Eddy Cue Wanted To Bring iMessage To Android In 2013 (theverge.com) 102
According to The Verge, citing a new deposition made public as part of the Epic case, Apple's senior VP of software and services, Eddy Cue, pushed to bring iMessage to Android as early as 2013. "[...] Cue wanted to devote a full team to iMessage support on Android, only to be overruled by other executives," adds The Verge. From the report: The latest deposition cites a specific email exchange between Cue and Craig Federighi, currently Apple's SVP of software engineering, beginning on April 7th and 8th, 2013. The exchange came after news circulated that Google had attempted to purchase WhatsApp for $1 billion. According to the exchange, Cue took the rumors as a sign that iMessage should expand to Android to cement Apple's hold on messaging apps:
Cue: We really need to bring iMessage to Android. I have had a couple of people investigating this but we should go full speed and make this an official project.... Do we want to lose one of the most important apps in a mobile environment to Google? They have search, mail, free video, and growing quickly in browsers. We have the best messaging app and we should make it the industry standard. I don't know what ways we can monetize it but it doesn't cost us a lot to run.
Federighi: Do you have any thoughts on how we would make switching to iMessage (from WhatsApp) compelling to masses of Android users who don't have a bunch of iOS friends? iMessage is a nice app/service, but to get users to switch social networks we'd need more than a marginally better app. (This is why Google is willing to pay $1 billion -- for the network, not for the app.)...In the absence of a strategy to become the primary messaging service for [the] bulk of cell phone users, I am concerned [that] iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.
Elsewhere in the deposition, Cue says, "I remember the time of wanting to do an iMessage app on Android ourselves." "Would there have been cross-compatibility with the iOS platform so that users of both platforms would have been able to exchange messages?" the questioner responds. "That was certainly the discussion and the view that I had," Cue says. [...] 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."
Cue: We really need to bring iMessage to Android. I have had a couple of people investigating this but we should go full speed and make this an official project.... Do we want to lose one of the most important apps in a mobile environment to Google? They have search, mail, free video, and growing quickly in browsers. We have the best messaging app and we should make it the industry standard. I don't know what ways we can monetize it but it doesn't cost us a lot to run.
Federighi: Do you have any thoughts on how we would make switching to iMessage (from WhatsApp) compelling to masses of Android users who don't have a bunch of iOS friends? iMessage is a nice app/service, but to get users to switch social networks we'd need more than a marginally better app. (This is why Google is willing to pay $1 billion -- for the network, not for the app.)...In the absence of a strategy to become the primary messaging service for [the] bulk of cell phone users, I am concerned [that] iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.
Elsewhere in the deposition, Cue says, "I remember the time of wanting to do an iMessage app on Android ourselves." "Would there have been cross-compatibility with the iOS platform so that users of both platforms would have been able to exchange messages?" the questioner responds. "That was certainly the discussion and the view that I had," Cue says. [...] 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."
Glad they didn't (Score:3, Interesting)
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I'm glad they didn't too (one less app polluting Android) but I disagree with your assumption that Apple would have won.
They could even have lost users because of it. Many Apple users use iMessage explicitly because it's elitist (no risk of doing a group chat with someone not worthy enough to buy an iPhone). I read that argument for using iMessage often even here on Slashdot. I even read a father who was proud and happy to buy iPhone to his kids so that they become more likely to communicate with other kids
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Many Apple users use iMessage explicitly because it's elitist (no risk of doing a group chat with someone not worthy enough to buy an iPhone).
I know it's really trendy here to bash Apple, but you should at least learn the slightest thing about what you're talking about before you bash it.
iMessage isn't elitist at all - it's the standard text messaging app on iOS. It's for sending SMS messages - something people expect to be able to do with every cell phone.
The main perk of iMessage is if the person you're sending a message to also uses iMessage, it will establish an encrypted connection to the other user and send your messages via your internet c
Re:Glad they didn't (Score:5, Informative)
That said, Apple deliberately used it to enforce trapping iPhone users within their walled garden. If you switched from iOS to Android, your phone number remained linked to your iMessage account. Whenever an iOS-using friend sent you a text, instead of translating the message to SMS/MMS and forwarding it to your phone number, their iMessage app would send it to your iMessage account which of course you couldn't access now because your new phone couldn't use iMesage. It took Apple nearly a decade to fix this and finally give you a way to access your iMessage account and de-link it from your phone number when you no longer had an iPhone.
