Grustaf

It’s not Stockholm syndrome, you incorrectly assume that every iPhone owner is some kind of mini Stallman. Most people really don’t care about all this stuff, they just want a product that works well, with minimum fuss. They don’t care about third party appstores. Sideloading, open sourcing imessage and all this linux hacker stuff.

Even if they did, Apple doesn’t care about that. If they wanted an Android client they’d make one, not allow some random company to do it.

Sure, but I reacted to the idea that some people were not “allowed”.

From a philosophical or practical standpoint? For me personally, I don’t care at all, i have no philosophical objections to companies running their own, closed chat apps. There are no hurdles for new entrants.

And practically speaking, it’s a very small inconvenience to have to switch app when chatting to some friends. It even has some benefits, each of the apps will have fewer conversations to keep track of.

If they have the same combined population, then it’s not misleading. There are no other first world countries with 300 million people, so it’s pretty obvious that the comparison is with the combined 6 countries.

Why aren’t they allowed to become doctors?

I'm not making an argument, I just found it humorous to say that a company had a monopoly on one of their own products. Not a category, but a specific product. The whole idea is just absurd.

> Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky [...] spoke out against Apple's iMessage monopoly

I hope he will also speak out against Signal's Signal Monopoly, and Facebooks Whatsapp monopoly

That rule would probably then apply to all message apps

They do charge for iCloud, they charge the person that put the photos there.

Because half the population have an iPhone, a tiny fraction have macs, and the overlap between mac and iphone owners is probably very large - if you like the mac you probably like the iphone. And there are benefits to getting both from the same ecosystem of course.

Which illegal barrier are you talking about? The App Store may be illegal, but on what grounds would there be anything illegal about preventing other companies from using your servers?

And note that they are not even discouraging third-party chat apps, on the contrary, they actively promote the likes of whatsapp, signal, telegram etc.

The difference between being able to send unlimited messages for free, and having to get a new phone every hundred or so texts is pretty large. Free vs 1 dollar per spam text.

In the upper middle class in Copenhagen it’s more than that, seeing an android phone is very rare.

Even in the metro you can go days without seeing one.

It’s not just about market share. In Scandinavia about 90% of middle class people use iphones, but this whole blue-green bubble nonsense is a total non-issue. We have group chats in whatsapp, fb messages or sms, nobody cares.

I have never received a single spam message through iMessage, but regardless. If they have to keep buying new phones all the time as they get blacklisted, in order to keep spamming, the economics of spamming changes.

I think the main thing with all the cringeworthy talk about green bubbles is about android being perceived as less glamorous - on average android users have less money, and/or are ideologically motivated - like some linux users.

In a word, android would be considered just as uncool even if they had access to imessage.

Beeper should care about their investors, since they are using their money. I think they raised something like 15m.

Weird thing to comment on, especially as it definitely is an example of something that a company may be focused on, rather than making a profit.

> Since I have no control over iMessage, I would not consider it safe.

I would trust iMessage about 95% less if I had written, or even implemented, the protocols myself, and I consider myself a pretty good developer.

If you don't want to communicate with other Apple owners over iMessage, then there is no issue.

What Beeper set out to do was to solve the opposite problem, people who don't have Apple devices, but want to use iMessage.

And the poster above did have an Apple device, and wanted to use iMessage, but didn't seem to realise that iMessage works on Macs too.

> Security isn't about Apple knowing if an app is spying on users

Clearly, what matters to Apple is what _they_ believe is secure, and they of course trust themselves more than they trust Beeper.

> At best a third party iMessage client can only be as secure as iMessage itself

Exactly, they can never be safer, and given that Apple, or we as users, know very little about the company behind the client, third-party clients are much less secure.

How would third-party clients _increase_ security (other than indirectly, by people using SMS less)? On the contrary, third-party clients is a gigantic security hole, since Apple can't even know if a client app is spying on users.

Sure, that's fair. But if he knows that, why spend the time to build this app in the first place? Is it a marketing play? It did buy them a whole lot of attention.

As pointed out below, "they" is Apple, but I would also assume that at least 99.9% (really) of users would trust Apple more than Beeper, i they had to choose.

It's a pretty indirect gap, since it has nothing to do with Apple's infrastructure, it's about users choosing to interact with users of non-Apple platforms using insecure means. There are dozens of secure cross-platform messenger apps that they could be using, and SMS is a legacy technology.

> "if Apple truly cares about the privacy and security of their own iPhone users, why would they stop a service that enables their own users to now send encrypted messages to Android users, rather than using unsecure SMS?" - Eric Migicovsky

1. If Apple sees this as a gap, it is very obvious that they would address that themselves, rather than by allowing a hack to exploit loopholes in their architecture

2. Since Apple has no control over the Beeper mini client, they would not consider it safe, it could easily be spying on users without their knowledge.

In Japan the percentage is very low, but you can still have all the foreign food you want. Most foreigners in any country are doing other things than running restaurants, so it's pretty orthogonal.

Video cameras in unmanned libraries definitely don't exist in order to spy on people. I can assure you that whatever its other faults, the municipality of Copenhagen is not interested in spying on readers.

The food is also very safe in Switzerland