> I am concerned [that] iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.
We're an iPhone family, but damn is that lame. How about: make the best product. Don't coerce people into buying an iPhone.
It drives me crazy how fractured messaging has become. Here's a recent example. My non-technical aunt tried to send a group iMessage to my wife and me. For me, she used an email address tied to my iMessage account. But for my wife, she used her Google Voice #. Now what you need to understand is that iMessage allows you to associate one or more email addresses with your account, but only a single phone #, which has to be your carrier-assigned #.
So now she's trying to send an iMessage to my email address (which would have shown up in blue) and my wife's Google Voice # (which would have shown up in green).
Well, here's what apparently happened. iMessage handed this off as an MMS to Verizon. Verizon's MMS gateway sent me the message via email, as a text attachment. My wife got the message in the Google Voice app on her phone.
What an f'ing mess.
I've turned off "Send as SMS" and "MMS Messaging" on my iPhone so I don't make this same stupid mistake.
I'd use WhatsApp for everything, but, Facebook. (I tried Signal. I found it to be pretty sub-par for everyday messaging.)
Would you mind elaborating on why Signal was sub-par? I use it as my main messenger and find it to be fine. There have been issues where older clients couldn’t receive messages and needed to upgrade their phones to fix. And migrating to a new phone is fragile, but everyday messaging seems ok to me.
Edit: honestly the challenge is getting other people to install it
Can't speak for the poster you are responding to, but as someone who also uses Signal for a portion of my social circle, here's my big one: Signal is tied to a phone number, so I can't use it from multiple devices/platforms (unless I want to show up as a different entity from each of them).
This alone is the reason why I personally would not freely choose Signal, and only use it because some of my friends insist :-\
I have Signal installed on my laptop, and it works perfectly. Do you mean multiple mobile devices? I guess that's probably true, and I'm sorry to hear that that's a limitation for you. That said - isn't that limitation also true of every other major messaging application. I only know of SMS and WhatsApp - what alternative do you prefer?
Signal on paired devices works really poorly if you are a heavy Signal user (eg: 5+ daily active groups that are media heavy, over 5GB database size).
The Signal servers rate limit you severely, causing it to take tens of minutes (or sometimes half an hour) to catch up to where your friends are at. Brief losses of connectivity are near-unrecoverable without closing the app on either my laptop or Pinebook, and worst yet the read/unread status of reactions to your messages is not synced across to your phone.
Signal also just killed custom emojis for reactions to messages, by refusing to display them. Now my message history shows I have reactions on a message I sent, but I can't even see the darn reaction.
Large rooms (50+ members) in Signal will get your client rate limited quickly, preventing you from interacting with anyone on Signal in a timely fashion.
Element/Matrix comparatively just works across my laptops, desktop, tablet (somewhere Signal refuses to work) and phone. It uses a nearly identical tech stack for the client (Electron with SQLite) but it never seems to need to sync messages from the server, lag behind, fail to connect to the server or fail to send messages. This is with me being in a ton of active rooms on Mozilla's Matrix, bridged rooms with IRC and Discord, and my friends shitposting at incredible rates.
The chat ecosystem is moving, Signal seems to have veered off course :C
Good to know, thanks! I have a mental disconnect between "1-1/small group chat clients" (for which Signal works perfectly for me) and "group chat clients" (for which Slack works well for work. Discord is some of the buggiest and least-usable software I've ever used, but I appear to be in the minority there). To be clear, I'm not trying to shift the goalposts here - it's very reasonable to expect Signal to be good at both, I've just never done so (which is why I didn't know about those issues, and why I only listed SMS and WhatsApp as competitors).
I definitely see that those issues would be irritating! I've never heard of Matrix, I'll give it a look - thanks!
Unfortunately Matrix still has the issue of key sharing between clients. If you want to read previously sent messages when you log into a new client for the first time you have to do the key sharing dance with one of your existing clients.
For me it's a little annoying, but I find it an acceptable tradeoff. However I could easily see how for many people this would be a dealbreaker.
Key backup makes this a lot easier, assuming you've saved the recovery key in your password manager. But it's still one of those frustrating points where it defeats the purpose of the exercise for the provider to be able to recover an account (or at least the content and trust within an account) for someone who's locked out.
I have. It doesn't sync message history. I have the desktop client on one computer, and if I set up the desktop client on my other computer (the one I'm on right now) it won't bring over all the past messages - it'll be like I'm starting fresh.
It's been a while. I should probably re-install it and give it a fresh chance. My recollection is that the UI was sluggish and that the app was poorly integrated with iOS (e.g. I don't think it had a sharing extension).
Signal iOS is still underwhelming, on Android it has some really nice features that make it a good SMS client and SMS replacement, but alas no one (outside Apple) is permitted to do that on iOS.
Element/Matrix might be of more interest, it syncs history instantly, has good room support (unlike Signal), bridges in Discord and IRC quite well, and has a ton of interesting native rooms from Mozilla Matrix, Pine64, Gitter and such
Wow i wanted to switch to iPhone later this year, but i did not know this. I exclusively use signal as my messaging app and this means i will not buy an iPhone i guess! Thanks for preventing a costly mistake :)
We're an iPhone family, but damn is that lame. How about: make the best product. Don't coerce people into buying an iPhone.
But iMessage isn't the product, it's a feature of the product. They think by not letting those features be available on other platforms they are creating the best product. You can't make the best product while simultaneously commoditizing your differentiators.
