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Comment by lbwtaylor | Hacker News Reader

>I like it. If I didn’t, I just wouldn’t buy Apple products. I’m not sure why that’s so hard for people.

Because Apple is so aggressive about lock-in that it excludes reasonable interaction between people with Apple and people without. The texting situation with pictures and videos is the most glaring example. You are not forced to purchase Apple products, except that you are.

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Pictures text just fine to non-Apple users. Videos don’t go through, but that’s because of a limitation of the text protocol (and Apple is finally providing support for the extended text format that allows videos to be sent via text)¹. Claiming that iMessage should be opened up is kind of like saying that you should be forced to allow people to park their cars on your front lawn. iMessage is a non-zero-cost service that Apple provides to add value to their products. You might as well insist that Apple allow people to install iOS on a non-Apple phone.

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1. I will criticize Apple for bad UI design in that if you text a video to a non-iMessage user, it silently fails rather than alerting the sender that the video can’t be sent.

Why do we have interoperable email but not interoperable text? Actually we do now, thanks to regulatory action forcing Apple.

Pictures going through MMS are horribly low-res though. Luckily IOS finally supports RCS now.

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