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Pressure grows on Apple to open up iMessage::Samsung has joined Google’s campaign to force Apple to make iMessage RCS-compatible—but European regulators are more likely to get that job done.
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“Lol, no.” -Tim Cook, probably.
“Too bad” -the EU, as well
“Hell yes” - the EU, definitely
I have zero interest in using any Apple service. I’ve never needed to, and I never will.
They can keep their imessage thing, I hadn’t even heard of it until just now. I’m good.
It’s incompatible with Android on purpose. They want their users shaming non apple users in to getting an iPhone.
Well it kinda works in a weird way
I saw it work in high school, but I haven’t seen adults care much. As an android user, there are times I wish I had iMessage, but I’ve never had anyone bother me about it.
It is not just high school students that care about pureblood iMessage group chats. Also dip shit wife beaters: https://news.yahoo.com/nba-head-coach-punished-team-161451722.html
Yeah, there’s always shitty adults. I typically try to avoid them
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Surely that’s a people problem, not a technical one?
Who makes the bubble green? Do they not create the people problem?
I would love if they would just roll out an iMessage app to android. Ideally free.
I could realistically see them roll out an apple subscription pack to android eventually. Give users a way to access Apple Music, Fitness, etc. May even allow android users make use of Apple Watch.
I’m not an Apple fan boy, but this seems like a decent compromise from a business perspective. This meets a need and I don’t think there’s a decent enough argument that it would cannibalize iPhone sales (flagship models anyway)
I’ll just carry on using whatapps and people on iPhones can either download it or put up with my different coloured bubbles if they don’t want too. Luckily people in the UK are all mostly on WhatsApp anyway, this who text message colours is a very yank centric problem.
I tried to use it a few months ago. It would not let me use it unless I gave it access to all my contacts’ information. I denied the permission request and it wouldn’t work.
How in the hell are you okay with that?
How do you think phone number based chat apps works bro?
Give me the option to add contacts individually?
That app is cancer, better just to nope out of the installation.
I’m pretty sure the stock SMS app that comes with your phone also needs access to the contacts permissions, but is enabled by default, so the app doesn’t even ask for it.
So in addition to that, why give the information to Facebook too?
Remember, Zuckerberg thinks people are dumbfucks for giving information to him.
Why do they go out of their way to disable the app if I deny access to contacts? Surely it would be less work to just add a couple of warnings telling me it may not work properly. But to disable the whole app? That is absolutely ridiculous.
Because that’s how phones work, it links your account to your phone number and uses your contacts to tell you who’s on the app too using their numbers.
Because that’s how -phones- Whatsapp works,
Yeah, that is also how computer viruses work. I was very thankful for permission control. That app is cancer.
Meh, I think some people are just paranoid on Lemmy when it comes to stuff like this. There’s plenty of laws in the UK around storage and use of information that protect users of apps like this.
And all thieves pay close attention to laws, and make sure their apps have “nothing” hidden in the folds.
If it’s so benign, why make it necessary to give all the information about all your contacts to the app?
To paraphrase Zuckerberg, “people are dumbfucks for giving me so much information.”
How else do you think a messaging app that replaces your phones messaging functionality is supposed to work if not on phone numbers?
Signal or at least Telegram or Viber. Fuck WhatsApp, I’d like at least my messenger app to not belong to Facebook of all companies.
Whatsapp is actually better than Telegram lol. You fell for Telegrams marketing lol
At least Telegram doesn’t show your fucking phone number
They can literally read your messages by default lol
Any FSB agent can connect any whatsapp message to person who wrote it.
That’s just plain wrong.
Whatsapp is using the Signal Protocol.
To read your messages they need to get your phone. And now even your Backups are encrypted, so they can’t read your Messages from there.
For now. Facebook has said that they plan to disable end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp at some point, so that you can receive messages from people using Facebook Messenger.
This gets even better: WA listened to Putin and did not enable channels because it is popular among 40+ and teachers.
While it’s all still E2E encrypted I don’t really care what servers it goes though. If the UK/EU manage to get encryption blocked then I’ll worry.
they still collect the messages’ metadata and create a profile based on that.
Do you use E2EE for all your chats? I think nearly nobody does.
It’s on by default with every convo in WA.
I don’t think that works, since why would people want yet another chat app to deal with. I tried several but usually gave them up because iMessage does what I need it to and I don’t want to check many
Having everyone support RCS, as an update from SMS, gives that interoperability, along with improving the SMS experience
I was a huge fan of what Pigeon tried to do, but I’m Apple-centric these days and have no idea what the state of that is
You can do apple music on android
Apple Music on android is shit
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I ain’t paying a one time or subscription to get fucking blue or green bubbles. Hell with that.