They are repeating RIM's mistakes. It fascinates me they haven't actually jumped on the services train, they just started charging a monthly fee for the walled garden while still focusing on selling product and called it a services play.
I totally agree with this. iMessage as a stand alone business would be super valuable. WhatsApp is valuable because so many people use it. Chase the network effect or it will crush you.
Worst cast make people pay for some apple services to get iMessage if you really want to. They really are repeating RIM's mistake here.
iMessage would be trusted, largely spam free, etc.
My wife is now on Google Duo because it IS cross platform. WhatsApp and Telegram as well. These messaging networks are natural monopolies. So now I am on Duo etc. I just wish her parents could have installed iMessage on their phones - then apple could have charged us all $5/month for some type of family (10 person) plan.
So far RIM consumer business went bankrupt and Apple keeps growing quarter after quarter. I would doubt that this strategy, which they have held for a decade on iOS is anything like RIM mistakes.
> They think by not letting those features be available on other platforms they are creating the best product.
No, they don't think that. Their refusal to extend iMessage to Android, to not even provide an iMessage API that would allow Google or third-parties to extend iMessage to other platforms has nothing to do with creating the best product. It's coercion, just as I quoted Federighi writing.
Just above that line he wrote "to get users to switch social networks we’d need more than a marginally better app."
Well then, make it insanely better. I happen to disagree with him though. I think he sold Apple short. I think even a marginally better messaging app would be sufficient.
Ultimately what I would like of Apple is for them to provide the best experience on their own devices, but also to provide interoperability with their services for third parties to extend to non-Apple devices.
BTW, it's interesting to see that they are extending to non-Apple hardware with AppleTV+. They've even paid Roku recently to get an AppleTV+ button on the Roku remote.
I think engendering network effects intentionally is pretty monopolistic. You can't just say, "Hey, but we're not making money from it directly" and get away with that.
I still have this problem where my mom's iMac will occasionally send a SMS (sent via macOS Messages and delivered via her iphone) to the email address in my contact, rather than my phone number. Somehow it thinks that xxxx@yyy.com is a phone number, but +1xxxxxxxxxx isn't. Tmobile then takes the SMS and forwards it to xxxx@yyy.com, as happened to you. So frustrating at how hard this is for Apple to get right. I don't even have iMessage, but I guess that's the point -- interoperability, where it exists with Apple products, will be usable enough to get started but just buggy enough to be infuriating.
Cost of iMessage is built into the price of the iPhone and other apple products. Why would they pay to develop and maintain it for other devices? Apple doesn’t monetize their data like other messaging services/social networks. If apple charged $3/m for iMessage on Android would you pay it?
Yes. I prefer Android phones, but I don't want my choice of phone to impact the communication between my friends and family.
The only reason I consider getting an iPhone is for iMessage. I would gladly pay a monthly fee so I could use the phone I want AND communicate freely with the people in my social circles.
I would be willing to pay $10 if the solution wasn't so hacky... Maintaining a system solely to run unsupported software (in a way that I would have to imagine is against ToS somewhere) is just too risky to handle a critical piece of my communication. I can't drop a message - especially if my excuse for dropping messages is "the laptop in the corner of my closet had to install a security update and restarted on me"
> Beeper has two ways of enabling Android, Windows and Linux users to use iMessage: we send each user a Jailbroken iPhone with the Beeper app installed which bridges to iMessage
You just described what that bloody pile of crap called iMessages is doing all the time and is somehow extremely popular in US.
It still baffles me why US has always had the different default IM compared to rest of the world. When the world moved from ICQ to MSN, they are still with AIM. When the world went with WhatsApp, no one in US knew WhatsApp until Facebook announced their $16B acquisition.
And what's worst is Apple didn't even care to improve iMessage.
Telegram is one potential answer. I find it to be the fastest messaging platform , and super reliable. Not to mention their desktop apps are not bloated, and message history, drafts, etc sync really well. (note - there is also a secret mode that works like signal, that also doesn't sync message content, which is parity with signal)
I believe you can have multiple phone numbers associated with your iCloud account if they are a physical number. This is assuming you have a phone that's capable of dual-sim or if you have a second iPhone linked to your iCloud account. The latter is what I do when to make myself available when traveling abroad.
I have a dual sim iPhone 11. Everytime I switch off the main sim and use the other on abroad, imessage breaks and I have to use WhatsApp. Never manages to link two phone numbers, less so to use it without the correct sim...
You found Signal very sub-par for everyday messaging when compared to WhatsApp? May I ask how so? Because I found those 2 of the many I use to be very similar if not the same.
The biggest reason is larger user base. But here are two things I do in WhatsApp that I can't do in Signal:
- Share live location. If I need to meet up with somebody, or let someone know how far away I am and when I'm arriving, I use share live location. "Share for 1 hour." In Signal you can share your location at a moment in time but it doesn't update.
- Broadcast messages ("mass text" basically). In WhatsApp I can send a message to a list of people without the people on the list seeing each other (to them it looks like I messaged them 1:1). In Signal I would have to use a group and all the members would see each other.
And now to add:
- Message history across apps. When I install the signal desktop app, it doesn't pull the message history with it.
It would be a fantastic outcome of this case if the use of closed standards and lack of integration APIs in a high-market-share product gave rise to a presumption of monopolistic practices. That is obviously what drives the lack of integration points with iMessage and other messaging services, but right now there is no consequence. If it were codified, even in a court precedent, it might be enough to get these systems to start playing nicely again. Remember the days when you could write a client that would connect to most online chat services? I want those days back.