The warts I've noticed in their iMessage-SMS/MMS bridge include:
Encrypted user-to-user communications is a problem that was solved back in the 1980s with public/private key encryption. Each user just needs to keep their private key secret, and can freely distribute their public key. Your friend encrypts their message to you with their private key, then encrypts it again with your public key. You (and only you) can then decrypt the message with your private key, then your friend's public key.
The whole point of the system is that the public key can be freely distributed at no risk, since it doesn't help you back out the private key (at least not with tens of thousands of years of computer time). That means any app on your phone you grant access to your private key can then encrypt and decrypt messages. And because the message is end-to-end encrypted, you can transmit it via any network or server.
Implementing encrypted communications in a way which requires a specific app and closed message exchange server is completely broken. iMessage primary design goal isn't to give you end-to-end encryption. It's to trap you within Apple's ecosystem.
I was very annoyed at having to buy iPhones (Score:2)
For my daughters. Their friends all used iPhones, and group chats were critical for them.
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So you daughters and their friends were not aware there are a crapload of cross-platform messaging applications?
Network effect (Score:2)
friends were not aware there are a crapload of cross-platform messaging applications?
The friends' reaction is most likely "Why the hell should they all install one additional messaging application, just so these two stupid girls - who refuse to use a 'normal' phone like all the normal cool people - could finally send message? It's their fault, they're the onw using weird phones and weird apps! Even more so because they are the only people insisting on that? Everybody(*) uses Apple's iMessage, I even installed Facebook Messenger to message grandma, I don't see the point of installing this we
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So that they don't have to buy a different phone is a very good reason. Unless you are elitist of course. That's where you see whether you value your friends Tamara and Betty or your social status as being part of an iPhone-only group.
And since they already have Facebook messenger, why not use it?
Nobody has only Apple friends. Get over it. It doesn't exist. Those who pretend to either live under a rock, or worse, stop considering as their friend those without an iPhone.
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Oh I know all that. Still, I've seen slashdotters who purchased iPhones because they didn't want the shame of being that "green person".
Also, SMS is crap. So any application which falls back on SMS to communicate with the 85% of the world buying smartphones other than an iPhone is total crap too. And that's usually where people reply "but my friends all have iPhones anyways". And now you understand why it's elitist. Nobody only has friends with iPhones. Even if you live in a market where Apple has a very hi
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Sure, SMS is crap. But it's the standard. It's what's supported everywhere.
You're complaining that everyone that uses the standard stuff is elitist, which I can only take to mean that you think the people who go out of their way to use something non-standard aren't elitist. That seems backwards to me.
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Sure, SMS is crap. But it's the standard. It's what's supported everywhere.
No it's not. You need a cell phone with an SMS plan. It doesn't work from an Internet-connected PC, altough there are some exceptions such as Google Voice.
You're complaining that everyone that uses the standard stuff is elitist
No I'm not. I'm specifically talking about iMessage, which is not a standard by any standard ;-)
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Sure, SMS is crap. But it's the standard. It's what's supported everywhere.
No it's not. You need a cell phone with an SMS plan. It doesn't work from an Internet-connected PC, altough there are some exceptions such as Google Voice.
So now your complaint is that the iPhone SMS app is bad because it requires the other person to have a cell phone with an SMS plan for you to send them SMS messages?
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No, I complain that any app that requires to fall back on SMS to join most people in the world is crap, because SMS itself is crap.
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Many Apple users use iMessage explicitly because it's elitist (no risk of doing a group chat with someone not worthy enough to buy an iPhone).
Users of infidel devices can join iMessage chats by SMS, which is indicated by a green message background among the blue-background messages from Apple devices.
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Yes, and I've repeatedly see Slashdotters who said they were purchasing iPhones to avoid the shame of appearing green.
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Please link even one comment saying this. You've said this several times now without actually citing any proof.
