These two Messages features combine to create a terrible UX. When someone starts a group chat in Messages and includes a single non-Apple device, it converts the chat into a group MMS at which point anyone in the group who was added by Apple ID email address starts receiving the messages via email with text messages arriving as text attachments to those emails.

The from/to addresses look like 2345678901@domain with domains such as mypixmessages.com, mms.att.net, mypixmessages.com, icmms1.sun5.lightsurf.net, etc.

It doesn't matter if you have a phone # associated with your Apple ID in addition to an email address. If the person who starts the chat accidentally uses your email address (which Messages makes both very easy to do accidentally and very difficult to notice because Messages hides the actual address behind the contact name) and there's a single non-Apple device in the group, you get to be on the receiving end of a barrage of emails from which you cannot unsubscribe.

When Messages converts a group to MMS, it really needs to make it obvious which recipients are email addresses and which are phone #s... it should either not hide the information behind the contact name and/or for cases where a contact has both a phone # and email addresses, it should favor the phone #.

The ironic part of all of this is that while the EU may be forcing Apple into supporting RCS to fix the situation, Google has resisted every effort to extend RCS to their own Voice platform.

It's really a shame that Microsoft gave up on mobile, because they really could be a real middle ground for the rest of us that just want interoperability.

Google Voice has been in maintenance mode for years. It's unlikely that Google resisted adding RCS, but rather there's been no effort to actually do it.

Upon moving to Europe we discovered that WhatsApp is the preferred way to connect with friends, employees, social groups and schools. It was actually the driving factor in me conceding and setting up a FB account.

IIRC I have not ever linked the two nor should FB have...

A service having a paid version doesn't mean anything.

I'd be sure this was why, if Google hadn't once tried to get me to use a combo SMS/MMS + some-other-Google-messaging-service app on my phone (by replacing the normal SMS app on OS upgrade—this was on a Nexus phone) that was so broken and janky it was unusable.

Like, it is for-sure the case that a rich, huge, "smart" company can fuck this up a lot worse than Apple has. iMessage is easily good enough that I haven't had to go find some alternative SMS app, at least.

(Almost) nobody here is challenging that it is, under the condition that you communicate exclusively with iPhone users.

MMS group chats are an absolute dumpster fire from an UX point of view. In some countries, a single MMS costs about half an USD as well (per recipient)!

Some carriers/plans don’t even offer it.

> MMS group chats are an absolute dumpster fire from an UX point of view. In some countries, a single MMS costs about half an USD as well (per recipient)!

Yes, agreed, I’ve never seen it not be awful.

It doesn’t support delivery receipts (my old Nokia could do that in 2003!), doesn’t let me send texts to a specific number of a given contact, doesn’t let me pick what number I want to send texts from (for dual SIM), and most frustratingly I can’t send an SMS to any contact it believes to be on iMessage.

It gets even worse when iMessage and multiple devices come into the mix. It all kind of works for 95% of people I’m sure, but it completely falls apart in some cases with absolutely no way to be more explicit.

You can long press on a sent iMessage blue bubble to reveal a 'Send as Text Message' menu item. It's quite hidden but it's there.

Swipe up from bottom screen edge to open Control Center, toggle Cellular Data off, send as SMS, then toggle Cellular Data back on?

Maybe asking siri for help on this is the apple way.

Oh, what's even better is that it tricks the iPhone owner into thinking that a full resolution image was sent. On my wife's end she see's the full resolution original format image in the messages thread, not the blurry 32kb version everyone else gets so she had no idea that this happens.

I think that setting doesn’t even do anything for MMS.

The two just have very different semantics, just like how it's generally accepted that email is not a great medium for group chat either.

And at least it was cross platform but overall I agree that mobile messaging should be standardized and open. So while the Google messaging strategy has been an abject failure overall, they did eventually trip over themselves and stumble onto the right path.

Release iMessage on Android. If there is a concern that it wouldn't be secure with Google controlling it, then they could put it out on F-Droid, which would simultaneously prove that they're serious and also undermine Google's own efforts at controlling the culture war.

Yes, there are other solutions to the spam problem. They are nowhere near as effective as what I’ve witnessed as an iMessage user so far. I regularly get spam chats on WhatsApp and Signal.

Spam doesn't matter here - same app is used for SMS, which gets spam, so there's nothing new here.