(To be clear, I guess this is wishful thinking. But I would be happy if it came to pass.)
Even better would be a requirement to provide interoperability APIs at a legislative level, but I guess that will be a long time coming.
Like many others, I switched from iOS to Android during a time when it (edit: this transition process) was most fraught with very unexpected failure modes. I remember being absolutely incredulous that anyone thought this experience reflected positively on Apple in any way-- it seemed incompetent at best, and had a strong stink of maliciousness to boot.
I've always seen this as major bungle on their part, and it's one of many reasons I will never go back to their not-so-safe walled garden by choice.
i honestly don’t remember what period of time you are referring to. could you elaborate on examples from the period of time iOS was “fraught with very unexpected failure modes?”
edit: i just saw your edit to specify iMessage the app.
I'm referring to iMessage specifically causing tons of unnecessary problems when switching from an iPhone to an Android phone. This was over 5 years ago so I have no idea what's fixed or isn't now, but I do still occasionally have problems when an iPhone user tries to message me as part of a group.
These were all intermittent: Messages were lost or delayed for very long periods (going both ways), groups were completely broken, I couldn't tell who was messaging me because they were assigned some random source number (which I think also happened both ways), and images were compressed to illegibility.
Some people I seemingly just couldn't text with at all.
Here is just one small thread of thousands about it:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6750172 [Not the best example, but I'm having trouble tracking down the posts I remember browsing back when I made the switch.]
It was a complete mess, experienced by many users, and it was entirely Apple's fault.
Terrible, considering how text-centric social relationships have become. Reply delays on the order of hours are considered to send a strong signal. "Double texting" is a faux pas.
It pains me to think how many friendships and romantic relationships might have been crushed by this bug. Neither party will ever know why.
For folks switching to iOS for the first time from Android the experience can be incredibly frustrating, if you don't know that you're supposed to do things "The Right™" way.
Examples from personal anecdotes include:
- My first Macbook pro several years ago was the cheapest one at the time, and basically got stuck in a boot loop when I opted out of creating an apple ID on setup. Needed to boot into safe mode and factory reset it to start again.
- Setting up an iPad (in the last year) for a first time iOS user, required two 2FA challenges and needed the apple ID password ended no fewer than 7 times in the first 5 minutes of operation. The App Store didn't work for a few minutes for reasons unknown, and then with no changes, started working. (I'm guessing the creation of a new apple ID takes a few minutes to propagate to the app store or something?)
I'm sure everything goes smoothly when you just log in with an apple account and import all of your existing settings from iCloud etc, but if you're jumping in for the first time and press the wrong buttons it's rough!
And WhatsApp was a start-up of less than 50 people that took over communication of entire nations in a matter of months. Who saw that coming? Biggest WTF since Napster.
It has to be the highest acquisition-dollar / employee of all time. I doubt anything even comes close. And isn’t it true that they were profitable on their $1 per year subscription scheme?
I’d love to read a book about how it all came together. Especially something that dives into the speculation I’ve had that their relationships and zero-rating contracts with telcos in developing countries and how that could be leveraged into internet.org and establishing FB in emerging markets was a bigger driver for getting the deal done than the idea of owning IM. Does anyone know if there are any interviews with the team that negotiated the zero-rating deals because seems like excellent execution before almost anyone stateside realized what the play was.
Ah yes, when HN decided that poor people in India shouldn't have any internet, because Facebook was providing it.
To be fair though, the zero rating/internet.org stuff does appear to have made a massive difference to internet availability in developing countries, and it juiced FB's user growth numbers, as it was intended to do.
It happened to coincide with hyperbolic campaigns around net neutrality stateside and a lot of that language got overextended to really different situations. I spent a month in Myanmar in late 2016 and different providers had different zero rating on different services. The one I went with offered generous prepaid data plans and no phone service or SMS at all, just unlimited use of Line. I was tickled by this but there were a couple of old Israeli guys in the shop where we got our SIM cards getting massively frustrated that no one could explain how many “minutes” of calling they got on the various plans. None of the staff knew what they were asking. It was just a market at a very different level of maturity, more advanced in some ways, and weirdly pragmatic in others.
The reason for not bringing iMessage to Android was because parents could just buy cheap Android handsets for their kids. First of all, why not create a product for that niche (nevermind, we're talking about Apple). But what actually bothers me is the weak mindset. I remember when Apple didn't have such concerns because they were certain that they have the best product and people would buy for that reason. This is going on across the board at Apple it'll eventually lead to its IBMification.
I’m not sure your assessment is right. They let iPods run on windows and made a janky version of iTunes for windows so it was operable, but I don’t think they ever treated iTunes for Windows as a priority. So, sure they knew iPod was best in class, and people bought the product for use with either platform.
But where’s the iMessage analogy? It’s not like all of Android would get better because of iMessage, they couldn’t actually sell anything based on an imesssge port, so where’s there incentive? Where’s the example of them absconding on a principle of “best product wins” when they aren’t selling a product associated with the cross platform access?
The distinction here is that the iPod/iPhone is the product, while iMessage is merely a feature.
By creating iTunes for Windows they were expanding the potential customer base for iPods. By supporting iMessage on Android they would not be expanding the potential customer base for iPhone. If anything they would be shrinking it if they think iMessage is a compelling enough feature for people to switch from Android to iMessage.
