AirBnB isn't opening up their platform to Expedia. Meta isn't allowing your Instagram data to be accessed by another platform. Your own company isn't voluntarily making it easier for its customers to leave.
In what universe do you exist where SMS was removed?
There would be nothing wrong with that if Apple wasn't equally as miserly with that power as the carriers they want to valiantly protest against. I'm no fan of cell carriers either, but now that we see Apple's end-goal I don't think their cause is righteous at all. In the friendliest of interpretations, they are a competing alternative enabled by disproportionate first-party integration on Apple's behalf. It doesn't take long to extrapolate their motives for deliberately neglecting cross-platform interoperability to bolster their market presence.
If it harms the market, prevents fair competition, and doesn't benefit the general public, there is no rational reason to let iMessage persist the way it is today.
I can absolutely install other messaging apps (WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, etc.) on my iPhone and contact other people on an Android device using that app. The thing that keeps me from doing so isn't the fact that said applications are locked out of a decent percentage of the phone market, but that the network effect helps Apple. Most of my friends don't know, or care to know, what Signal is, even though it's a better application re: privacy than iMessage.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...
Which, to me, demonstrates the core problem: Apple succeeded by remaining focused. Google failed because it has some form of institutional ADHD when it comes to messaging services. Google even had a six year head start on Apple with Google Talk, and still managed to fail because they couldn't remain focused.
People are upset that Apple succeeded, but they aren't even running the most popular messaging service out there.
In NA, Messages is the true source of Apple’s power and the key to their evil anticompetitive empire, the only ones who can stop their masterplan are the men in suits from the DOJ.
Outside of NA, it’s the app you use to get TOTP codes and phishing attempts.
You’re right that the real story isn’t that Google missed out competing with iMessage, it’s that they missed out competing with WhatsApp despite having control over the OS and being able to bundle their own messaging app!
Google is not even competitive with third tier apps such as Viber which is really funny. I read HN compulsively yet I don’t know what the name of Google’s current chat app is or even if they have one.
It's a mistake to assume that Google wants to pick a fight with carriers just because Apple does. Their goal isn't to replace SMS or use it as an obtuse marketing stunt, and whether or not that's the right or wrong decision is a hilariously irrelevant distraction to the actual problem. SMS sucks, and replacing it is either a community effort or a regulated one. Apple chose "regulated" a long, long time ago by making an insular service their replacement candidate.
WhatsApp too is a problem in it's own right; but again, it's a strawman when we're discussing Apple's specific damages (which neither Google nor Meta copy in-full). Apple uniquely uses their vertical integration to create a less competitive environment for third-parties, which is damned for scrutiny everywhere they try it. There is no reality where Google announces that WhatsApp comes preinstalled in the messaging app without immediate and legitimate antitrust bundling accusations.
It is a wild projection, a common one amongst members of this esteemed congregation.
Removing SMS supports invalidates and revokes the 3G/4G/5G network compliance with standards and certification, whether you are Apple or an invisible fifth column. It also voids the right to display the very same 3G/4G/5G sign in the upper part of the smartphone screen and opens a very expensive path to litigation from all sorts of patent holders from the 3/4/5G patent pool.
With that in mind (and how outrageously useless SMS is in 2024), I think you can absolutely accuse Apple's reluctance to standardize as extinguishing. Unless they correct course, iMessage's greatest contribution to text-messaging will be making it a proprietary affair. That would be the lamest way to go down in history, which is why I really hope Apple does the right thing and either a) commits to a better standard than RCS or b) extends iMessage to some more reasonable and open protocol.
SMS is the lowest common denominator across all mobile networks and is the ultimate fallback option for a smartphone if more modern messaging standards or extensions (RCS, iMessage or whatever) are not supported. Degrading SMS means losing 3/4/5G certification and losing the telecommunication authority certification in every single country around the world, consequently instantly losing sales. No sane company that is in the business of selling phones would dare to lose the certification on a global scale. SMS messaging has worked like a charm on iPhones, and I am not sure what the insinuation is all about.
GSMA, the governing body of 3/4/5/6G, has neither adopted nor endorsed RCS up to date, and it is supported at the core network layer only by a fraction of mobile operators across the world. SMS, being a 21st century rotary dial phone equivalent, is supported by every mobile network today however outdated it is. RCS is not.