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sure, there you go:
https://apple.slashdot.org/com... [slashdot.org]
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Here are a few more :
This one even got modded +5:
https://apple.slashdot.org/com... [slashdot.org]
https://apple.slashdot.org/com... [slashdot.org]
https://apple.slashdot.org/com... [slashdot.org]
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Fair enough. Unfortunately, if this is ever to get fixed, Apple must take action - either allow other messaging apps that can tie into SMS on iOS, or allow other platforms onto iMessage. However, they are choosing to be assholes and wedge people with messaging as some kind of half-assed competitive advantage.
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I don't think the backward compatibility with SMS is even a good thing. I prefer it the hangouts way, before Google scrapped it. You had your SMS inside the same application, but it was not merged. When creating a new conversation, you had the choice between SMS or Hangouts.
This way you get all your messaging at the same place, with the same notifications, but you are not spreading the use of SMS by sending them SMS by accident like on iMessage.
When Hangouts/Google Talk was still on XMPP, all we needed was
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The Hangouts experience on Android was exactly what you say, but very different on iPhone - the only way it was integrated with SMS was if you are using Google Fi, because they can hook the SMS message at the service and push it to Hangouts. Apple will not allow any app to become the "messaging app" like you can on Android - that privilege is reserved for iMessage, and only iMessage.
My preferred solution would be for Apple to release that strangle-hold so that multiple applications could compete on that si
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I agree that Apple is doing the wrong thing here, but fortunately there is a workaround: don't use an iPhone.
I think Facebook messenger can handle SMS as well on Android.
My point was that we shouldn't use phone number as an ID for instant messaging. The phone number is owned by the carrier. It also sucks for people swapping SIM cards, moving to a different country (or sometimes even region), or those without a cell phone number. Email is a much better ID. Everybody can create one for free, and for the geeks
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Elitist? iPhones are common hand-me-down devices because Apple supports them for a very long time. There are loads of them on the used market, go into any shop or check eBay and half the devices will be iPhones.
The 2+ year old iPhone is the phone of choice for those who can't afford a newer model.
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Elitist is in the perception. It doesn't have to be based on facts.
If a company can market a crappy wine as being the elite wine and sell it for $50/bottle, chances are a lot of people will buy it anyways. Because you know, they wouldn't want to be identified as drinking $15 wine, even if it tastes better.
Re: Glad they didn't (Score:1)
Re: Glad they didn't (Score:1)
Re:Glad they didn't (Score:4, Informative)
I've never met anybody with this attitude. This just sounds childish - were you at school or amongst immature man boys?
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I wasn't at school no, I was on slashdot.
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A lot of immature students or people who are still in their parent's basement? In general though, /.ers are not a good representation of the rest of the world.
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Possibly, although some of them pretended to have kids. Perhaps they dug a basement under their parent's basement for their own kids?
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I used an iPhone for over 10 years, my whole family except for me uses iPhones, and I have a brother that works at Apple.
Literally nobody I've ever interacted with has ever thought of iMessage as "elitist" but rather as a messaging app that actually works in most situations. And nobody I've ever talked to has ever said "oh I'd love to buy an Android phone, but it doesn't have iMessage so..."
Maybe kids think that way, but nobody with any life experience outside of a few years of high school does.
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I was shocked at first too, but discovered those people actually exist on slashdot.
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If they allowed third-party access into iMessage people can still use their existing clients because Signal or Telegram could just hook into iMessages.
Re:Glad they didn't (Score:4, Interesting)
If iMessage was on Andrdoid a decade ago, the tech titans would have one more locked market segment today.
As an iPhone user, I could give two shits and a fuck if the standard was something other than iMessage. I'd just like there to be a standard that doesn't involve falling back to ancient SMS/MMS because Android users can't all agree on which messaging platform they prefer.
In ye olden days, I remember some people used to use Trillian to avoid having to run multiple messaging clients. You'd think the need for one universal messaging standard would've been realized by now.
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Because it's shit? The most basic of use-cases fails: group messaging. Replies go back to the original sender, not the group.
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Doesn't work over wifi.
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Then it isn't SMS.