Having iOS as a first class citizen and accepting the fact that Android users exist and your paying customers don't have to bother with the fragmented messenger landscape. All while creating the de-facto standard for smartphone messaging (that is now Whatsapp).
The instant messaging market is such an utter failure of competitive market economics. There hasn't been a single worthwhile innovation in like 25 years yet there is intense competition over who owns the proprietary protocols. Text vs data is also an entirely contrived competition.
End to end encryption was a huge innovation first widespread with iMessage, then Signal, and even WhatsApp and eventually (optionally) on FB messenger and Telegram. Now it's table stakes.
Not only did Apple miss an opportunity to own global messaging, Google could have done the same if they had designed Allo with SMS fallback similar to iMessage.
I have no idea what they were thinking with Allo, but they blew one of the easiest layups I’ve ever seen.
RCS is the evolution of SMS, is standardized and should be what the industry uses. Carriers mostly adopted it I think, but as expected, the situation is a mess. Bell, for example, went with Samsung for their RCS infrastructure and for some reasons, they don't allow sending RCS messages to other carriers.
Google decided to bypass carriers entirely, but you have to use the Google Messages app to use RCS. So if you use another texting app, it won't work.
Maybe they missed a chance to own global messaging, though I’m not sure that’s true given the number of competing messaging platforms, but iMessage being a walled garden has sold a shitload of devices for Apple and served as a major way of locking people into their ecosystem. It’s a major differentiator from Android/PC products, and it’s something I’ve heard mentioned a lot when people are choosing between Android and iOS or between PC laptop vs MacBook.
I think people are underestimating the value that Apple has derived in terms of device sales from not expanding iMessage to other platforms, and device sales are worth a lot of money compared to new messaging-only users.
No one wanted iMessage when it came out. Making it opt out on iPhones and defaulting made people try it and they started to prefer it when they realized. The opt out was Apple's key to success. Google should have done the same on Android.
Because of antitrust concerns. It amuses me every time this suggestion resurfaces here because this community is most familiar with anti-Google pressure when it tries to use its market share like this.
Agreed. They could probably monetize that better than hardware sales too, most likely via Apple Wallet payments and data.
And the whole blue/green bubble pretentiousness would have never happened, which is funny because so many Android users still have no idea that's even happening to them or just assume they don't need to care about anybody that cares about that. (protip: its affecting your life and relationships)
The bubble is a US thing primarily. Not because Americans are uniquely prone to it, but because iPhones are not as common outside of the US.
But don't worry non-Americans, people are judging you on the basis of how you dress, eat, walk and talk and deciding silently whether to let you in their social circle or not.
WhatsApp was a game changer for people that had international contacts. Before WhatsApp, all the mobile networks (at least in the US) charged exorbitant amounts of money for international SMS and MMS.
Then, WhatsApp came and it was free and cross platform, compressed images and video to send them quick with decent quality, and free of spam. Absolutely perfect execution, in my opinion. If it was not owned by Facebook, I’d probably pay a considerable amount for it if it promised security and privacy.
they owe a huge part of success intially to tricking people into what you describe -- that it's a replacement/better than SMS -- that it's "free". When it was simply that ppl couldn't tell difference between SMS network and Internet. And using phone numbers as accounts got a ton of people in non-American areas to use it (also north american texting rates crazy cheap unlike alot of the whatsapp-popular countries). Ridiculous. When all it is is another internet messaging app.
Honestly, reading the rest of the comments in this thread to this effect, it's terrifying that the runaway success of a single company can so degrade the fabric of personal relationships this way.
The only people I've met who use iMessage have been Americans and the Americans I've met that live in the UK use WhatsApp or Messenger as their primary local comms, though frequently iMessage with friends in the US. I wonder why it is that iMessage hasn't enjoyed the same dominance here, even when the iPhone has. (45% iPhone in the US vs 40% in the UK)
The blue/green thing matters mostly to young folks, who are constantly on the lookout for signals of social distinctions. If it wasn’t chat bubbles, it would be something else.
This isn’t derogatory; it’s literally how the human brain develops. Everyone goes through this phase. It’s not something that Apple created.
iMessage only makes sense on the iPhone with its full suite of Apple solutions. I don’t know why Google split up their video and then their chat into multiple directions but on Apple these exist as a workflow of solutions.
Thus they are vulnerable to a do it all app like WhatsApp. IMO just exporting iMessage wouldn’t have been enough, they would’ve needed to combine FaceTime too.
I'm in Australia, and here iPhones have about 50% of the smartphone market, with the other half being Android of course.
I obviously know many iPhone users, including my wife and many close friends. I know of no one who uses iMessage. Here everyone uses Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp (and to a lesser extent Telegram and Signal).
I’m in Australia, and iMessage usage here is huge and I have to assume the reason you’re not aware of it is because you dont have an iPhone.
Everyone I know with an iPhone chooses iMessages for texts and group chats first, and only reverts to WhatsApp when someone on Android has to be involved.
In the US almost everyone uses SMS. iMessage uses the same app as SMS, changing the message type based on whether the recipient can accept iMessages. So, most iPhone-to-iPhone communication ends up being SMS because we don’t have to change what we’re used to.
iMessage in the US took over before WhatsApp or Messenger landed. So it's still going strong based on that (although I wouldn't want to switch to a FB product, so I may be biased.) But SMSs are free and therefore the number of people who use SMS (or RCS, whatever it's followup is), is really high.
