As a user, I am totally fine with Apple restricting access to iMessage. In fact, now that I read this, I want them to do this, thanks Apple.
Yes, I don't want apps accessing my messages surreptitiously. Points there.
However, what's wrong with allowing another app to post messages to my messages?
If I don't want it, let me turn them off. Maybe, as a UI expert company, it's easy "block app from sending me messages" when I get a message. Seems like something that should be fairly transparent to the (potentially misbehaving) app.
I use a Garmin, and Android, and I use it for messages all the time, it's great. I can't imagine not taking them. It's easy for me to block stuff I don't want, could it be easier, maybe...
But my point is this isn't something unreasonable for a user to want.
As a general aside, it seems when I hear about Apple products anymore, they are locked down, unintuitive, and generally just unpleasant. I even tried an Apple device again recently...eugh.
Apple is only "nice" for a certain, narrow segment of the population.
> If I don't want it, let me turn them off.
Can you it off for anyone sending you messages too?
That's the issue; you not wanting to use it does not mean that spammers won't use it.
That's the problem. You can't have nice things if some people can use it to abuse the system; and there are a lot of people who will.
> But my point is this isn't something unreasonable for a user to want.
This ignores the reality which is that doing it in a way that gives a nice user experience without an enormously painful security issue is really non trivial.
Maybe it's OK to have the choice?
...
If you love your android phone, don't care about iOS, don't like iphones.... why do you care? I mean, why does it upset android users when they see this sort of thing for people using iphones?
It mystifies me. If you love you phone, and you think it's better, then use it.
Nothing lost right?
EDIT: example script to run from a mac terminal:
osascript -e 'tell application "Messages" to send "$message" to buddy "+12345678" of (1st service whose service type = iMessage)'Because it affects my life, and can be fatal even, thats why.
That's exactly what spammers would use to send spam.
If you 'opt-out' then it does not fix the problem of spammers having easier access to imessage.
I'll say that again: If you personally, either a) opt out, or b) dont have a watch at all, it makes no difference to spammers. They are not sending spam using your watch.
People are concerned about the result of allowing anyone to send messages in general.
...
The real argument to be made here is, as other people have pointed out, this isn't technically impossible; I mean, apple watch can do it right?
So there is a solution; but Apple isn't allowing other people to use it.
THAT is the issue here.
Pretending there is 'no issue' is flat out wrong. If that what you think, you're wrong and you haven't understood the problem.
The issue is why only Apple is, according to Apple, technically capable of implementing the controls required to do it in a secure manner.
That's a fair question to ask, and there really isn't a strong answer for it.
Certainly, making it easy for anyone to send messages would not be a solution. That would be stupid. That's why they haven't done that.
...but, you have to ask, is there really no certification process that would do the job? Really? None? Only Apple engineers are smart enough and diligent enough to do it without screwing it up? Hmmmmmmmmmm...
Imagine a world where they allow Pebble to go through certification process for it to get jailbroken half a year down the road opening the gateway to iMessage for all the spammers in the world. What then? Should Apple now play whac-a-moll with the spammers forever, or block the access to all Pebble watches creating another scandal? And what if this happens to next 10 different watch makers down the road?
They own Apple Watch and if it gets jailbroken its their mess to deal with, but if they open it to the world then they have zero control over it.
Apple doesn't get to be a major player in the market without playing fair.
If they further block it by default but allow Pebble users to bypass the block with some very scary warning message then My God there wouldn't be a scandal at all. People who know and accept the risks can use the thing they paid money for as they please then.
They might just as well beat you up and take your wallet.
I don't get this argument that Apple making it difficult for their paying customers to send and receive messages is somehow a good thing. It's also not like Apple is helpless, they managed to shut down Beeper.
If they are right next to you, there are many criminal activities more lucrative than sending an imessage...
...Which wouldn’t be possible anyway, because devices using ble to communicate typically require to be paired together by their owner.