But if Apple wanted to, they'd just sort out a deal that allows hardware signing of iMessage accounts on Android. That's not an unfixable problem.

Hardware Attestation however can have an actual security benefit.

If beeper was able to attest without hardware, Apple isn't doing hardware attestation and it's therefore just anti-competitive.

Apple does not want you to connect to iMessage with non-Apple hardware and Beeper uses old Apple binaries to let you do just that.

That, to me, does fall under the umbrella term of "circumventing" some measures that Apple put in place to stop you from doing that; but I guess I can see the point where you'd object to use of that word?

The point was that if you can replicate it in software, then they're not requiring hardware attestation.

Guess it's local issue?

Email is in my bio if needed. Thanks in advance.

I have not participated in any cryptocurrency-related groups, so I have always assumed it’s just random.

Additionally, F-Droid signs every app themselves.

[1] https://f-droid.org/docs/Building_Applications/

edit: When the signing is in single entity like f-droid, we have single point of failure.

When everybody sign their own app, we have trust scalability issues -- "trust" just can't scale to everybody.

Of course the build platform being compromised is possible but that can happen even with binary distribution.

As for reply threads, when it's used it creates a lot of confusion for non iPhone users and it's not clear how Google Messages and other texting clients can fix it post-hoc. I'm not even sure how iOS reconstitutes it-- perhaps Apple sends some message metadata on the side via iMessage?

Hopefully the experience is improved when they implement RCS, though I'm not sure if tapbacks are part of the spec.

Unless there's something I'm missing, only Android users get cross compatible tapbacks.

Anyway, I hope for Apple that they have numbers proving that this bullshit strategy really makes them sell more iPhones because it makes them look really stupid. In any sane society, nobody cares about the color of a bubble, in fact, as an iPhone user, I blame more Apple for the lack of basic SMS features than of the bubble color. I’d be a stupid friend if I pressured my friends to get a blue bubble, that’s insane.

Nokia's Lumia phones were so good at one time. The hardware was top notch (including cameras). The software was smoother than android and more intuitive than iphone. It was just a solid platform.

I would buy one in a blink if it was available today in the high end segment. I'd not even be bothered about google's anti competitive behavior wrt youtube and other apps.

Massive shame we lost Nokia and windows phone both due to the de facto duopoly that has taken hold in the market.

Because 1) everyone in the Apple world knows, and 2) they want the answer to "What can be done about it" to be "Shame your peers into switching to an iPhone".

And it works. A little too well, especially with younger folks.

But I'm also the opposite of a younger folk.

SMS is outdated in a similar way that email is, it's something you use to receive notifications and messages from companies etc, it's not how you talk to your friends.

https://www.verizonwireless.com/pdfs/user_guides/How_To_Txt_...

I cannot overstate how impactful it is to and how vain American young woman are about phone choice. Android users might as well be autistic in the eyes of young iPhone using women.

Here’s a selection of evidence, but much much more than this has been written about it.

https://applemagazine.com/iphone-users-76-more-attractive-on...

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/android-ios-incompatibl...

https://leafandcore.com/2019/08/24/green-bubbles-are-a-turn-...

I’d argue that it’s due to social media, not the iPhone. I can believe that a reasonable number of guys being “bubble shamed” into inceldom, but as a driver for a quantifiable and significant number? No way.

MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc? For sure.

Desperate men blaming everyone and everything for their own dating shortcomings is nothing new.

A Moto G 2023 is $100, unlocked. With a competitively-priced prepaid MVNO, it’s $10 a month to maintain the line if using data becomes unaffordable for that month.

I’d love to know where I can get a free iPhone and get the same economics as described above. All I see is iPhones for $x00 with a $60/month/line minimum. Even on MVNOs.

In India alone, whatsapp MAU already reaches nearly 50% of imessage MAU worldwide, and rapidly rising.

WhatsApp is ubiquitous in India, the most populous country in the world.

(I'm American, for context.)

You also seem to be forgetting the most-populous country in the world – no WhatsApp there either.

Between China and the US, that's already 20% of the global population unlikely to be using WhatsApp for most of their messaging.

However in the 4th largest (Indonesia) everybody uses WhatsApp (at least a few years back) as Facebook offered free data to their services there (internet.org / "Free Basics") whereas iMessage would cost money for data traffic or SMS/MMS.