FaceTime would be nice to have on Android as well, I know it technically works via a browser, if you get an invite from an iPhone user, but it’s such a bad experience for everyone. And I’m sure they do that because it’s easy peer pressure “advertising” from Apple users who want to video call with Android users, but can’t be bothered to put any work into using a compatible app, and instead blame Android users for the incompatibility.
You can use Apple Music and an Apple Watch from android.
You can’t use an Apple watch on Android because it requires the Apple watch app to sync with the phone and that won’t work on Android.
Yes because iPhones have ✨magic chips✨ inside which only Apple has… I’m pretty sure the apple watch communicates with Bluetooth. Apple just deliberately shuts Android out.
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Apple originally looked into it but decided not to because they wanted to maintain their ecosystem. Same story as usual.
I have no idea why the above guy seems to think that Apple watches work on androids
It doesn’t work on Android, I know that. But I’ll bet you 1000€ that Apple could enabled cross-platform compatibility with an OTA update.
That’s pretty stupid. I doubt many Android users would switch to Iphone you for a smartwatch, but a few would absolutely buy apple watches if they could.
I guess the point is that they don’t want iphone users to switch to android since that would make their watch practically useless.
Apple doesn’t want to that because they make money from iMessage. Android wouldn’t want you to do that if they had iMessage. If you use Android and have RCS then you don’t need iMessage because you already have the features you want. Android only wants iMessage be opened so Apple makes less money. Don’t get caught up in their war. Use your RCS messenger and don’t be worried about what Apple has.
Unless the EU makes them use RCS they never will. In the US iMessage is literally THE REASON people buy the iPhone. It’s their main selling point. They don’t care how much pressure you place on them, they aren’t going to lose those sales willingly.
Group chats in RCS weren’t even end-to-end encrypted on Android until August of this year. Green texts are a security risk.
😂, a security risk 🤣🤣🤣🤣 Are you Edward Snowden that you think it’s such a massive risk?
You are delusional. I use text messages all the time and there is zero risk.
Is there zero risk or do you think there is zero risk? Text messages can absolutely be intercepted by your service provider
Don’t you think you’re a bit paranoid? Does the service provider care to know that you sent a message to your friend saying “great party last”? Or to your wife, “pick up bread and milk please”?
I’m quite sure they are not wasting their time doing that.
If what you need to say is so secret, you should not be using iMessage, SMS or WhatsApp but something stronger like Signal, Matrix etc
I don’t think it’s paranoid to not want any intermediary to know what you’re talking about, even if all you’re talking about is innocuous things like groceries.
Besides, they don’t have to “waste time” on anything. They’ve got computers to collect it all.
Of course, like you said, Signal or Matrix are potential solutions for that, but you still need to get both sides to agree on using them. SMS have the advantage that everyone has a phone number and can thus use them. Upgrading to RCS will secure this insecure-yet-very-popular medium.
I understand that but as we know from Edward Snowden, the CIA literally have direct server access to all of Apple servers, Google servers, Amazon servers and Microsoft servers to name a few.
So they can just log in and view your iMessages at anytime. Or have the system collect them. This was part of the Patriot Act that requires the tech companies to make sure the government can view all of this at any time to identify terrorists.
That means the server definitely has the encryption key to your conversations. However you are protected from having a snooper snoop your line using snoop tools because the connection to the server is encrypted
Okay so now that it has encryption, what is the security risk?
If you’re that concerned with security, shouldn’t you be using Signal and try to convince others to do so? iMessage is E2E encrypted but Signal is platform-agnostic and has better security/privacy.
I don’t care but you have to convince Apple. People really pile on for the most trivial of comments.
I can’t speak for the others, but I’m just curious as to why iMessage’s quirks are heavily put up with. With the options of messaging apps nowadays, the “green bubble” stuff seems like an arbitrary problem.
Sure, it’s stock software, but plenty are willing to switch off Edge/Safari for Chromium browsers. I understand that there’s strong social pressure to conform to using the same messaging service. I think it’s something that can be worked around with any proficiency with tech, along with a good argument to the social circle. I managed to get off Messenger this way and it worked great.
Personally I’d rather find the best message service than use what everyone else uses, but that’s just me. It’s not a big problem at the end of the day, really. People value different things with their tech, and that’s fine.
Network effect. It’s easier to convince the one green text to switch than to convince everyone to switch to an alternative. Even in my one immediate family we only have one Android. As a result we have two group threads, one of which excludes that number so images and videos will go through at full quality. Message is the default so people use it. I’m aware that’s not the case in other countries.
In most of Europe, nobody uses an apple phone, so the pressure to get them to use a different protocol is fairly low.
💀
The fact that other people they know also use it.
The app itself is pretty much the same as any other modern messaging app, but network effects are everything when it comes to messaging services.
This is why you see entire countries where everyone has WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or Telegram, depending on what other people in the country are using.