SMS is not free while traveling abroad. I know most people int he USA don't travel abroad but I do and is one reason I detest SMS. Further it's tied to my phone number, something I'd prefer not to give out.
I suppose you are one of the special few in that case. In other social groups people tend to gravitate towards a common messaging infrastructure, only sharing the absolute essentials when reminded of those that are not part of that shared system.
This means that while you might be part of the group while physically present, you are not a part of the group outside of that. For billions of people around the world that is a problem (not the tech, but the isolation), and as such, that is where a good deal of focus goes towards.
This isn't about selecting your friends or social groups based on tech, but about groups of people dynamically interacting. Replace the applied construct with something else and it still applies. (you don't like smoke signals because big smoke is evil to you, so you use carrier hawks, but al your friends still use smoke signals and can't be bothered to learn how to maintain a hawk)
Eh, if you aren't able to stay connected to a group despite not using that group's chosen technology, you're not that critical to the group. I'm not advocating to hold your participation hostage, but someone organizing a group to use exclusionary practices despite knowing specific members can't or won't participate is a classic bullying tactic. Family members employ it often.
Eh, a social group isn't a business gathering nor is it a calculated construct. We're talking about people following their natural attraction.
People don't consciously 'organise' a group with some 'group manager' and a nice hierarchy, technology choice panels, and acquisition procedures. There isn't some grand evil plan where the 'group CEO' selects the technology that everyone now has to use. This is just users using an end-user service on their end-user device that doesn't cause them friction and makes them happy.
People don't think "I want to send an instant message to my group-colleagues on their mobile OS on their mobile hardware over their WWAN link to setup a meeting in our shared calendar for a ninety minute gathering for a consumption of nutrients". They generally think: "I could go for a bite, I'll let my friends know so we could go together". Everything that makes that harder just gets thrown out.
I have a family, small children, relatives. Grandparents loves to see videos of their grandchildren. Sharing a video via group MMS is fraught with problems, it often doesn't work, or the resolution is garbage. iMessage works every time. I'm not dismissing your experience but the green vs blue bubbles do make a big difference for many of us.
In my case I don't care for the green/blue bubble divide, EXCEPT that I have a limited SMS plan and every time someone messages me it potentially costs me $0.10. That is not that significant until someone sends a series of short messages that could have been bundled into one, and I can't help but think "this person just cost me the price of a coffee".
It's not even Apple's fault, but rather AT&T's confusing and expensive billing options. I could also upgrade to an unlimited messaging plan, but 90% of the billing cycles I'd be overpaying.
They added a data plan to my bill when I bought my first iPhone... it wasn't the $10 a month, it was the disrespectfulness of "you can't, we're forcing you to".
There are many popular messaging applications(Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp) that are cross platform and handle multimedia content well. This is what is used outside of the US.
Convincing an entire extended family to switch app is not simple. Making sure they are all set up with an alternative messaging app is not simple. Getting them to remember to use it with your specific chat while they use the default app for other conversations is not simple. Using an iPhone is simple.
The one big thing about iMessage is that it never really changes. And it cannot be hijacked by some other application like on Android. For better or worse, and for basic services like text messages I'm erring on the side of better. I have no idea how many times I had to go fix messaging issues when my grandparents were using Android. Facebook tried to take over all messaging. Then it was Google, with whatever iteration of failed messaging application they were pushing out. Or when they had phones that actually received updates it would suddenly drastically change the user interface.
We're having weekly video calls on FaceTime, and the superior sound quality of a FaceTime Audio has made it possible to even have a phone call with my hard of hearing grandpa. They don't even know they're using it. I send them high resolution pictures and videos of my hikes, that they can enjoy on their iPhone or iPad, whenever they want. Pictures and videos stay there without them having to do a ton of complicated tasks in a forever changing user interface, like Snap and the likes. The Apple Watches lets them know when someone is calling, and it gives us peace of mind knowing that they always have it with them. Everything uses a format they're used to from long before smart phones was a thing: Phone numbers. My grandmother is writing her life story on her now 7 years old MacBook Air. All their devices are backed up to my iCloud-family subscription. We've started using AirPods with Live Listen to include my grandpa in our conversation when I'm visiting them. If you haven't tried this, you should. It's mind boggling good.
The amount of time spent fixing things for them have gone from an almost weekly thing to non-existing. Being seniors they also have a lot of time on their hands, and Apple-partnered stores, at least around here, provide excellent support for anyone that owns an Apple device, regardless of where it was bought. All their devices are updated almost effortlessly: They get a notification about a pending update that tells them exactly when the device will be updated and what they need to do. The one big wish I have would be to postpone major updates for a couple of months. The recent trend of Apple radically changing the user experience is not a welcoming trend.
There's a lot of things I've really started to hate with Apple. And to be honest, at this point the things I just listed are more or less the only things holding me back. But the things mentioned in this post is such a huge quality of life improvements for all of us, almost like a cliché of Apple advertising. It's almost embarrassing.
Exactly this, I spent 5 years of monthly calls with my mom over the course of 4 Android (admittedly very cheap) phones. Just basic stuff like sending pictures, why so and so didn’t get her text, etc.
Three years ago she got an iPad and it’s zero support calls with way more communication.
So while I suppose it is possible to have a non-horrible text experience on Android, I’ve only succeeded on iOS.
They don't. Whatsapp degrades image/video quality massively. Just a choice they made given that a lot of their customers are bandwidth constrained. If I have to send a photo that I took with my high quality phone camera, I prefer to use iMessage.