Thus really different across countries and regions and social circles.

I really don’t think Apple consider iMessage exclusivity that important.

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/08/29/china-biggest-iphone-ma...

Then you missed the part where Apple executives explicitly said so in writing:

> "the #1 most difficult [reason] to leave the Apple universe app is iMessage . . . iMessage amounts to serious lock-in." Schiller stated that "moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us, this email illustrates why."

https://www.phonearena.com/news/imessage-locks-ios-users-int...

People I know in India tend to use WhatsApp. People I know in Europe tend to use whatever shit is popular where they live. Discord, Telegram, FB Messenger, iMessage for those with iPhones, SMSes as a default, you name it. Again, what’s the point?

iMessage is only used in the US.

AOL finally "won" that one by making a buffer exploit in their own client part of the required protocol. Later a court required them to allow messaging interop (as part of the Time Warner merger). They never implemented it.

My youth was in the late 90s and 2000s and I don’t know a single soul that used AOL, ICQ, or Yahoo. I imagine all of them must have been hoping for the reverse at that point, access to MSN.

Obviously just 1 anecdote but I just wanted to share that my experience and your experience were dramatically different.

I definitely look back on those as the "good old days" of chat.

IIRC AIM was popular in America and MSN was popular in Europe.

MSN was more of mid-00s thing. The 90s were all AOL though. I knew people who used ICQ (it was definitely more of a nerd thing) and Yahoo Messenger too.

Unless you actually sign up you tend not to find anyone using it. But when you do, it all appears out of nowhere.

Same as when you buy a car and suddenly everyone has the same colour/model.

I used Y!M for NeoPets stuff when I was 14, and MSN for school but never ICQ or AIM.

Those time's were specially magical.

I also don’t think goading apple is going to do much here either. Regardless of the current feelings around apple’s walled garden, they are not going to suddenly keel over and give up on locking out these commercialized attempted to bypass their security

In theory I love it but in reality it'll be dead soon as Apple has too much to gain from the walled garden they've spent decades and billions building and defending.

(Whether it is a violation or not, I certainly couldn't say, but my point being that there is a reasonable good faith interpretation of the behavior that would not raise eyebrows.)

They’re publishing client software, which is protected expression provided it’s original and doesn’t infringe any trademarks or copyrights.

The end users are the ones potentially violating the ToS by connecting to Apple APIs.

Apple has no basis to tell Beeper to cease and desist from the publication of software that it is legal to publish.

That would be a clear and avoidable error and would get them shut down instantly.

I probably won't try it again until it has a few months of uninterrupted service.

Either Beeper manages to make a client that is truly indistinguishable from old iPhones, and gets to exist for a few years, or Apple somehow manages to patch all existing iPhones in a way that makes it impossible to spoof (not sure if that's possible with old hardware that don't have a secure enclave).

I highly doubt that these guys will win. I would bet 5 AAPL on it.

I still have my Macbook if/when Beeper is cut off again.

I missed a few messages when I switched from iPhone to Android because I hadn't deregistered my number from Apple.

I don't think I'd use my existing Apple ID for this -- probably easy enough to create a new one with a new email.

I have no idea how to compute the actual price. It really isn’t any better than SMS anyway, so I put the value at $0.

Depends on what you do with it. You can send much higher-quality photos and videos over iMessage than SMS/MMS. You can also do things like play games (chess, for example) entirely inside iMessage.

If you're just sending short messages of plain text, yeah, it's not much of an improvement.

You can only get Apple Fitness on Apple devices, but you also have to pay for it.

Imo the only thing that should be done here is only valid Apple IDs should be able to use this service. Then paying customers are the ones using it. Problem solved, right?

1) you have a device

2) you have software

If you buy the software, it is paid.

If you do not buy the software, its free.

If the software is not available for your device that does make it not free; you just have an incompatible device.

Any other take on this is subscribing to some bias.

Paper clips, are not relevant.

There is a distinction, to be fair, between “free open source software” which is free and you can take it and port it to your device if you want.

…but no one is claiming iMessage is FOSS, and when someone says it is “free”, that is not what they mean.

You are the one asking if iMessage is “free” (as in beer) software.

It comes with iOS - the license of which is provided free of charge for each user to run on their respective device.

I never made any statement about Beeper - I was talking singularly and only about Apple.