Other options available to Apple instead of Lightning:
* stick with the iPod connector for longer
* switch to micro-USB
* never invent the iPod connector in favor of staying with Firewire or going to mini-USB and then switch to micro-USB or something else later anyway
None of these are better. I'm EXTREMELY glad they didn't switch to micro-USB. I had no shortage of mini-USB and then micro-USB devices and the micro-USB ports/cables are pretty much the worst I've ever dealt with.
If not for the lightning connector, we wouldn't have usb-c as we know it today.
Its also a stretch to claim apple doesn't like usb-c given how hard they've been pushing it on their laptops. In 2016, they started shipping laptops that only had usb-c ports - which worked around the chicken-and-egg problem we would have had otherwise. Dongle-gate was a real thing that annoyed a lot of people. But my desk is covered in usb-c peripherals - and that might not have happened if not for apple's "brave" choice.
Without that, USB might have died.
All in all, Lightning was a net benefit that overstayed its welcome by a few years. Even once USB-C was introduced a few years later, it took a few more years than that to become as pervasive as it did.
As noted in other comments, Apple was part of the USB working group, contributed to USB-C, and introduced USB-C/Thunderbolt-only laptops in 2016. There was backlash against this so they have since backtracked and reintroduced MagSafe and HDMI ports. Personally I would have preferred more USB-C/Thunderbolt ports.
For a hardware project I looked briefly at the MFi terms and they just don't make any sense. This is why any good lightning cable was always more expensive (at least before you get some from China with contraband auth chips)
Lightning is a major cash crab from Apple and revealed their actual playbook. Microsoft passed as a very bad players in the 90's but Apple is even worse. The only people not accepting that are deranged fans.
Tech stack has the customers. You pay for access to customers.
Some USB-C cables aren't data compliant. They just send power. There's all kinds of foibles with USB-C that have taken years to work on and this just isn't clear to tech folks, let alone non-tech consumers.
The Lightning port has never done this to me, the device just charges and that's it. It transfers files and that's it.
What I'm saying is that Apple didn't have to take a cut from every item sold by 3rd parties who wanted to use their specs. They could even have sold the spec at a fair price but instead they went on a full rent-seeking strategy.
This is why, when there is chatter about Qualcomm/Apple feud on licensing, I laugh my ass off because this is exactly the same behavior they impose on their partners. Can dish it out but can't take it. My complaint is mostly about the hypocrisy of Apple's behavior.
But the real motivator was making as much money as possible, the fact that their specifications had some desirable qualities is nice but not very relevant (since you don't get a choice if you wanted to make an iThing accessory anyway). Their previous port (30-pin) had the same problem and it was rather terrible. I had the first iPod with FW400 and they could have very well gone with mini-USB when they switched to their 30-pin to make it compatible with most PC who mostly had USB 2 and rarely FireWire. I used mini-USB for plenty of things from external hard-drive to digital cameras passing by digital mini-disc players and it was a fine port.
Yet they chose to make their completely proprietary 30-pin port, to rent-seek as much as possible on the accessory market. When they switched to Lightning, the goal was exactly the same, trying to pretend it's because it was better is disingenuous and very ignorant of Apple's history and behavior.
Plenty of corporations do things like that but the difference is that with Apple there is an army of zealots eating the bullcrap and justifying their behavior in a fanatical way.
Except all the profits from selling all those cables, connectors, and converters.
The 3rd party manufacturers didn't make profit because of Apple but because of their customers choosing their products.
The way you try to reverse the situation and try to pretend Apple is entitled to a percentage of revenue from other companies making things to work with their products is pure insanity.
Do you think the brand of your car should get a cut of every compatible thing you buy to use with it? Should they get a cut on brake pad, tires, cables to their entertainment system, carpet of the right size for the particular car, etc. The list can be almost infinite.
Do you realize how absurd what you are trying to defend is?
It is not just technically wrong to say “the iPhone doesn’t support a thing” when it the statement only applies to a fraction of the product line and actual user experience.
I will die on the hill that the Lightning plug is superior to the USB-C plug. Lightning could some day have supported USB-3.2+ speeds, if they'd chosen to work further on it.
Still, I have never once transferred data to my iPhone over a USB cable. I have used an iPhone since the first generation. For me, it has only ever been a means to charge the phone and to connect it to CarPlay. With wireless CarPlay and MagSafe charging, they could remove the port and I wouldn't miss it all that much (except for fast charging).