> Sharing a video via group MMS is fraught with problems, it often doesn't work, or the resolution is garbage.
FYI, this is carrier related. Many carriers have a hard limit on how big attachments are, and will silently reject them if you go over that limit.
What the limit is varies based on the carrier, but it seems that a "safe" limit is ~1.1 MB (This is the hard limit that Android enforces for the largest MMS attachment it allows). T-Mobile seems to allow higher (I think I got up to 10 MB?), but I do not know what would happen if you sent an MMS to another carrier that is that big (they probably silenty drop it).
So you have two options: either reduce how big it is (which Android Messaging silently does), or flat our reject it. So the video is problem is silently reencoded to accomedate the 1.1 MB limit.
Why doesn't this happen on iMessage? Probably because you can set your MMSC (the Server that sends/recieves MMS) to Apple's MMSC, so you can standardise how big it is.
> I just know that if you have an iPhone, you have to set your MMSC to Apple's servers versus the carrier's servers.
I don't believe this is true. To the best of my knowledge (and a quick Google) Apple has no MMSC servers. I've certainly never input any.
SMS and MMS sent on iOS use the same servers an Android phone would. But when the target phone number is detected as being iMessage capable that whole system is ignored and iMessage is used instead.
Fair enough. For a day or so I was looking up if I could somehow emulate iMessage on a Pinephone, and I remember a lot of it being a non-starter unless you had an iPhone. It stuck out to me that Apple had their own MMSC for some reason. But perhaps it is old news or I read the wrong post?
On an iphone, when you send a text message, apple will take a look at the phone number you're sending it to and check if it's linked to an imessage account. If it's linked to an imessage account, you're not sending a text anymore, you're using an internet service just like whatsapp.
There is no technical relationship between SMS and imessage, but to the user it's the same interface
But it was a bit infuriating to realize how huge an impact it was having on my kids who were being socially excluded for the sin of Android. Many children have ipads and hand me down iphones with no SIM just for iMessage, which they all just refer to as texting.
And you likely miss a ton of group chats where there are no android (or Pinephone) users because you’ve been excluded because group chats don’t work fine.
I have many iMessage groups, but it is an almost unspoken rule that you do NOT add a green bubble user to the group.
It downgrades to standard MMS which doesn't have all of the features, AND delivery is hit or miss.
With iMessage I can be fairly sure that all messages will arrive, with MMS groups... it's a shit show. There's been plenty of times where someone whose a green bubble will receive only part of the group messages, or none of them whereas the rest of us do. It all depends on the carrier.
There are some features for group messaging on iMessage that aren’t available in Group MMS. If you add a non-iMessage user to your group, the group downgrades to using Group MMS, which does still work for basic messaging, but the group loses all of its iMessage-exclusive features.
I bet they also have side groups without you in it for when they want to share videos/photos or not deal with MMS jank. Nothing personal, we had to do the same thing to my brother and his fiance. Group MMS is busted it has inconsistent delivery, videos and images are compressed to the point of being basically worthless. Sometimes I'll get 3 of 4 people's messages leaving me with a partial conversation, then hours later I'll get the 4th person's messages. Sometimes they never come through. Sometimes I just don't get images, sometimes my wife and I will get different parts of the conversation and can piece it together.
And the thing that causes all that friction is including an Android user in the group text. It's entirely not your fault, but also it's very natural for people to want to exclude Android users when the majority of the group uses iPhone.
I'm really not sure how to respond to this, because you are assuming a lot of unheatlhy family dynamics there.
I will say would hope if you value you relationship with your brother and his fiance, that you actually told him you do that and offered a comprimise on how to chat.
I’d like you to query your family and find out. Of course this is not a reasonable request and I’ll likely never know.
This isn’t to mean you have poor relationships. It’s just extremely likely as it happens in every other group.
I have friends and family who I don’t include in group chats because we’re using iOS features. It’s nothing significant so I don’t tell them about it.
I also have group chats with them. An example is there’s a family group chat about a planned vacation, everyone is on it. It’s pretty important.
I have numerous other group chats with hiking photos and kid photos that don’t include them because they can’t do moment shares and all the stuff that my family members send out from their iPhone.
I don’t think this means we have a bad relationship. I also don’t text my elderly family members who don’t have mobiles, I call them.
It’s just a function of using convenient tools and what’s available.
Similarly I have friends and business groups that only communicate through discord or whatsapp or viber, etc. I would never feel bad because a subset of my friends started a chat on Facebook and didn’t include me. I don’t use that app.
But I also don’t believe that I’m in all group chats with all people I think are important.
I’m not assuming anything unhealthy. We mostly use that chat for sharing videos since MMS is basically worthless for that. But conversations stem from the videos or sometimes people grab the wrong one.
We are fairly good at using the main chat for important things. But again delivery is spotty.
Switching to another messaging infrastructure for the 10 of us is going to be a nonstarter.
> so many Android users still have no idea that's even happening to them or just assume they don't need to care about anybody that cares about that. (protip: its affecting your life and relationships)
To be as blunt as I know how to be: good. I really hope that anyone inclined to treat people that way goes all the way and cuts me out of their life completely. I don't need or want friends like that, and I've had no trouble making friends (including iPhone users) who aren't so absurdly shallow as to treat people differently based on the color of their message in a fucking texting app.
In other words, I really do hope you're right about this and it's affecting my life and relationships, because the only way it could possibly affect them is positively by cutting assholes out of my life.