The original spat over RCS, however, concerned a few sticking points:
1. Google becoming a gatekeeper and holding messages until they could be delivered to the recipient;
2. RCS not being end-to-end encrypted;
2½.Google providing a proprietory encryption protocol with no open source implementation and – *at first* – encryption only being available to P2P conversations (aka FaceBook Messenger style secret chats but not to group chats[0]);
3. Owing to (1), Google gaining the ability to track users via the use of metadata;
4. Only a limited number of Android handsets supporting RCS in the beginning.
As of May 2024, RCS is still not part of the GSMA portfolio of standards. From the mobile network perspective, it does not exist.
[0] Added later.
Doesn't benefit the public? Are happy iPhone users that rely on iMessage every day including it's SMS integration not benefited, or not the public?
It certainly doesn't need to be removed, just expanded. Apple can't have their cake and eat it too, you either replace SMS and the multiplatform commitments that come with it or you don't. Pretending to hold down a halfway-house to keep selling iPhones is not only a bundling tactic, but combined with Apple's negligence towards alternatives it's genuinely anticompetitive.
> Are happy iPhone users that rely on iMessage every day including it's SMS integration not benefited, or not the public?
...no, those are happy iPhone users. The public inherently means people that are not paying customers of Apple; regular citizens with no outstanding obligations to any corporation.
I don't understand how you could possibly interpret "the public" to mean "satisfied iPhone customers" in this situation.
You keep suggesting that Apple replaced SMS. They didn't. So per this new statement, they have no multi-platform commitments because they haven't done anything to warrant it.
In fact, I'd argue that iMessage has been one of the most successful implementations of EEE ever. Maybe only behind ActiveX and Microsoft's slow adoption of web standards in the late 90s - mid 00s (but MS never actually replaced HTML or JavaScript with its proprietary stuff).
Is it? Globally, iMessage is far from the most popular messaging application. If it's an attempt at EEE it's not a great one. IE was far more successful in degree and longevity of impact.
And no, they didn't. They just implemented CSS and other things exactly counter to the spec in a number of spots, along with other incompatibilities in order to make developers have to choose: 80% to 90% of the market, or conform to standards?
> That perfectly describes iMessage if we're to believe all the commentary on social media about how iPhone users get the "ick" from seeing a green bubble.
The only people who care about that their own messages on their own phones show up as green bubbles are children. The rest of the world doesn't give a shit. They see green bubbles because they use WhatsApp.
I basically already said it was second to IE. What else did MS do that was more successful than iMessage? There were definitely many attempts by Microsoft that were not as successful like Visual J++. They also had a similar strategy to iMessage with MSN Messenger embracing and extending AIM and they had a lot of success with that but most of that success came right before desktop messaging was superseded by mobile messaging.
> The only people who care about that their own messages on their own phones show up as green bubbles are children. The rest of the world doesn't give a shit. They see green bubbles because they use WhatsApp.
Thats just just not true in America. There are literally adult Android users that who post about how using Android is a barrier to their dating life because other adult iPhone users (which is the majority for certain age groups) will just simply refuse to date someone who doesn't use an iPhone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9FbOf3uewU
https://www.cnet.com/culture/iphone-or-android-your-phone-ch...
And countless reddit threads and twitter posts:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dating/comments/qsle1x/is_having_an...
https://www.reddit.com/r/dating_advice/comments/17n91aj/is_a...
https://twitter.com/ldollaz_/status/1783138659480289561
https://twitter.com/tweetsmoe/status/1783274758856925517
Some people even think the issue is Android:
https://twitter.com/EbonyJHilton_MD/status/13480303950157004...
I've also heard personal anecdotes from single men that I know who use Android (it definitely goes other way too but I know more single men personally than women).
I wish this current generation would learn what’s actually important to fight for. Green bubbles are not on the list.
I'm not sure if you're very familiar with the prevalence of texting (or Apple) in the 21st century but it stands to reason that this is a rather important thing to regulate. It certainly was worth regulating when Ma Bell tried monopolizing communication protocols 50 years ago.
So tell us; what is worth fighting over? I'd be tickled pink to hear what consumer harms you'd prioritize over something as supposedly-diminutive as Apple's actions.
Apples actions are not keeping people from living the one life they have. They are keeping people from having blue bubbles. Blue bubbles are not a necessity in life. Food, jobs, money, housing, these are all required.
Take that same energy and focus it on something that will let more people live instead of a nonissue. You are defocusing actual issues to solve a petty fight and force control. Stop.
If you continue to be blind, and focus nonissues, you are the problem.
> If you continue to be blind, and focus nonissues, you are the problem.
You are the one that has refused to furnish anything more important.
Also, somewhat obviously, food, jobs, money and housing are not distributed arbitrarily. Blue bubbles are.