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You have an interesting definition of "works fine" - yes, it can send single sentence text absolutely fine. Anything more than that, and it's either totally unsupported, or a shimmed-in hack from a bygone era that sucks in comparison to what is readily available today, should the "big boys" decide to stop using bad obsolete protocols as wedges to lock in users.
For one thing, I like to receive video sent from friends and family that I can actually see what's going on, rather than blurry bitcrushed .3GPP gar
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SMS is shit because
1. based on phone number as the ID
2. doesn't work on devices without a cellular modem (most tablets and computers)
3. no central message history
4. can be billed per message by the carrier, especially international SMS
5. is crappy to transfer files, pictures, and videos (yes even MMS is crappy)
SMS was fine in the 90s. Time to move on. #2 is probably the most important. There are workarounds (like Google Voice) but they have their downsides too.
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99% of what I do is talk and the one person that doesn't have a mobile connection has an app that allows him to get SMS texts over the internet. If I send files I upload them to Google Cloud and send a public link. Most people I talk to use SMS and resist using apps.
Well you need an app to read your SMS. The only thing is that it can be pre-installed.
I resist using SMS. I consider it to be a lower layer protocol like TCP/IP. I was using an email to SMS gateway to receive emails on my dumb phone back in the days. Now that my phone has an Internet connection, I have no reason to use SMS. I use it for 2 factor auth when they do not support email.
It's not because someone has a mobile connection that they want to be forced to read and reply to their messages from a tiny pho
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What's wrong with SMS? I use it all the time and it works fine with everything.
Multiple messages sent within a few seconds of each other can arrive out-of-sequence.
Messages can arrive late.
Messages sometimes don't arrive at all.
You have to ask the recipient manually if you want confirmation that they actually received something.
As someone else already said, it doesn't natively work over WiFi.
It doesn't support sending anything except text (and MMS has its own set of awful problems).
It requires 3rd party workarounds if you want to send/receive your mobile text messages from multiple de
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Today's "standard" seems to be RCS, having solved the major issue with prior standards that they cannot easily be controlled and commercially exploited by mobile network providers.
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iPhone users can't agree either. They use all the same protocols used on Android (Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal and others) PLUS iMessage.
Without the iPhone and iMessage, we'd be one step closer to that standard.
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The problem is that it's still fragmented, and still a mess, so the only lowest common denominator out there is still ass-old SMS, and everything defaulting to what a 15 year old phone can handle - limited message length, bitcrushed 3GPP video files to fit under an unreasonably small file size limit, etc.
An iMessage client for Android would have either forced Google to not fuck around with messaging as they have been (gchat, hangouts, allo, google chat, messages, RCS, etc.) and leave the usability hell we c
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The problem is that it's still fragmented, and still a mess, so the only lowest common denominator out there is still ass-old SMS
No it's not. SMS doesn't work on most internet connected devices such as non-cellular tablets and computers.
email would have been a better answer.
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forced Google to not fuck around with messaging as they have been (gchat, hangouts, allo, google chat, messages, RCS, etc.) and leave the usability hell we currently have unless everyone you know and ever message is all using the same app.
Up to allo Google was doing fine. Google Talk was renamed Hangouts but it was the same thing. Works well, cross-platform, a lot of people already have an account (gmail account), web-based client (inside gmail), centralized, searchable message history, audio and video calls. It also handled SMS. It had everything we needed. I preferred they kept XMPP compatibility, but nobody else joined the bandwagon.
Then they chose to split it into Allo/Duo and started to push RCS in messages. That's when it started going
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Yeah ok so I should just not receive messages any more from my entire family, my wife, and many friends. That's certainly a better solution than shitty SMS fallback.
You clearly must subscribe to the idea that form > function, yeah?
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Signal and Telegram are not innovative at all. Their only feature is encryption.
