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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

It’s a shame Phil Schiller has gotten sidelined. He always seemed like a good guy and a big part of the “soul” of Apple as it made its resurgence under Jobs after the NeXT merger.

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Agree with this. He originally was taking the opinion that they should make changes to the App Store rules from a position of strength before being forced into it. Schiller has always felt like the best embodiment of the Steve Era. I think they would have lost Tim Cook if he didn't get the CEO position, but Apple has been a little too focused on extracting as much value as possible during his time. They are still doing great stuff, but feel focused on the wrong things.

Phil Schiller was one of the strongest voices against cross-platform messaging interoperability. He's just as bad as the rest of them.

But isn’t that orthogonal to this topic? Being strong on not allowing or losing to competition from a business standpoint vs. advocating that it’s a good idea to follow the judicial directives without playing around?

He was an advocate for illegal anti-competitive business behavior.

How do I know it was probably illegal? Because Apple finally caved and implemented RCS once it started leaking through backchannels that a legal case was being built against them.

You can’t guarantee E2E across messaging networks. Apple still doesn’t do it, and neither does Signal, WhatsApp, Messenger, etc.

Sure you can. The services just need to agree protocols. The tech & cryptography part is not difficult these days. We've had guaranteed E2E for email since PGP in 1991, though not many people cared enough to use it.

None of the services you listed do it, but that's because they don't want to, not because it can't be done. It's a business decision problem, not a technical problem.

It's also a technical problem, the overall security model of these apps isn't just the E2E encryption, but e.g. Signal not saving attachments to local storage, message expiry (which inherently requires clients to cooperate).

> RCS update adds end-to-end encryption, Google and Apple confirm support

https://9to5google.com/2025/03/14/rcs-end-to-end-encryption-...

The parent is technically wrong, but he was right at the time the decision got made.

The parent is factually correct about the state of the world at time the decision was made but it is irrelevant trivia, given that Apple already supported SMS (an unencrypted protocol) and that they made a deliberate business decision to preserve the status quo of non-interoperability and their ability to falsely blame it on a dedication to encryption.

In what sense, that we literally didn't know how to do e2e across messaging networks? The Signal protocol existed in 2016 when Schiller argued against cross-platform (also PGP for 30+ years). Even granting that, offering iMessage on Android would satisfy most people and doesn't require operating across networks so any argument about feasibility rings very hollow.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406303/imessage-android...

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