It sounds like you're really upset over this whole thing, which is concerning once you consider how likely Apple is to lose their case here. Are you going to still be okay in the event that Apple is legislated for this behavior? Are you going to protest in the street against the DOJ for ignoring the real problems, like PB&J distribution at the local middle school?
I have said many times what is required for life and therefore what is important. You even acknowledged it in your next sentence.
> Also, somewhat obviously, food, jobs, money and housing are not distributed arbitrarily. Blue bubbles are.
Wrong. We are not communist. Food is purchased and people with more money purchase better quality food. Apple iPhones in fact are just as cheap as Android phones. It’s a users choice to choose one or the other.
> It sounds like you're really upset over this whole thing
Yes, because I’m a veteran that has been to war for this country and this is what your generation focuses on? Do you feel like you’re wasting peoples lives at all? Do you feel like you’re wasting the gift given to you by everybody that has died for you? Because you are.
> Are you going to protest in the street
Protesting is a waste of time. You know what works? Having politicians on speed dial and calling them daily. So no I will not be protesting anything much less this. What I will do instead is focus on making housing cheaper and fixing wages not keeping up with inflation.
Again, stop defocusing the work of many thousands of people. Use your energy on solving anything required for life. Or have people like me fight your efforts and force refocusing on actual issues.
Perhaps you should read HN less then. Along this line of thinking, any business adopting any open standard is a bad thing. Don't you think it's a very weird take?
All they did was put an optional message service in the same app.
One that isn’t even the most popular making it strange to say there is no competition.
They did a bit more than that. There were the glory days that if you ever left the Apple ecosystem, but iMessage ever had an awareness of your number, no other iMessage users could reach you until or unless you did some incantations that Apple didn't make obvious, ideally from an Apple device (that you may not own anymore), to allow your friends to keep sending you even green bubble messages?
I know multiple people who had to go to Apple stores to try to do this process.
So this isn't an exclusive Apple problem.
Embrace: include SMS
Extend: add iMessage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Extend: add ActiveX
Yeah, it is.
Maybe Ma Bell's success was in-part due to their free long-distance calls. It's kinda moot speculation when you look at their top-down business strategy though.
Running the IM equivalent of an open SMTP relay is a ghastly experience for users. You literally have to gatekeep because the alternative is going back to circa-2000 levels of spam.
Deep down you know exactly what would happen because we’ve all lived it with spam voice calls again recently - we’ve been trying to reach you about your car’s warranty…
Destroying a working, positive experience on the apple platform and dragging it down to 2000s level is the explicit goal for a lot of people. The pain is the point - not to bring android up but simply to tear things down and walk away.
The vast majority of spam is explicitly permitted by Google. What are you talking about? Do you not use e-mail? They have a Promotions tab, they could make spam - that is, marketing emails - go away in an afternoon, if they wanted to. They just don't, because those same companies are Google Ads customers.
Now, the spam argument for iMessage makes little sense IMO - you're still going to get the same message via SMS. However, with Apple in charge, there is a chance that there will be some kind of "report + temporal ban" feature. Carriers have no incentive to create such feature.
It is certainly not lmao - try sending mail to google from your own smtp server on your own doma
Seeing some spam occasionally doesn’t mean the vast majority isn’t being rej
> They have a Promotions tab, they could make spam - that is, marketing emails - go away in an afternoon, if they wanted to.
opting into newsletters is explicitly not spam, so either you don’t understand the basics of being on the internet or you’re arguing in bad faith.
Which is probably also implied by the “I saw a spam once therefore google runs an open SMTP relay” take honestly. You know that’s not true either. We both know you know. Why are you doing this?
again:
Google doesn’t provide your desired standard of openness either, in their own oligopolistic fiefs/gatekeeper domains like gmail. And everyone understand why it’s a bad idea. Forced open interop is an unworkable idea and forcing an unworkable idea on iMessage is the whole goal. Flooding iMessage with spam 2000s-style by forcing an “open relay” into the system is the whole point, whether you realize it or not.
Just like forcing “choice of browser” was never about giving users freedom either - but about wiping away the last counterbalance against chrome’s dominance/monopoly in the browser market. Hence the flood of shit like web integrity and adtech ever since.
C'mon. Signing up for a store to buy a thing doesn't grant permission to bother me with a newsletter, you very frequently just can't opt out until they've sent you something.
That's the "I'm not touching you" of compliance and spam-in-spirit should have a mudhole stomped into it--and yet does not.