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/26/iphone-us...
Apple was already well under way on their USB-C transition. They literally shipped the first all-USB-C laptop in 2015. Not the first Apple laptop. The first laptop full stop. The iPad Pro switched to USB-C from Lightning in 2018. Every year since, fewer and fewer devices released with Lightning and more and more with USB-C.
If you need more evidence, literally just consider that Apple never bothered to invest further in Lightning. There were no further speed bumps. No updates in the USB protocol version supported. Even charging, USB-A to Lightning has been capped at a pitiful 12W. Does this seem like the behavior of a company that wants to stay on Lightning?
The iPhone would undoubtably have been USB-C in a generation or two even without the EU’s involvement.
yeah ok
This cannot be your actual stance.
You know there is a lot more to the Internet than that one website, right?
There are ads in algorithm apps like YouTube, tiktok, Instagram, mobile games, streaming service "poor" subscriptions, etc. And there are paywalls. But the vast majority of interesting websites don't have ads anymore.
Yeah you're an exception.
Thankfully people like you don't get to decide what EU rules as best for people.
So many people complaining about a really robust connector that solved real problems and has proven to be pretty reliable for 13 years. I'm no huge Apple fanboi, and I'm happy to have all their stuff use USB-C now, but the hate for Lightning is way inflated IMO.
Because they did that.
if the worst thing is someone else's code then someone else's hardware
Also relevant: 19 engineers from Apple worked on the USB-C connector and cable specification[1].
«None of the chargers fit snuggly into socket. The connectors are flimsy and get damaged easily. Just rolling up the charger and putting it in my pocket can cause the tip to break off»[0]
«While on the whole, I am satisfied with the switch to USB Micro, my only major gripe is the less obvious keying. Inserting the plug with good lighting is no problem (if you can see), but trying to plug in your cell phone after you've crawled into bed with the lights off can be a trial. As somebody who works with people with disabilities and medical conditions, I have heard from clients with compromised motor control, those with low vision, and those with distal neuropathies that they do experience a harder time plugging in their devices nowadays»[0]
[0] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/18552/why-wa...
Apple was also part of the working group that developed USB-C.
Over the years, third party cheap ones were risky. May damage port or device.
Has a stupid chip in the connector so people can't easily replicate it like a USB cable.
It was the purest example of proprietary capture in an age where the "The correct universal port" has been around for decades. The massive irony is not missed on me as they used USB mouses and keyboards to engineer a step backwards.
There's things I like about Apple, but I could never bring myself to defend the lightning cable.
They did move to USB-C, but the lightning connector was actually a great product, far superior in usability to the Micro-USB, Mini-USB, and whatever other nonsense standards that existed. When Apple wanted to move to USB-C people complained about them "changing standards all the time". There really isn't a move that pleases everyone and even when they do the "right" thing people still complain lol.
> App Store too, for all the good it does everyone in the EU
The Apple App Store is pretty great. There's a large, vocal minority of folks that want changes there, but they also aren't the ones that have to deal with grandma and grandpa doing crazy stuff. If you want another App Store just by an Android phone since that's a feature they offer. Kind of like if I wanted a phone with a larger megapixel camera or something I'd buy something else.
> If you want another App Store just by an Android phone since that's a feature they offer.
Sorry, this is bullshit. Alternative sources for installing software will always exist, even current iPhone users have to accept Cydia as an option. You don't ever have to leave the Apple App Store, but your preference has no right to enforce an artificial limitation onto other users. The Mac as a product would not exist without third-party software distribution, the iPhone is undeniably stifled by Apple's stance on the matter.
So... just buy an Android? This is not an artificial limitation, it's an express preference that the vast majority of iOS users have voted for.
