of what you intend. When someone sees claims like yours and then finds the first result on Google proving you're full of shit, they don't believe the next complaint about Apple that could be legit.

The same way we're agreeing that Spotify never took in-app payments and decided to withdraw it's payment processing from IOS for reasons unrelated to Apple, yes.

When I grew up you were bullied for wearing champion and not abercrombie. Look at how the overtone window has shifted now.

Was Abercrombie sued by the government over this?

> So you have not read anything about kids being bullied in schools for having green bubbles?

Have people tried parenting their children?

They don't even need to mandate anything. They need to neuter intellectual property, unambiguously legalize reverse engineering and circumvention, and make it illegal for corporations to retaliate against consumers who exercise those rights. Then all this stuff will happen on its own via adversarial interoperability.

Want to use a custom client to connect to some service? Want to bridge two rival networks? Such things should be our rights.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

This is much more reasonable IMO.

>unambiguously legalize reverse engineering and circumvention

That'll never happen. It basically opens the door for all kinds of malicious activity that can go unpunished. From Malware to distributing decryption mechanisms for sensitive information. It's pretty important for some of that stuff to be stopped at its root.

Not important enough. Computing freedom is more important. Computers should be free. We should be free. If the cost of that freedom is having to defend against malicious actors, so be it. I pay it gladly.

It's important enough to the people who actually have the power to change it. This wasn't my opinon, this is why it'll never happen with current driving forces. Stallman won't be kicking for that much longer, probably not long enough to argue this sort of angle.

There isn't, but the way anti-trust works it more or less says "You need to do X by Y date". That X usually nudges a path or least resistance towards iplementing and servicing a new feature (or undoing chokeholds on old features), but as we see with the DMA Apple can play with loopholes for months before getting with the program.

To your example (and excuse my lack of sound legalese), they wouldn't say "Apple must implement RCS", they would say "Apple must allow for an cross-compatible solution" or "Apple must document XYZ features keeping competitors from implementing a proper iMessage alternative".

god damn, just use whatsapp

> The blue background on messages sent between two iMessage users has to be one of the most brilliant vendor lock-in strategies. It is an artificial form of discrimination.

This is, always has been, and will always remain bullshit.

The problem isn't the blue vs green background. It would be the same if the backgrounds were purple and gold, red and gray, or just both blue.

The problem is the different capabilities between SMS and iMessage. And because those capabilities are different, it is useful and productive to communicate that in a clear, but unobtrusive way—like making their message bubbles different colors.

Apple doesn't control the featureset of SMS.

Well, sure, "green and blue background" is a proxy for "SMS capabilites and iMessage capabilities".

People aren't protesting the actual primary colors of green or blue.

And when iMessage was introduced it was at a time SMS and MMS incurred extra charges, or, at best, came out of a fixed monthly allowance.

Making the user aware of whether they were using SMS/MMS or iMessage was actually a technically important feature so the user could understand if/how they would be charged.

> Apple doesn't control the featureset of SMS.

Interoperability doesn't have to be through SMS. Apple could allow other developers to implement the iMessage protocol.

> Apple doesn't control the featureset of SMS.

If they control how SMS is received and displayed, they absolutely do control the featureset of SMS. On Android it's trivial to use different SMS apps, the receiver gets to decide how, if at all, they'll be separated.

Apple cannot add typing notifications, end-to-end encryption, and reaction support to SMS.

Apple does not control the featureset of SMS.

Technically not in general but practically yes on iOS since it's either just SMS, MMS or iMessage on iOS instead of also RCS. That's a constraint they enforce on the colloquial SMS experience, it's limited to whatever they decide it is, and they decide that it's strictly old tech.

Saying they don't control SMS is like saying they don't control HTTPS or access to the web. Sure they don't get dictate the protocol itself, but they do control practically the singular implementation of it on their platform, heavily influence what people can do with it, and also control the entire software stack underneath. My iPad 3 is functionally useless despite being just as capable as it ever was (not very) because although it can still run apps, I'm only allowed to run whatever happens to still be on the app store.

No, that...doesn't work.

Sure, if Apple wanted to, they could implement some kind of layer over SMS, using "hidden" characters sent with each message, that would let it act as if it has features like typing notifications and reactions. I'm...not 100% sure whether they could do the same with E2EE between iPhones, but let's say for the sake of argument they could.

That still doesn't change the situation between iPhones and Android phones. In fact, it makes it worse, because SMSes to Android phones would have all this garbage in them—but the main point is that Apple can't add any of that stuff to SMS between iPhones and non-iPhones.

Apple does not control the featureset of SMS.

> Sure, if Apple wanted to, they could implement some kind of layer over SMS

Seems like it would just be RCS, falling back to SMS, which would enable better interaction between Android and iOS.

And Apple has already committed to implementing RCS. However, I will be absolutely gobsmacked if RCS messages appearing in the Messages app show up with the same color as iMessage messages.

They will still be differentiated.

There will still be differences in featureset. (For one thing, Apple has, at least for now, said they will not be attempting to implement Google's fully proprietary E2EE extension for RCS.)

Some (shallow, petty) people will still use it as an excuse to shun other people.

And none of that will be because Apple is deliberately degrading the experience.

But they are deliberately restricting who can make SMS clients. Google also needs to open APIs for RCS as far as I know, but you can make an SMS client that acts as default. I used Signal for both at some point, no RCS but I could make a choice about how I want to interact with people over SMS.

> The main question I want addressed is: If SMS messages can be directly shown in iMessage, and are not secure, then the argument of not allowing "insecure" 3rd-parties to integrate with iMessage goes out the window. All I want is Android messages to be shown in iMessage. Sure we can make them green, but at least they will be sent over the data network and not SMS.

There’s the Messages app and the iMessage protocol — two different things. How would Apple allow messages from Android that are not SMS? That’s by adding RCS support, which is coming later this year. It still won’t have end to end encryption (like the iMessage protocol does) because Apple isn’t going to support (as of now) the proprietary and closed extensions Google has developed for RCS. Any Android message that comes over the data network will have to have some sort of encryption. Otherwise SMS is just fine, as it is today.

> How would Apple allow messages from Android that are not SMS?

Quite easily: by releasing a standalone iMessage app on Android. The Beeper folks have shown this of course can be done (even if Apple doesn't like it and blocks them).

Doing this would certainly be orders of magnitude easier than implementing RCS. It's quite telling that Apple still wants to maintain iMessage as iOS-only. And if Apple doesn't work with Google to implement the E2EE extension (assuming Google is reasonable about it), that tells us all we need to know (and should have already known): Apple doesn't actually care about their users and user privacy. They just care about their market position and "prestige", and want to maintain these silly "class divisions".

> The Beeper folks have shown this of course can be done (even if Apple doesn't like it and blocks them).

They hacked together a solution that “quite easily” exposed your private comms to them..

> It's quite telling that Apple still wants to maintain iMessage as iOS-only.

Also iMessage also works on macs and ipads, Apple Watches, and maybe Vision Pro (haven’t looked)

> And if Apple doesn't work with Google to implement the E2EE extension (assuming Google is reasonable about it), that tells us all we need to know

Apple is implementing the Universal profile. Instead of forcing companies to rely on google, GSMA can improve that profile.

> They hacked together a solution that “quite easily” exposed your private comms to them..

Beeper Cloud did (does?), but Beeper Mini did not! It was all on device, nothing was relayed through Beeper's servers.

>It still won’t have end to end encryption (like the iMessage protocol does)

If Apple can access it in any way (which they can) then it is not real E2EE.

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