Ok, so a comment on the actual content of the article rather than iMessage in general: I do the kinds of things that the author describes in the article (digging into private implementations of things) and I while I believe all of iMessage is a bit obfuscatory it's not nearly as bad as the author has described it. Really, it's one of the places where Hanlon's razor actually applies: the AppleScript bridge sucks because AppleScript in general sucks, as Apple has let it decay until it stops working entirely. The iMessage team for macOS is already kinda eh, and it shows in the app's architecture and lack of new features for years, as well as its fairly strange usage of a web view (actually the long-deprecated one…) for the main content. The rest of the stuff about private frameworks…I mean, I don't really know what to say. They're not meant to be linked against, they're undocumented, they change and disappear between releases…you really cannot complain about them. They're not Apple making it harder for you, they are just a side effect of how Apple writes its applications and the fact that the entire OS is proprietary. Some do venture into that realm (such as the author and I) and find meaning, but I disagree with the characterization that Apple is fighting against reverse engineers by making you dig through class-dump output and figure out how to marshal your arguments through the right function to make it do what you want.
Two of my main gripes with iMessage is the fact that if you scroll back up to read the past it becomes progressively slower and slower to scroll and each time the lag to get a new “page” of history takes longer. The other gripe is search being almost completely useless. Search for say “apples” and it just lists the entire conversation instead of relevant messages containing apples. And then you are left scrolling up endlessly to find said message with the aforementioned slowdown bug being front and center.
They've actually fixed that second part: search now shows individual messages mentioning the search term (even if there are multiple in the same thread).
yeah they fixed that on ios but imessage on mac os is not a great experience. just about as bare bones and janky as a messaging app can be. don't get me wrong... i like imessage as a utility but the app is rough.
I've been developing for Mac and iOS before the App Store was released, and have experience the author names - in broad strokes, your argument is valid, but it's not correct - errors slip in when describing the Applescript interface as just a reflection of Applescript sucking, describing his issue with Apple having _fragile_ private APIs when his conclusion is the problem is _private_ APIs, and reducing the problems inherent in the walled garden as "making you dig through class-dump output"
Ok, to distill my point: I think the author is going beyond a complaint that the system is proprietary and claiming that Apple has purposefully made the code difficult to reverse engineer, which I something I dispute based on the level that the author was working with, which were fairly standard (might I say comparatively well-packaged) private APIs. I say this because I know there is actual Apple-proprietary code that the company has actually put effort into obfuscating; things like FairPlay (and closer to iMessage, IDS, though I have only heard rumors of the latter not having looked at it personally). Thus, at the moment I think Apple is preventing third-party clients of the type described just by virtue of the literal barrier of “this is a compiled blob that I need to interact with and I don’t have source to” rather than “Apple added obfuscation/prevents you from attaching a debugger/encrypts the code at rest with a Blowfish key that is undone when the kernel maps the process into memory” (all of which are things that Apple does actually do in cases where they half-care). Basically, I’m removing the attribution of malice I felt from the article. Does that make some sort of sense?
There's a very significant difference between releasing an API publicly, and having a few internal users.
Public APIs have a high communication burden, but "fixed cost" if done right -- it shouldn't go up much as the number of users increases. They also have strict compatibility requirements that greatly slow, prevent, or complicate changes. They require more stringent security review and comprehensive tests, etc.
Private APIs can have a low, informal communication burden, but it tends to increase exponentially with the number of clients. They can be changed quickly, but clients have to be changed or and/or tested as well, so again the number of clients is limited. Tests only need to cover use cases the limited set of known clients actually need. It works best when clients are part of the same release cadence, since the price of managing branches is high.
Also, you can't separate the idea of fragile private APIs from private APIs in general. Private APIs are fragile. That they can change quickly, including breaking changes, is the whole point.
Why do people act like having “private APIs” is something evil? The entire purpose of having published public APIs is that they should be something that doesn’t change without a deprecation schedule or warning while the underlying implementation can change without notice. This is software engineering 101.
I don't know about evil, but it's hostile because Apple is intentionally preventing a non-AppleOS version from existing. The details of how they do it are of merely scientific interest.
It’s not hostile that you build a system with a public API that doesn’t change and private methods that you make no guarantees about. This is how software engineering has always worked.
Given Apple’s frenetic propensity to be extremely resource conscious, I doubt that team even exists any longer.
