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Comment by apetresc | Hacker News Reader

Legit curious what the use case would be, that would justify Apple adding it in. Like, when do you need to text someone who's within Bluetooth range but somehow has no WiFi or cell reception?

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When you're at a protest and the government shuts off the internet in response to the protest. It's happening right now in Togo, has been for ten days (https://pulse.internetsociety.org/en/shutdowns/).

My eyes are opened as to how much more power the people would have if cell phones were all mesh network devices, especially as we enter a world where having a working cell phone is easier than having running water or food.

I'm not holding my breath--it would seem that keeping the people down is more profitable.

But if it happens we'll have to figure out how to write partition tolerant apps, which I think would be a lot of fun. It would also make "going viral" so much more apt, as you might catch the content from people you got physically close to.

I dunno, that still sounds like a perfect use case for a third-party app like the one this post is about. I'm not sure government crackdowns are a core enough experience that it needs a first-party app from Apple.

They happen regularly in the USA and Europe now.

Government shutdowns of the internet happen "regularly" in the USA? Name one time.

This is admittedly a rare and minor use case, but maybe on a plane if you’re not sitting next to each other? Last time I flew I saw two teenage girls communicating by typing into the same note file and Airdropping it back and forth for hours - it struck me as very silly that there was no messaging interface that they could use instead.

when do you need to text someone who's within Bluetooth range but somehow has no WiFi or cell reception?

There's no cell service or wifi at my neighborhood movie theater. If I could send her a message when she's up, I could tell my wife to bring me back a box of Sno-caps.

When would you want to peer over third party networks while a direct connection is possible?

Maybe you want to have a local conversation about Winnie the Pooh?

Hiking, Airplane, stadia (here in India the tower capacity get exhausted), underground metro etc

Hiking? Probably not very useful since you must be within Bluetooth range and you can whisper to your chat partner.

If you're hiking in the remote area youre much better off with LoRaWAN or amateur radio transceivers anyway.

“Coded PHY” Bluetooth has a range of up to a kilometer! Once you add mesh forwarding, you could probably cover quite some distance on moderately busy hikes.

I dunno, I bet if it was widespread people could come up with applications. Like, telling people doesn’t necessarily leave a record, so you could talk about tomorrow’s plans and then send a summary text so everyone has a record and all the details.

On top of that “It would be so easy” is almost never true for a billion users network with all kinds of edge cases. Seems like a very narrow use case when there’s things missing from iMessage that could be way more appealing for a bigger group of users.

I’d agree if Airdrop, which includes offline identification via users’ address books, didn’t already exist. That seems to be by far the hardest part.

The technical details are often not the tricky part of new features. You have to integrate it into the existing app that people know and use, explain how it works, maintain it forever etc.

“With iOS xx, now you can message your loved ones even without any cell or Wi-Fi signal from up to a mile away! Simply make sure you already have an iMessage conversation with them started while you still have signal.”

When you're sufficiently outdoors with friends and/or family

This happens at festivals - despite being largely offline events, you still want to text your friends "hey I'm over at <place>", but the one rural cell that's usually empty for 362 days out of the year is getting DDoSed by 50000 people suddenly arriving one weekend.

Apple added support for this 10 years ago

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/multipeerconnectiv...

Airplane

and the reason they probably cite as why they don’t, children with no sim or wifi.

It would be trivial to be disabled by iParents

I use Berkanan for just this purpose. Sometimes my partner and I don’t sit next to each other, and it’s an easy way to message.

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