Group MMS is terrible (group chats in general) and you can't really expect a group of people to all download and install a new app because one person has it. In all likelihood, you will simply be excluded or if it's important, you will be forced to use something like facebook messenger, google hangouts, instagram, etc which is worse than SMS.
It becomes terribly low-res. The MMS media limit means each video, if longer than a few seconds, has its bitrate crippled to fit in the limit. Photos too have their resolution lowered, less so than videos but if you send a bunch at once it gets worse.
It is solved if phones use RCS. RCS allows many of the features you love in iMessage - e2e encryption, typing indicators, large files, delivery receipts, reactions, etc. And it is all standards-based and backed by the carriers.
Android phones do support RCS. Apple will not implement it. Apple will only support the bare minimum of SMS/MMS and then people wonder why it doesn't work well.
Carriers have worked to improve messaging. And Apple won't work with them, preferring to make "green bubble" a horrible experience. People should be outraged that Apple is able to e2e encrypt their chats but refuses to implement the standards.
RCS doesn't solve the core issue that carriers are bad at providing messaging systems and even worse at interconnecting their messaging systems.
If carriers were good at messaging systems, SMS wouldn't be so unreliable and expensive. MMS would have worked well. But sure, maybe their new system works? Except, for the most part it's only rolling out widely because Google decided to be the default RCS server, so it's yet another Google messaging service; 9th time is the charm.
Google deployed e2e in rcs at the end of last year... But does that mean it works everywhere? I'm guessing probably not.
Unfortunately, if the carriers impose the same attachment limit, it really won't help. The limit on MMS is largely artificial (considering the phone and the MMSC talk HTTP...sending an MMS is literally an HTTP POST).
That logic would've applied to imessenger when it first appeared on the scene. Yet it is possible for challengers to displace the previous method despite not (yet) having the requisite network effects.
To now argue that nothing can or should supplant it is just Applecronyism.
Depends on location, IMO. I was an Android user for years (since the Nexus One!) and the vast majority of my contacts were on iOS. My lack of iMessage was a constant frustration and I would have signed up in an instant.
But I'm in the US, which has a disproportionately high amount of iOS users. Across the rest of the world iMessage would be competing with WhatsApp and its existing network (something the e-mails in the article note) and I think it would have been an uphill struggle.
1. iOS being uncommonly popular (in other words: the US is weirdly rich compared to even most developed countries)
2. People texting a lot (maybe other countries’ carriers used to just make texting too expensive?)
Outside the US, people more commonly use messaging apps, and there is less peer pressure to be on iMessage as it is less likely for someone (in a certain social class…) to have a big majority of iOS-using peers. I had never even heard the term ‘green-texter’ until I went to the US
Adding on to what others have said, it's also that some non-US countries have much better internet infrastructure than telecom (which might've affected pricing, can't say for sure), so people flocked to internet-only messaging apps to avoid their telecom's faulty SMS/call handling.
>2. People texting a lot (maybe other countries’ carriers used to just make texting too expensive?)
Yes. US mobile plans gave enormous buckets (thousands) of SMS messages a month to mobile users 10-15 years ago, so there was little incentive to move to other mobile messaging systems.
Conversely, the lack of such generous SMS allotments in most non-US countries drove widespread adoption of WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger/etc.
I don’t know why you’re taking this needlessly snide tone.
It seems obvious that GP thinks that iMessage would have dominated, even WhatsApp in Europe.
I don't know. Android is not exactly a place with a lot of paid software. No way Apple would make it free for Android and ad supported. Maybe they could have come up with some kind of iCloud Android bundle, and maybe it would have done well, but I am not convinced there is a massive market for a paid consumer messaging service.
i think making it free for android would have certainly made it easier for people to try android for their next device, and thus the net balance isn't really clear..
I find it ironic in a lawsuit over Apple's supposed dominance, that Epic is claiming that executives shot down a plan that as Cue puts it "that iMessage should expand to Android to cement Apple’s hold on messaging apps".
More relevant to the article—does anyone know what Epic plans to argue from this finding? Honestly, I could interpret not bringing iMessage to Android as being decidely anti-monopolistic; they actively tried to avoid capturing the entire market. I’m sure that is not what this evidence is intended to show though.
What benefit would it give Apple to have all of Android users on iMessage? It’s not like they inject ads into your messaging streams/ they left money on the table to benefit another product?
To me, forcing them to make an Android version of iMessage would be pretty anti-American. Domestically they have 20-30% market share, and there’s 0 revenue to gain from an Android version except the tenuous concept that maybe they could use it to upsell someone to iOS? Idk, I agree with you here. Doesn’t seem clear to me why they should be obligated or compelled to ship iMessage for Android.
Sure, Apple Music, because there’s a fee attached to it, but do you think Android people would pay a few bucks a month for Android? Could they upsell it to another product like cloud storage? Would they a) want the scrutiny that comes with and iCloud upsell b) security risk from enabling iCloud on an unmanaged platform
Even without direct monetization, there could be advantages for Apple?
- It’d be compelling for a lot of Android users and would probably be widely installed. This would give Apple a strong foothold onto Android devices. They could perhaps build on that for their services.
- For iOS users, this might make features like Apple Pay and sending songs more universal/reliable, which might provide more of a moat against Venmo, Android Pay, Spotify, etc. It’d also give a better privacy/security story if your messages aren’t converted to SMS.
- If it was sufficiently popular, it could provide Apple with a credible retaliatory move in case Google yanked something important from iOS.