> The Mac as a product would not exist without third-party software distribution
The Mac is a completely different product servicing a completely different set of needs. Nobody is asking for the iPhone to be able to run Node or Vim so they can do their work, they want to scroll Instagram and reply to their iMessage
But they're not, so I'm continue to assume they know what they're doing. Again, go buy an Android if that's what you want
USB-C development started in 2012 (I was not there!), but from wiki, the ever helpful source of truth: "The design for the USB-C connector was initially developed in 2012 by Intel, HP Inc., Microsoft, and the USB Implementers Forum. The Type-C Specification 1.0 was published by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) on August 11, 2014.[1] In July 2016, it was adopted by the IEC as "IEC 62680-1-3".[3]"
I not sure of the logic here, but Lightning solved a problem way before USB-C existed and I'm sure, led to support of USB-C standards such as reversible connectors etc...
Almost every Apple lighting cable in my household frayed...
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+Repair+a+Frayed+Apple+Li...
>Apple charging cables, such as the Lightning to USB Cable, are easily prone to fraying. Most commonly, this fraying occurs from device usage while charging.
Thanks Apple, for switching connectors on your mobile devices once in 25 years and enforcing standards on 3p peripheral and cable manufacturers, until a government forced you to change making me throw all my cables away.
This is not to say every aspect of their walled garden is good, but I’m more than happy to accept those problems in light of the benefits I personally value.
This is all to say: it’s not much of an argument to point out that one of their selling points is an aspect of their ecosystem! I don’t think you’ll get through to anyone who doesn’t already agree with you.
The Apple ios app store is positively chock full of spyware. You can’t download apps without a care in the world. This is why Apple put a privacy label on the apps (which is still woefully inadequate; it is self-reported).
> surely any "spyware" on the app store is going to include a ton of permissions alerts when it does anything?
Not really. Push notifications is enough. I can send you a push notification and get loads of details from your phone, including cross-app fingerprinting. Iirc Apple allows ~3 silent push notifications per hour so they can be completely hidden.
https://gizmodo.com/iphone-apps-can-harvest-data-from-notifi...
But really, your search is as good as mine. The entire digital economy is based on personal data collected from your devices, and yes, that includes the iPhone. How is this news? What’s your definition of spyware?
That's rich knowing that most of the money Apple gets from the Appstore is made from predatory casino-like games
You can have the walled garden, and also not restrict people's freedom — on Android I'm sure the number of people that use any other store than the play store or even side load apps are vanishingly small.
To even be able to do it you have to enable it deep in the settings. And even then, if a new app tries to install an apk you have to manually approve that app's ability to do that before reinitiating the entire process.
That's to say, the default experience is very wall gardened, and I do feel somewhat more protected when downloading something from the play store than not, and the vast majority of people will never leave the Google walled garden. But there exists a way to go around that walled garden when you need to, and that doesn't subtract from that walled garden mode in any way IMO.
I prefer the gatekeeper, in this case.
The App Store was an absolute revolution for mobile app developers. It is hard to overstate how much of an improvement it was over the status quo. People are complaining about Apple taking a 30% cut; it used to be that the operators took a 70% cut. Not for hosting an app store, no, just for sending the reverse-billing SMS message with the install link. You had to host it yourself, there was no store so you had to advertise your app to make it discoverable. You had to arrange (and pay for) a shortcode and SMS provider for every single country you wanted to sell in. You had to write and host code to handle the incoming message on the shortcode and respond with a RB-SMS.
Next to that, the SDK’s were absolute dogshit, phone manufacturers didn’t give a shit about apps and the phones themselves were riddled with bugs (with the notable exception of SonyEricsson, their J2ME environment was excellent). Symbian was a PITA to develop for, BlackBerry was actively developer-hostile (unless you happened to be a Fortune-500 company). Samsung phones were an absolute disaster, every single phone model had a unique set of bugs you had to find workarounds for.
So in comes Apple, they charge only 30% and for that you get a nice SDK, an App Store that distributes your app, makes it discoverable and handles payments worldwide with zero extra effort. We were thrilled when they announced it, and rightfully so.
Google then followed suit with the Play Store, effectively matching what Apple was doing.
So yeah, Apple deserves some thanks for what they did with the App Store.
Not in the PC world, back when the App Store was released I was paying 4% to my e-commerce provider.