This is not true. On iOS - iOS has APIs for third party messaging and voip apps to intergrates natively into the system where they are presented as equal peers to iMessage and default phone app.

When I view contacts in the first party Contacts app, it presents message & call as the top options for my contacts. The first time per-contact it'll prompt you which you want to use, with third party options getting equal billing compared to first-party, but after that it'll remember.

Also, merely opening a separate app doesn't really help. How about instead of having 5 different apps (that the system one sometimes generously allows you to open), you had one app that can seamlessly speak all protocols?

You can add multiple e-mail or contacts accounts (even from different providers) and it'll seamlessly merge them in the system Mail/Contacts apps - why can't we have the same for messages?

Because there are standards there - SMTP and MIME and HTML for email, vCard for contacts.

For the contacts app, whatever fun graph or RDF or whatever format you use for contacts, your extension has to provide contacts via the surface of the SDK, which luckily had vCard to influence it. That may mean that the contacts app cannot support round-trip edits of those contacts, and you need to go back to whatever source to change things.

Same with calendar events - applications can expose a calendar, but this is typically not editable and you need to go back into the application to change things (e.g. to remove a session from your calendar, go into the conference app and say you no longer intend to attend it).

The message apps typically have none of this. They don't have commonalities in terms of identifiers (and may all claim authoritative use of say a phone number, with no approval of the carrier). They have no consistency in formatting. They have a varying set of additional features, none of which are designed to be compatible (e.g. person-to-person payments in Facebook Messenger vs in iMessage). They may also support extensions by third parties, business accounts with custom routing and workflow, etc.

XMPP and later Matrix tried to create standards around this, and for XMPP there was a brief time we thought there'd be buy in by larger parties like Google and Facebook. I'm very curious to see if we see uptake in ActivityPub, or if the same product/market forces make its popularity transient as well.

And on top of this, other voice apps are merged with the list of incoming calls, e.g. discord calls show up in the same list as phone calls.

This really highlights the intentional degradation of chat behavior. From a pure user experience standpoint, Apple’s own product does not meet their own philosophy and guidelines applied to other categories of app.

There was no push for RCS until iMessage came along.

Also it's worth noting that RCS originally launched in 2008, a year after the iPhone and iMessage launched in 2011. Many features we expect from both iMessage and RCS today were not present at the time, but a next-generation messaging spec was there- Apple chose not to engage with it- which is too bad because at the time Apple could have helped to defragment the implementations and make it a better specification. The carriers fumbled pretty hard on compatibility, also probably because they saw it as a way to produce vendor lock in for their customer base.

What's kind of interesting about this to me is that Google was able to add encrypted messaging on top of RCS without the help of carriers (and it's not just because they develop/host Jibe, the most common RCS server side implementation-- E2EE messages can be sent over any RCS server/relay from what I understand). They just use a special mimetype and some base64 encoding and a custom identity server for exchanging keys. All things Apple could have done with RCS back in 2011.

Google's whitepaper on their E2EE: https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf

That doesn't change anything about what I said.

With RCS or iMessage they cannot justify charging for these.

I also worked at Apple in 2008, and recall the discussions then too.

I wonder if e2ee makes this difficult.

Is iMessage the default sms client? It's just called Messages on my phone. What does it offer? Mine looks like the stock android one. I see virtually zero options to do anything else than to send a message. Is it US only thing?

If you don't ever want to fall back to SMS, you pick some other app (WhatsApp, Signal, etc).

In the US, unlimited texting became a thing much earlier than in the EU, partly because the carrier and network relationship is structured differently. So SMS is bad but free, and thus a bit more tolerable.

A higher percentage of iPhone users means that more often than not, you'll find your text is using the much better protocol. As a result, many in the US never had to pick a third party to be "winner" via network effects (like say LINE in certain asian countries).

This puts things into a weird state, where SMS and iMessage sort of act like a single pseudo-"product" in the US available to both iPhone and Android users, but where Android users get a way worse experience and where iPhone users get a worse experience when talking with Android users.

Which is where I get to personal opinion, and say this is mostly Google's fault. https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo... . As owner of the other major platform and with the ability to release a compatible chat app for iPhone, they've had and squandered every opportunity to own the space.

Namely: Telegram, Signal, LINE, WhatsApp, Discord, among others.

That is, all except one.

The one exception is, of course, Apple's iMessage.