Encryption, photos are higher quality through it (this is where “Android cameras are bad” came from,) typing indicators, sending messages over Wi-Fi, iMessage games, and message effects.
All of this is available on just about every messaging service, so the real answer is tribalism and lack of consumer education.
But still, if you have an Android and someone you want to text has an iPhone, you’re using SMS, not RCS.
I do believe RCS-compatibility for iMessage would make take a chunk out of iPhone sales honestly.
I message people on iOS from my android all the time, we use WhatsApp and the problem is solved.
My understanding of “Android cameras bad” came from snapchat on Android literally taking shittier pictures and videos for some reason.
It took a screenshot of the viewfinder instead of an actual shot with shutter settings etc.
Some of that isn’t i-message specific though, right? I have a Pixel and it has high quality pictures, typing indicators, reads receipts, sends over wifi… the other stuff I don’t think Android has but that’s a bit gimicky anyway. Not trying to be an android fan girl but I really don’t understand what makes i-message better.
The problem is the walled garden, both ecosystems have those features but they don’t work together. If all your friends have iPhones, there’s a lot of pressure to also have an iPhone. And once you’re in, you’re not likely getting out unless all your social circle does at once. That kind of lock in is extremely valuable.
I have an android and use Textra as my messaging app. I can see iPhone reactions and also react to messages agnostic of the other phone’s OS
I agree that all the stuff iMessage has that RCS doesn’t is gimmicky, I’m, an Android user myself…but if you have an Android and someone you want to text has an iPhone, you’re both using SMS.
It isn’t better, but it’s an extreme example of Americas corporate fanaticism, everywhere else people say “well if Apple and Google don’t play nice together, we’ll use a third party app and skip it all”. In the US they say, “if you don’t have an iPhone that makes you worse than me somehow so this allows me to lord it over you”.
It is not literally the reason.
Yeah this thread is wild… like no imessage isn’t literally the reason people buy iPhones. And iMessage doesn’t have “higher quality photos.”
Everytime I discuss apple vs android with colleagues, it always boils down to “but come one, you can’t take someone with green bubbles seriously”. And we all work as developers for god’s sake. iPhone users are more shallow than you think.
And yes iMessage has way higher image quality than sms, just like RCS has
And yes iMessage has way higher image quality than sms, just like RCS has
MMS resolution seems fine for me and on Android, if I try to send a photo via SMS, my phone will alert me and suggest that I send that particular text (with a photo attachment) via MMS.
True. So true in fact that I’d be willing to bet that even if the EU made them implement RCS they still wouldn’t do it in the US. USB-C only worked because it’s a hardware change and maintaining separate lightning and USB-C models and accessory ecosystems doesn’t make sense. RCS is a software change that costs them nothing to NOT use in the only market where it would hurt them.
Agreed
I have seen people literally say they like that iMessage is exclusive, and they like to keep Android users away/separate
It was reeking of classism in addition to being generally a terrible thing to read
I knew a 29 y/o woman that switched to iPhone so that others with iPhones would see her text messages bubble as blue instead of green. Imagine blowing over a thousand dollars so that someone else sees blue rather than green in text messages. Meanwhile, I can make the bubble colors whatever color I want on my Android.
I honestly blame Apple for abusing the societal penchant for forming tribes around random things.
That's just sad. Not even sports teams or musicians, but over a walled-gardened messaging app?
I’ve heard of people not responding to the wrong colored bubbles or being judgemental, like my $1,200 phone is better than your $1,200 phone?
Bullet dodged. Thinking you’re hot shit because you use the ultimate basic bitch phone is just ridiculous.
I mean, guys have the same thing going on. Fickle knows no gender.
I think basic bitch is not a gender specific phrase, I personally use the meme bitch on myself even as a cis guy.
What an American problem. 😂
In so many ways.
Top whack android phones aret really cheaper than iPhones these days so it’s not classism as such. Yanks just seem to love to tribalise everything, see masks during Covid as another example. I think it’s a result of having a two party political system.
I know it’s not actually a thing, it was about how they were talking about it
The EU has dragged Apple through the mud in order to make them change for the better, they will be able to do the same.
If what the first commenter said is true. They will just implement RCS or an alternative in the EU and make up some reason why they can’t or won’t for the US market.
I’ll take it. Whatever makes them suffer at least a little bit. (Apple, that is.)
USB C was a hardware change. Economically it was not viable to run separate production lines of lightning/ USB-C phones.
RCS is a software issue. Supporting RCS in certain regions but not others (the US for example) is much simpler.
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I honestly think the odds of Apple making an iMessage app for Windows/Android/Linux is more likely than that sadly
Yeah fuck apple but seriously, RCS is fucking stupid. We have so many nice open protocols and RCS is the best we can get?
There is exactly one app that can use rcs. No better than apple
Confidently incorrect but ok.
The whole point of RCS is that it’s a protocol so there demonstrably would be other apps. It’s like saying there’s only one app for SMS, it isn’t true.