They still have a lot of downsides:
1. Not possible to use on many devices (requires one central phone)
2. Poor computer implementation (needs to piggy back on a cell phone, maybe even turned on, with internet, and the application installed)
3. Still based on phone number as an ID (worst possible choice, the phone number is owned by the carrier, not by you)
4. No centralized, searchable message archive
5. Lack of or poor web-based cl
Monopoly (Score:2)
iMessages is probably the number 1 reason why people don't switch from iOS to Android .. I've heard that multiple times from iPhone owners. The convenience of getting messages on the computer and of course keeping the message history. If Apple did that, they would lose money. But then sometimes you have to do things that cause you to lose money because it's the right thing to do. It's not fair to lock people into something if your "market advantage" comes not from superior product but from the fact that peo
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There are various messaging applications also allowing you to read/send messages from computers and work on every platform. No reason to use iMessage, really.
And by computer, you mean a Mac, and I mean any computer.
Remember that Steve Jobs promised to make Facetime an open industry standard in 2010. And it never happened. The vendor lock-in is Apple's most effective strategy so far.
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Remember that Steve Jobs promised to make Facetime an open industry standard in 2010. And it never happened. The vendor lock-in is Apple's most effective strategy so far.
To be fair, the original FaceTime that Jobs wanted to open up was a pure peer-to-peer product, and Apple were subsequently sued for patent infringement within that product. They changed to a central Apple server model, and that was the end of any talk about an open-source or Android version.
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You said the key phrase there: what markets they want to enter. That is what this is about - defining markets. Epic is using this example to show that there are, in fact, multiple markets and not one big 'smartphone' market. Furthermore, Apple WANTS it that way. Now they can use that to show that Apple does indeed have a 100% monopoly in the 'app retailing for IOS devices' market (a huge market by itself), which they maintain by technological and contractural means.
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Re: Monopoly (Score:3)
Apple has argued that it isn't a monopoly because iPhone users can simply switch to Android.
Epic has counter argued that cost (repurchasing apps) and lock-ins (iMessage, FaceTime) mean the switch is not simple. Further, it has argued that Apple has cultivated this situation (see emails being discussed).
Whether the judge will side with Apple or Epic is still in the air.
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Epic didn't like the rules and the pricing structure of the ecosystem provided by Apple, so they broke the rules and faced the consequences that were clearly laid out in the developer agreement.
No one is disputing that Apple controls access to the iOS app store, but Epic was free to offer its products outside of that mechanism if it didn't agree to the terms. The app store is Apple's product, and Epic is just trying to use the courts to negotiate a more favorable price for use of that product.
I know a lot
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How could Epic have continued to provide their software to iPhones after being removed from the app store?
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Re: Monopoly (Score:2)
Being removed from the app store denied them the ability to sell iOS apps. If Epic can convince the court the iOS app market is distinct from a smartphone app market, Apple might be found to be in the wrong by virtue of exploiting their position.
If, maybe, perhaps. Nobody yet knows how this will come out. Doesn't matter what you or "Slashdot" think the outcome should be.
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Being removed from the app store denied them the ability to sell iOS apps. If Epic can convince the court the iOS app market is distinct from a smartphone app market, Apple might be found to be in the wrong by virtue of exploiting their position.
True, but that was due to a deliberate, planned and underhanded violation of the AppStore rules. They actually had submitted an app that would change its behaviour when it was in the hands of a user, so what Apple reviewed was not what users saw. And Epic had already prepared a lawsuit that they started immediately after the app rejection.
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You fanboys sure do like making strawmen. No part of the Epic lawsuit is about 'trying to negotiate a more favorable price'. The lawsuit is about whether the App Store is a monoploy maintained through illegal means. Epic doesn't want a 'better price' in the App Store, they don't want to HAVE to use the App Store at all to sell their product to IOS users.
Your silly assertion that Epic 'was free to offer its products outside (of the App Store)' is why evidence like this is entered. This evidence shows tha
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It's Apple's sandbox and they decide who gets to play in it.
Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. all get to decide who plays in their sandboxes, too. Unless you are advocating that all tech companies should be forced to let everyone who wants it access to their platforms, Apple is free to set the rules for access to its app store, as well.
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Anti trust rules disallow things for big players that have the ability to affect markets that would otherwise be allowed.
Companies are allowed to set the price that they sell things for, and negotiate prices with other companies. Apple has been in trouble in the past because it used its size to dictate the prices of eBooks sold by other people.
