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Comment by Philip-J-Fry | Hacker News Reader

This feels like something Apple should do with iPhones.

Find My and air tags was already a huge success because of the ubiquitous nature of iPhones.

Apple could add this to iPhone, sell it as privacy focussed. Let you message anyone in your iMessage contacts with a new bubble colour. Propagate over Bluetooth when you don't have internet.

I can see a snazzy Apple reveal for this showcasing it's use on a cruise ship, in a packed stadium, and then for the meme factor, 2 astronauts on a space walk. It writes itself.

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Unfortunately iPhones aren't ubiquitous outside their home market. It would have to be on Android to be really useful in the places this would be really useful, i.e. places where regimes turn off the internet when things go badly for them (current situation in the US notwithstanding). That's not to say iPhones shouldn't have it, I'm all for that.

Home market for iPhones is the whole world.

In India IOS has 4% of the market share of mobile devices whereas Android has 96%.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/india

Sure, that is still millions of devices. What about other countries?

Home market would imply one country, but given there are billions of iOS/Apple devices throughout the world, this is not really a valid argument to make.

I mean yeah technically you can buy them pretty much everywhere, but outside of the US there are very few countries where they're above 50% of market share. They're below 30% in the vast majority of countries actually

Idk that there's much of a privacy sell vs. messages being encrypted. In the end users are just trusting Apple to actually be securing messages; they aren't going to love that they are trusting dozens of strangers instead of telecoms. Plus, police etc. already snoop on phones by spoofing cell tower relays anyway.

> Showcasing it's use on a cruise ship, in a packed stadium

Stadiums will still max out the pipe out of the local area, so I suspect it wouldn't help much. Festivals and cruise ships, where you want to reach people who are nearby (and at a festival, you might even have a good idea via gps which peers are better) are in desperate need of this and idk why apple didnt solve it years ago.

The US, and likely Chinese, government(s) have too much potential leverage over Apple. I wouldn't trust that Apple would do this securely, or that the government would allow them to release it.

Apple just gonna disable it for China like any other privacy feature.

Wouldn’t that bring the wrath of mobile carriers around the world on their back?

If there is a decentralised system that doesn’t require infrastructure , what is left to monetise?

> what is left to monetise?

Low latency, high bandwidth

Apple/Google have the financial brawn to push a disrupting technology into more common use. And this is not encumbered by any restrictive licenses.

It really isnt a disrupting technoology. It doesnt work as soon as you are far away from any other humans with phones.

Range? Bandwidth? A solution like that would work only in limited circumstances. It’d be neat but no replacement for cellular.

Sure. But if you have a semi reliable way of getting messages to loved ones either through the distributed net completely or using a satellite hop somewhere, then you have captured a big chunk of what people really want. When you are at home you can just use your WiFi.

At least in my case, I’m just using messages on the road. Obviously it’s not going to be a solution for sparsely populated areas.

Seems extremely niche for a keynote but a lot of the Apple Watch Ultra features seem niche too. Who knows, I guess it could happen.

I doubt the equities analysts would appreciate this as much as a tech nerd would. It'd be seen as a step backwards and evidence of having no clue which way the world is heading.

This has absolutely nothing to do with privacy.

Then Google can copy it with a series of a dozen product launches and closures over the next decade.

Google BT Chat. Android B Chat. Google Relay.

And Microsoft can get on board, too. With Microsoft Teams Decentralised For School and Work.

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