- It would weaken the value proposition for important competitors like Facebook. Why let scary FB messenger on your phone if you can talk to everyone over iMessage?
I know nothing and this is just spitballing. Maybe nothing here outweighs keeping it exclusive to iOS, but Apple getting some of their software used far and wide seems like it could have real upside.
I mean the logic is obvious. If you are popular enough you want to keep the platform exclusive. If you aren't then it makes sense to go multi-platform.
BlackBerry thought their platform was strong enough and BBM would pull everyone else in. They were of course wrong.
It seems like Apple is strong enough to keep iMessage useful even if it is platform limited, and surely some people are buying iPhones for the status-symbol of Green Bubbles (or Blue, I can't remember I don't use iMessage).
Of course every platform wants to think they are strong enough to pull this trick, admitting otherwise is very difficult. Of course by the time it is obvious that you aren't strong enough it is probably too late.
Funny Blackberry story. The .jobs top level domain was launched around the time RIM was really struggling. .jobs was one of the first gtlds that wasn't .net, .com or .edu. The management team at RIM wanted a .jobs domain for their career website. They didn't buy "Blackberry dot jobs" they bought... the other one. The company I worked for provided career website software. The meeting where we tried to explain why RIM and .jobs was a bad idea was a classic.
I hate the conspiracy theory that Apple did it intentionally to make iPhone users hate Android. The original iPhone had all green bubbles. The blue was only to differentiate.
Of course they are, but Apple loves status symbols. To a large extent they are a fashion company as well as a tech company. For example the constantly rotating design or Animoji. (only available on the expensive model of course!)
I feel like I'm the only iPhone user that barely makes use of iMessage. All my chat communications is done via Google Hangouts (or whatever they call it these days), WhatsApp, or Kakao (I'm Korean). I think I have exactly one friend who I use iMessage with.
Then again, half my friends are Android users, so...
Completely depends on where you live AND also your social bubble. That's why these threads are often repetitive in nature. Everyone's different.
Here in NYC, I can count the number of Android users I've met in one hand... but I know that tons of people have Android phones. Most chatting happens on iMessage and maybe Instagram chat (people seem to exchange IG usernames rather than phone numbers nowadays).
Mainly a Gen Z thing I believe (speaking as a member of said generation). Many people my age see their phone numbers as being more private information that should be given to those you trust, so may not want to give out to someone you just met at a bar for example. Instagram can be used as a sort of barrier. Also, each party gets more insight into the others lives by checking out their Instagram account which is usually interesting information if you're establishing some sort of relationship with another
I'm actually begrudgingly graduating from asking for Instagram usernames to asking for TikTok usernames.
A lot of Gen Z (18-23) are not using their Instagram accounts, or they have so many instagram accounts that they don't check and it is a high probability that you receive their "thirst trap" account where they just collect followers to look at their body and ignore. Not necessarily to consciously ignore, but just never check the messages at all because their personal instagram with their group conversations are elsewhere.
> Many people my age see their phone numbers as being more private information that should be given to those you trust
This is a really relevant factoid against the background of the debate over Signal requiring a phone number to communicate with people. It seems the next generation is likely to look elsewhere if that continues.
Yeah. Im us based, and have two different friend groups that i text with daily. One group all has iphones and we use imessage. The other group recently landed in signal, but has been all over the place over the years, from email, to g chat, to hangouts, then tried whats app, then back to hangouts....
Fascinating. Most of my circles are Australian, the majority have iPhones, and yet I have never seen anyone mention iMessage. Everyone I know uses Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, with Telegram and Signal being very distant third and fourths.
> The line of questioning is likely to play a significant role in Epic’s antitrust lawsuit, which argues that iOS app store exclusivity represents an illegal use of market power. Epic has made clear in previous filings that it plans to make iMessage exclusivity part of that argument, citing a 2016 email from Phil Schiller that argues iMessage expansion “will hurt us more than help us.”
This seems weirdly irrelevant. If Epic is arguing that not allowing other app stores onto iPhones is hurting consumers, I don't understand the relevance of Apple software on non-Apple phones. I mean, say Epic wins their case, and so Apple needs to support side-loading. The court still can't force Apple to port iMessage to other devices.
I think they could differentiate with privacy. Privacy is the ultimate silver bullet that could kill Android, because the Google's business model is built around lack of privacy. If iMessage could elevate privacy awareness and expectations, then it's possible that people would want to switch to iPhone.
We're an iPhone family, but damn is that lame. How about: make the best product. Don't coerce people into buying an iPhone.
It drives me crazy how fractured messaging has become. Here's a recent example. My non-technical aunt tried to send a group iMessage to my wife and me. For me, she used an email address tied to my iMessage account. But for my wife, she used her Google Voice #. Now what you need to understand is that iMessage allows you to associate one or more email addresses with your account, but only a single phone #, which has to be your carrier-assigned #.
So now she's trying to send an iMessage to my email address (which would have shown up in blue) and my wife's Google Voice # (which would have shown up in green).
Well, here's what apparently happened. iMessage handed this off as an MMS to Verizon. Verizon's MMS gateway sent me the message via email, as a text attachment. My wife got the message in the Google Voice app on her phone.
What an f'ing mess.
I've turned off "Send as SMS" and "MMS Messaging" on my iPhone so I don't make this same stupid mistake.
I'd use WhatsApp for everything, but, Facebook. (I tried Signal. I found it to be pretty sub-par for everyday messaging.)