In particular, one thing that anti trust laws disallow is product tying. That is, saying "if you use product X, you must use product Y." Plenty of people are arguing
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"The convenience of getting messages on the computer and of course keeping the message history."
Is basically a non-factor at this point. Every other messenger app supports this. And many SMS to PC sync solutions exist too if you need to be able to fallback to SMS. Windows 10 even added SMS sync right into windows 2 years ago.
And most people, yes even iphone users have other messaging apps ... snapchat, whatsapp, telegram, etc.
FWIW my family has a mix of devices; for us telegram works just fine cross platform; and lately although we still use telegram, we talk to our kids on discord more than anything
The right thing to do (Score:2)
The tech world is littered with the bones of companies who did "the right thing to do". Changing that would require fundamental changes in our society.
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This is an uninformed and fallacious argument. I have WhatsApp on my iPhone, iPad, three MacBook Pros and and a Mac Pro, and it fullfills this function and works with people who are Android users. I'd prefer iMessage and FaceTime, but WhatsApp is the only ubiquitous **modern** messaging and video calling tool. The idea that porting iMessage to Android would break down the walls of the garden is farcical and been
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No it doesn't.
You need your phone on and connected to whatsapp for whatsapp to work on your computers. Whatsapp is awfully designed.
There are better alternatives of course. But iMessage and Whatsapp are both total crap.
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Which messaging app(s) do you like best?
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I haven't tried them all.
But Facebook messenger and Google Hangouts seems good. Although I understand that if you hate these companies you won't like them.
But at least they work on any device. Google seems to be moving to chats, which is a downgrade since it doesn't have built-in voice and video calls.
A lot of people have a Facebook and Gmail/Google account anyways. I'm sure there are dozens of opensource equivalent (with all the same features as these two) but nobody use them.
Root cause: vendor lock-in (Score:3)
What are the #1 and #2 most used messaging system? SMS and Email. Why? Because they are standard protocols with many many applications that support them, and those applications work on every operating system on the planet.
We need to separate service vendors from OS vendors. Here we have an OS vendor who created a service, and they are incentivized to NOT make that service available to everyone! How absurd is that! Capitalism and innovation only work if application and service vendors are incentivized to make their services available to as many people as possible. By tying them to the OS, we all lose."iMessage" ought to be a network service, and there ought to be multiple application vendors making clients for the iMessage network, and we want those application vendors making applications for multiple operating systems.
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SMS clings on as the lowest common denominator, but it's a cash-cow for networks. Costs them basically nothing to deliver an SMS, but they charge commercial users for the service.
Well, there is one other advantage with SMS. All you need to send one is a 2G modem with minimal signal. Quite handy for IoT devices where networks are poor or the location has bad signal and 3G/4G/5G won't work.
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offtopic: I see you modernized your signature, and this is totally a pedantic tip, but the usage of "woke" is more of an adjective than a noun. Someone doesn't say "You are such a woke" (noun) but they definitely say "oh, you're so woke..." (adjective).
Ok, we can now return to arguing about why SMS sucks, and yet is still in use everywhere because no mobile OS company is interested in actually replacing it.
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I kept the same phrasing to show that "woke" is just the new "SJW", same old crap.
Moving away from iMessage was a pain (Score:2)
Years ago, helping people switch from iPhones to Androids used to cause all sorts of headaches. e.g. people would go to message someone that switched from an iPhone to an Android phone but because they had used the iMessage service before (Apple made it the default for iOS to iOS messaging), the iPhone user would continue to try and message that contact with iMessage instead of regular SMS.
In the end, if I recall correctly, there was some convoluted opt-out process the ex-iPhone user had to do on their iCl
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Moving away from a proprietary walled garden will always be a pain. That is the whole point. Lock in. And yet people flock to these gardens and they feel that they are the better for it when in fact it's the opposite. If you don't have control of your information to do with as you please then it's not your information.
Re:Moving away from iMessage was a pain (Score:4, Interesting)
When it was first released, there was no way to disable iMessage for your account and device unless you had the device itself - cue lots of people upgrading their iPhone, selling their old one and ... random strangers getting their iMessages. You had to disable iMessage on the device itself before getting rid of it.