What non Google sms app that has implemented RCS?
RCS seems to be pretty openly licensed out to other OEMs, definitely a lot better than iMessage.
It’s still proprietary though, a far cry from something like Matrix.
Never looked into it, what’s so bad about RCS besides it being proprietary? Way better than SMS in my experience.
Being proprietary
Everything is better than SMS.
And everything except SMS is better than RCS.Let me use a fucking messaging app, I’ll just need any internet connection and it will works and it get constantly updated.
RCS is just SMS2
Then everyone needs to download and make an account on said app, they already exist and none are unanimous.
Everyone has a phone number that gets used for auth and other things. If that system doesn’t change then RCS is way better.
What happended with forcing interoperability with different services like WhatsApp and Messenger? Would be great if we could just have one app for all messages like on Windows Phone back in the day 🙏
Matrix has good interop, you can use it.
I’ve looked into using Matrix bridge to be able to communicate with iMessage groups from Android. There’s a repo / company called Beeper that seems to maintain some bridges.
But tbh haven’t spent enough time with it. Looks like a lot of setup and maintenance. Would LOVE to be able to talk to iMessage from android
I use Beeper. There is a bit of a setup process adding the different chat networks but there’s next to no maintenance in my experience. It pretty much just works.
the downside is that it decrypts your messages on their server before sending them in either direction. so even if you use an e2e encrypted messenger like Whatsapp or Signal with it, Beeper could still read your messages.
I miss the old days of Trillian, a single pane of glass UI for all the major IM networks, cross-service meta contacts, and the messaage history was kept client side.
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or imessage
Uh oh class!
I care. The majority of countries are heavily dependent on WhatsApp and that’s not good!
Ever think the US based company is trying to do something for it’s American user’s? Makes sense to me. Almost nobody in America uses WhatsApp or other messaging apps, at least in my experience so far.
Who fucking cares, it’s a private company they’ll do what they want more power to em
Let’s be real: there’s a lot of self-interested whining from Samsung and Google, but there isn’t any pressure.
I’d love to see an open, secure, universal rich messaging standard adopted by everyone but we know that’s not gonna happen.
Carriers have literally no incentive to improve on SMS, I doubt they’ll lose any customers because of a lack of RCS adoption.
Do I like the locked in nature of iMessage? Not really, but it’s honestly not that big of a deal here (UK).
I just don’t like how Google talks about their proprietary messaging service as though it’s an industry standard. It’s not. Google RCS is not RCS.
Citation needed on the Google RCS not being RCS
RCS was meant to be a SMS replacement spec for carriers to implement but it never reached ubiquity like SMS did.
And of the carriers that rolled it out, not all of them rolled it out to the same spec either so they’re not even completely interoperable.
Then there’s the fact that many of the Google Messages features such as E2E encryption aren’t a part of the RCS Spec. They were built on top of it by Google.
And unless you’re Samsung, good luck on building a messaging app that’s interoperable with the Google version of RCS they use in messages.
In short, Google RCS runs through Google’s servers, not the carriers like it was designed for. As far as I see it, it’s just the Google version of iMessage.
If you want to download the actual RCS universal profile spec as defined by GSMA you can find it here, missing quite a few things from the Google version you see in Messages:
They aren’t going to budge, at least not willingly.
a la USB-C
People keep getting messages the app and iMessage the protocol confused. While never written that way (as far as naming goes), I’ve seen nothing to indicate that the EU isn’t just saying that Messages the app doesn’t just need hooks to allow third party apps to integrate into the one interface. It’s about adding more bubble colors as it were. So stuff like WhatsApp would just pop up in the same feed over whatever protocol it uses.
I hope this is right
But that would still be easier to convince someone to sign up for Signal or whatever other app if it came in a unified inbox. I just started using Beeper a couple of months ago, because while the security concerns are valid, it is really damn convenient.
Oh agreed. I think (if I’m right, I’m not a lawyer just a programmer who reads all this from a highly Apple centric technical background) it would make for a much improved messaging experience. Like this with RCS, I don’t care if Apple implements it themselves. I do think the carriers apps should though and those messages should just show up like any others in Messages. Same with say WhatsApp providing its messages. Ideally they’d handle their own encryption/keys/requirements basically externally to Messages itself, like many of the other apps that provide system wide extensions do.
Anyway here’s hoping 🤷♂️
As OP said, Apple can open up the iMessage protocol and still mark the non-iMessage mesagges inside their app as they used to. Apple didn't create the green/bubble class divide, but they sure are enjoying the ride and can claim they're innocent (since it's technically the users, not the company discriminating).
Anyways, I'm all for open protocols and cross-platform compatibility. If some iUsers decide to ghost me because my Signal message appears in a different color, then screw them. Can I make them purple or orange?