I couldn’t care less about Apple’s case, but the fact that this is being touted as the EU’s biggest achievement in decades says a lot about why Europeans don’t like the EU.
Apple should be able to lock down their ecosystem as a default -- plenty of people will be happy to use that default experience.
But Apple should absolutely be prohibited from not allowing users the choice of unlocking their own device, for additional functionality, if they choose.
It's also glaringly obvious that many of the "freedoms" Apple affords its users (freedom from iMessage spam!) help drive its revenue...
Also, I'm pretty sure you can just set up a click farm to spam from iPhone right now, so there's also that.
I do think that the state of AppleScript automation is the result of trying to break the mechanisms that were being used to generate SPAM. Could you agree that automation capable interfaces do increase the chances of bad actors taking advantage? Right now, with a lack of information, I don't know how I could make an iMessage automation interface "safe by design".
I do see a direct path from the mandated AT&I breakup and interoperability rules to SIP / VOIP services and the resulting levels of Phone spam and caller-id fraud. This has cost a lot of people, life changing amounts of money and much wasted effort and time.
Un-nuanced tech laws or mandates have a terrible track record for having bad side effects. Those effects often never get addressed, which makes me wonder a bit about the original motivation of why the laws came to be in the first place.
I also see a narrative that company X will automatically refuse to work with company Y or community Z and are de-facto always acting in bad faith. Even if company X was never approached or asked - yeah, companies do tend to isolate themselves making direct communication very, very difficult. I cannot deny that there are some company X's that do seem to behave very poorly. A counter example, in my opinion, is the recent Bambu labs API issue. As a tinkerer, a few minutes of looking at how people had built interactions with their printers strongly suggested to me that Bambu introducing an actual API endpoint was a really, really sane thing for them to do. (I did comment this way). Only time will tell if Bambu was actually trying to improve things or was acting in bad faith.
Yea I mean this isnt really hard to understand. 99.9% of users would rather have no iMessage spam and also not be able to publish messages from their 3rd party watch. This works in Apple's favor revenue wise because people value having clean and familiar experiences, and dont feel like they are leaving anything behind
This example might be apples-and-oranges when it comes to the protecting Apple protecting iMessage, but they often rob the user of the choice that other manufacturers offer.
For example: Hotspot. Android hotspot can be perma-on. iPhone hotspot cannot. It will always switch itself off after some time of non-use. When I asked an Apple employee about this (This was not his dept), his understanding was that it was for not-clogging up Wifi at-scale, and for users who forget to turn it off. But what about the users who want it on always, who pay their cell provider for the biggest pacakge? My computer goes to sleep, and the hotspot turns off and I have to go manually switching it back on because "Apple knows better". I want those choices.
How can you not realize that you're being abused?
It would be one thing to acknowledge Apple's doing something bad here but still decide to use their products because you like their hardware. That would be a cost/benefit trade-off. But actually thanking them for the abuse itself? There's really, legitimately no better way that I can think of to characterize the situation than as Stockholm syndrome.
I do not want 3rd party hardware/software vendors to have unrestricted access to the messaging app on my phone that is the only option my bank and PayPal and a bunch of other critical services use for 2FA.
Especially not when the software they want to run is JavaScript, with all it's well known npm dependancy nightmares, _and_ from a founder and team that openly admit iPhones are a second class citizen in their development planning and resources.
And especially especially not when the founders have previously shown their colors when they rugpulled all their customers and effectively bricked all the devices they'd sold.
Even with the limited iMessage/SMS access they have now, I wonder how long it'll be before we see a supply chain attack against Pebble exploiting some 11th level deep npm dependancy on something dumb like leftpad.js, that exfiltrates SMS 2FA codes and first anybody knows about it will be when a bunch of CryptoBros start complaining about their exchange accounts being emptied...
As a Pebble user for a long time, I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about here. If you're talking about Fitbit halting services, I can't exactly blame the founder of Pebble for that. Can I blame him for the poor business decisions that led to needing to sell to Fitbit? I guess, but I'm not a business person nor a CEO and have no idea what transpired to lead up to that. But I'm reasonably sure it wasn't malice as you seem to imply.