However, since then, Apple have made returning an iPhone or iPad to factory settings trivial, and doing so automatically does things like disconnect the device from iCloud, Facetime, iMessage, Find my Device etc so you no longer have the issue. The beginnings of this was done very early on, as Apple divorced iMessage et al from the physical device identifiers themselves after the above initial speed bump.
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It's still not a cut-and-dried process. Yes, you can remove your phone number from the iMessage service, but if you had the audacity to use your email address as an Apple ID (which, by the way, you have to) and an iPhone user has that email address in your contact info, iMessage will still try to send to that as default instead of an SMS message to your phone number unless they specifically select your phone number instead of just tapping your name.
My parents regularly do this, so I don't see messages for
What I want from iMessage: (Score:2)
Isn't Android compatibility (though that'd be nice - at least it would get rid of the non-inclusivity of the blue/green bubble thing), it's two things:
- custom bubble colors for contacts, so that you don't end up sending something to someone else than the intended recipient (happens to me all the time, and thankfully nothing embarrassing); it's been 14 iOS releases and this is still not there.
- actual search of message history (instead of having to scroll endlessly to find something from a few days ago).
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Wow, talk about "discoverability" - great job Apple :rollseyes:
Wow... Eddy was right for once! (Score:2)
Phil was an idiot. The reality might be that it was the right call, and good, competitive behavior at that... but it did not prevent monopoly abuse with Facebook (or Google or Microsoft).
Too bad the legislature doesn’t make a law about properly defining monopoly abuse relative to mergers that is relevant and concrete for today.
Still not for corporate use (Score:1)
That's nice, but iMessage doesn't even exist in our environment despite having more iPhones than Android devices. In order for use to capture SMS for corporate compliance it had to be disabled.
If Microsoft can figure this out with Teams and drop a cross-platform app that allows compliance checks and logging I don't understand why Apple doesn't want to step up... unless they intentionally want to half-ass their offerings for corporate use. If we had an iMessage backdoor that wasn't reliant on carrier SMS gat
I wouldn't use it if they did port it to Android (Score:2)
I have no interest in promoting vendor lock-in. I have friends who use iMessage. We can communicate just fine. We can't easily share videos, but if anything, it gives me a chance to suggest that there are better, and more open, alternatives to iMessage.
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Alternatives which they likely have to use anyways, in addition to iMessage.
This! This is why I agree with the Apple AntiTrust (Score:1)
The Epic-Apple AntiTrust case has always been a 'percentage of money' business BS thing, but when you get into the anti-consumer BS that Apple pulls, that's what makes me say they need to be slapped down - The iMessage lock-in, the hypocrisy going on with Right To Repair, the Apple-OS-Only software for Apple made peripherals - just try using Airpods Max on an Android or a Pro Display XDR on a PC. This bothers me a great deal.
For me, I'm stuck getting postage stamp artifacted videos of my niece, just because
Steve Jobs already promised this... (Score:1)
When iMessage and FaceTime were introduced, Steve Jobs said -- on stage -- they would make them open standards so anyone could use them. He died shortly after, and it never happened.
Apple has been becoming progressively more unethical and more big business since Jobs died. I worked there both pre and post Jobs' death, and the shift was immediate and very apparent to everyone who worked there with me. It's a shame.
I know a lot of people view Steve Jobs as this tyrannical evil person, and he definitely was te
WTF does that have to do with Fortnite? (Score:2)
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It matters because it is an example of the fact that the smartphone market is really two distinct markets - Apple and Android, and Apple wants it that way. And that is critical for determining whether the App Store is a monopoly or not. If there is just one market and people freely move between Apple and Android, then you can't really say they have a monopoly. But if there are multiple 'markets', then Apple does have a 100% monopoly on retailing apps in that market.
Incredible news (Score:2)
Pretty damning (Score:1)
email from Federighi. iOS for Android would unambiguously improve the iPhone end user experience. Anyone who has tried to hold a group conversation between when the group is mixed iPhone and Android can attest... Apple has pretty consistently chosen vendor lock-in over user experience since Steve Jobs died. (And some before he died, too, but certainly more now)
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