"C'mon" indeed.
Anyway, I think what everyone wants is an email tab called “Personal and Transactional,” which would omit all emails of all other categories, including marketing or spam or whatever you want to call it. And even then, I find it so fucking annoying that my ISP and my bank sends me marketing emails via its transactional domains, obviously with the blessing of Google, because people mark those as spam and yet their domains are not blocked. Google already has the capability to do this easily, and chooses not to because email marketers are part of their customer ecosystem.
Maybe Apple should lead the charge on that, or instead they'll be forced to use something truly godawful like OMEMO or RCS. I'd prefer they didn't, but it would be pretty funny if they were forced down that path in the long-run. It takes a haughty spirit before the fall.
> Destroying a working, positive experience on the apple platform and dragging it down to 2000s level is the explicit goal for a lot of people.
A more believable motive than being one of the millions of non-Apple customers that are subject to using an inferior messaging standard? Apple made their bed by believing they could proprietate a public resource; now you've got to lie in it because you're their customer. Frankly I (and regulators) could care less what iMessage looks like once it's all done. It's apparently not our platform.
They could completely design the spec by themselves with all the pro-consumer features that one could imagine including things like distributed spam filtering and then force the carriers to adopt it either by using the stick (force adoption by X date or lose the iPhone) or the carrot (shift proprietary iMessage features to the new standard so that users demand the carrier adopt it -- basically green bubble any carrier that doesn't use the standard). No other company in the country could do this.
But of course, complete control over a proprietary iMessage protocol that they can lock competitors out of is apart of the business strategy.
I’d argue that a much more urgent matter is opening up “accounts” so that they can never lock and delete my online data without recourse. This is way more important than iMessage on Android, to which there are plenty of options already.
Apple can create whatever they want, but they're going to get the scrutiny they deserve. iMessage should be an on-ramp to better communications for everyone; instead it's become the flaming symbol of Apple's deliberate negligence. This is absolutely the point regulators should be stepping in and ensuring Apple isn't headed down an anti-consumer pathway that ensures market harm.
We would have never had iMessage, Whatsapp, Messenger, etc. Other countries would have far surpassed us in messaging communication tech.
Regulations are a double edged sword.
The web is what it is today because its open. The telephone network is what it is today because its interoperable. Imagine if the web was bifurcated based on the operating system you wanted to use (that was Microsoft's vision in the late 90s and early 00s: to create a large section of the web that required Windows). Imagine if a Verizon customer had a limited feature set when calling an AT&T customer (like the inability to leave a voicemail for instance). No one would tolerate these things. But yet people will argue in favor of this with messaging (as long as its Apple doing it)
It doesn't seem the same, but that's effectively also stifling to innovation.
For one thing, if the whole reason something like iMessage got created was to ensure an Apple monopoly, if they couldn't use it to do that, they just wouldn't build it, not build it open instead.
For another, what does "open and interoperable" even mean? There isn't necessarily a defined protocol for these things already. So who would come up with one? Almost certainly, the big companies would have to be involved, and they could steer the standard to benefit themselves, even just by making it closer to something they've already built (which makes total technical sense too - of course you want to base the protocol on existing tech!).
But that means that compliance is much harder for smaller companies, which would mean you're giving a huge advantage to a big player anyway.
As opposed to the no-regulation world, in which Whatsapp was a startup that could do whatever it wanted, and ended up being the default messaging platform that half the world uses.
2G/3G/4G/5g did not hinder the mobile industry it only fostered it .
Standard payment interface like UPI did not stop apps for payments being built , India didn’t need a Venmo or WeeChat to innovate here before standardization
Innovations happen despite or without regulations if there is market demand for it . FRAND patents exist for a reason.
I can’t think of any common example where interoperability killed innovation
A lot of email protocol communication has been replaced by private, non-open solutions such as Slack, forums, Whatsapp, etc.
There should be open and closed protocols. If you want to use an open one, then go ahead, If a closed one works better for you, then go ahead.
. . . and likewise did not require regulation for companies to be interested in adopting.
Also, SMS is the open protocol so we have at least one interoperable standard for people to choose from.
Of course in most cases like this it's actually been illegal for over a century.
(Or to take another example of the operate-blatantly-illegally-until-you-bribe-your-way-to-legalization and loss-lead-til-monopoly industry, it's almost like having the taxi market controlled by Uber and Lyft instead of myriad local cab companies is a bad thing)
(Or to bring it back to the point of the thread, it's almost like having the mobile phone app market controlled by Apple and Google is a bad thing)