Grustaf

Shit or not, if new APIs require swift, it’s more of a practical question than an ideological one.

This is objectively false. It's first and foremost an app development language. In fact this is a common complaint, that Apple pushes too many features that are specific to app development and now SwiftUI.

Honest question: what exactly did you expect when adopting a brand new language? Apple were explicit that they would make breaking changes. Besides, would you rather be stuck with Swift 1 forever? It was pretty meagre in retrospect.

I started using Swift right away in 2014 and worked on several large projects written in Swift 2, 3, 4. Of the three or four large migrations I had to perform, the worst one still took less than a day - unless your Swift 4 project is enormous, you should be able to migrate it to Swift 5 before lunch time, the differences are really minimal.

Surely it's a good thing that a young language evolves, you can't improve without changing. And Apple were very clear about the fact that there would be breaking changes.

You can of course insist on using Objective C if you prefer it, but that closes the door to most of the new APIs that are being added by Apple, which seems like a very steep price to pay for the privilege of using a legacy language.

Isn't the fact that the platform vendor very clearly promotes Swift and makes most new APIs swift only a "practical reason"?

This is an interesting review about a great book. I was once holed up sick in the country side with no books left except Demons, and ended up reading it twice back to back.

It is in some ways one of the darkest of his books, and one particular passage was extremely painful to read.

I didn't love the book the first time around but it grew on me, maybe we should always read complex books several times to really appreciate them.

If you’re not a veteran wine drinker, which few adolescents are, then it takes real effort and dedication to get crazy drunk on wine. If you pass out it’s because you wanted to pass out.

With distilled spirits, and especially cocktails, it’s not at all hard to get dangerously drunk without intending to, so it’s a lot riskier.

Yes but you can’t fault Apple for people freely choosing to use one app over another, especially when they do nothing at all to discourage whatsapp and the other third party alternatives.

Whatsapp is universally available as far as I know. If people choose not to use a universally available, free and secure alternative, it would seem that universality is not the main driving factor.

Has anyone ever claimed that iMessage is some kind of open network that anyone can build apps for? I think most people presume it's just as closed as the rest of iCloud.

I don't know what the legal status of the protocol per se is, but I don't think anyone thought that you would be allowed to utilize Apple's iMessage servers for your own app.

I did ask for clarification, that's what the interrogation mark is for.

But it seems that your argument is exactly as subtle and indirect as I proposed. It’s not that Apple are stopping or even discouraging you from using third-party chat apps, it’s that your communication patterns makes using multiple apps slightly less convenient, hence you wish the first party one was more powerful.

It is quite amazing that you feel that they are “fucking with your social network” for not not making Messages more cross platform.

How exactly?

The point is that I don’t care about doing these things specifically over SMS. I send photos, voice memos etc over apps like whatsapp. It wouldn’t improve my life one iota to be able to do that with some legacy protocol.

I never once wished I was able to do that, the only application for that would be to communicate with android users that for some reason refuse to use whatsapp, fb messages, telegram or any of the numerous cross platform that do that. Why would anyone want to do this specifically using the sms protocol?

They have raised $16m, and I am very aware of who they are. I have talked extensively with both Eric and Brad. They are nice guys, but Beeper is definitely based on a delusion, Beeper Mini even more so.

Some people said it was 4D chess, a brilliant marketing ploy, but after 3-4 iterations I think we can all agree that was not the case. They genuinely believed that Beeper Mini would fly.

There is nothing sinister about being deluded, as a startup founder you might say it's a prerequisite. But nonetheless, they are.

So because of a combination of social pressure, app inertia and that people let their chat ups run up lots of unread notifications, there are situations where it's inconvenient for some people to use Android phones in groups with iPhone users? This seems like a pretty weak basis for indignation, let alone a lawsuit.

That’s great for you, but none of that contradicts the fact that he is deluded. And also, they are not doing it for free, they have taken in and burnt millions of dollars of investor money.

Sure, there are all kinds of people in the world, but would that group represent more or leas than 1% of users?

99% of people don’t care about what you call a “walled garden”. They have no more desire for that “freedom” than you yearn to install third-party firmware on your dishwasher.

Go up to a random stranger and ask how much it would be worth to them to be able to sideload apps or have a bash terminal on their iPhone. They wouldn’t even say “zero dollars”, they would just laugh.

I am a professional iOS developer and I also couldn’t possibly care less.

Sure, when it comes to things like pollution, or for Apple, child labour. But the broader industry is not harmed by Apple not releasing the Messages app for Android, that’s just silly.

That is simply objectively false. They can’t make the experience any better than it is. In a mixed group, they have to resort to the greatest common denominator which is SMS/MSM. They literally can’t do anything else.

So Americans hate the iMessage experience, but for some reason they refuse to use any of the numerous free alternatives? And that is Apple’s fault.

> and if they don't want their service to be accessible to third-party clients, they are more than welcome to just not build such a service

That is exactly what they did. Or rather didn’t. They haven’t sued beeper, or retaliated in any way. They merely blocked beeper from hacking into their network. It is crazy to think that beeper could sue them for that.

That’s the thing, nobody is forced to buy an iphone.

This only changes today. Until now they have used various workarounds to avoid this.

Yes, there is only the official app to send sms. Do you think anyone cares? Have you ever heard anyone yearn for a third party app to send texts?

Does their behaviour with beeper mini instill great confidence? Will you trust them with your credentials to all your chat apps?

Have you heard Eric talk about beeper? He genuinely believes that beeper is the future of message apps. He keeps saying that beeper is the only company that is completely focused on building a messaging app, and thats why they will win. He is simply deluded.

I’ve had iPhones for ten years and never once cared about RCS. Never even heard of it until recently, and I don’t think anyone I know has ever heard of it. It’s very very niche to care at all about it.

If you do don’t like mms, don’t use it, there are tons of alternatives. I have half a dozen chat apps.