There’s likely some larger messages team that is itching to replace that app with the iOS version via Mac Catalyst... which despite the poor experience of most Catalyst apps on the Mac, would still make for a marked improvement. Goes to show you how poorly maintained the app is.
> as well as its fairly strange usage of a web view (actually the long-deprecated one…) for the main content
iMessage (at least on iOS) allows for arbitrary plugins to generate content for it, right? I presume it does that by having the plugin emit a web-component-like bit of HTML+CSS+JS, that is then embedded into the conversation for all participants, and which can be further rehydrated after initial rendering by just-in-time zero-installing the relevant iMessage plugin on recipient hosts.
(For anyone who is wondering why this would be necessary just to display some stickers: there are other kinds of iMessage plugins, e.g. games you can play inside the iMessage window, and not just the "you say something, IRC bot says something" kind of games, but full Canvas kind of games.)
You would presume incorrectly. iMessage extensions use native code + rendering. It is probably the main reason why these things aren’t available on macOS.
The extensions do that on iOS, yes. But the extension has to show up as something when a macOS client sees it, similarly to how Slack add-on messages have to be delivered as something to non-Slack UAs, e.g. bots.
I got the same feeling reading the post. Seems like it was difficult because iMessage is a private API and a little crufty as all long-lived APIs are. This was more of a lesson in what the code usually looks like inside any software org - messy, full of historical cruft etc etc. but it works and powers a very important feature, so there's little to gain / lot to lose by trying to refactor.
For anyone who is interested in making an iMessage proxy and has time to spend: There is a legitimate way to interact with the iMessage system with a standard protocol. It requires you to have a host iPhone (no jailbreaking needed).
What you need to have is a Bluetooth adapter with MAP (Message Access Profile) support. Your iPhone will treat all messages from the MAP protocol as if they are from the Messages app. This means it will automatically route your SMS as iMessage if possible (you have no say on what the iPhone decides to do, however). As a bonus, you can also use email addresses as recipients with MAP.
A good place to start probing is the WT32 or WT41u module from Silicon Laboratories. It supports MAP, although it looks like the module supports receive-only [1]. I do not know whether you can hack blueZ to support MAP. I've tried to look at it and I don't think the MAP support for blueZ is complete but I could as well be very wrong. A Raspberry Pi 0 as a bluetooth middleman is very sweet, regardless.
Once that Bluetooth middleman is set up, you can use a public server to relay your messages. The scheme will look something like this:
iPhone <--bluetooth--> (WT41+ESP32)|(Pi0+BlueZ) <--wifi--> MQTT broker <--wifi--> your device of choice.
I am relatively confident that this scheme will work. I just don't have time in my hands to do it. So I figured I could share here. Hopefully, some good hacker will do it and publish it. Happy hacking!
A bit of a shameless self-plug, but it took me 4 weekends to implement iMessage message receiving with BlueZ[0]. Sadly, all I learned about Bluetooth LE and Apple's ANCS will be completely useless when it comes to sending messages, since MAP works over Bluetooth, while ANCS works over Bluetooth Low Energy, and these 2 protocols are almost nothing alike.
The only problem is that any messages that the iPhone received while the middleman was out of range won’t get to your PC, but this’d still be extremely useful for quick replies.
I wonder if the iPhone will accept photos over MAP....
> The only problem is that any messages that the iPhone received while the middleman was out of range won’t get to your PC
That is not a problem. MAP is sort of like the IMAP protocol. You can ask the phone to give you older messages and the iPhone does indeed support that as well.
Moreover, with this scheme, you will likely have to keep the donor host iPhone and the middleman at home and have them plugged in 24/7. So then your middleman doesn’t have to be extremely clever, although it wouldn’t hurt if it was.
> What you need to have is a Bluetooth adapter with MAP (Message Access Profile) support. When you send a message from the MAP protocol, then your iPhone will treat all messages as if they are sent from the Messages app.
What is the “legitimate” reason for this? Bluetooth accessories that can send messages, ideally from the MFI program?
Haha, I don’t know who else besides me who knew about this. I just happened to discover it the other day... night... month ;-) HN is the first platform that I shared this discovery with.
I figured that the ideas are free, the important part is the execution. I hope I didn’t accidentally open the Pandora’s box for the spammers and such. My thought is that programmatically sending iMessages is already doable just needs a lot of mucking around. This just makes it much more convenient.
As an iMessage user, I'm happy with a closed ecosystem. I know that's a controversial opinion.
I have dozens of channels of communication, and iMessage is the only one I don't get spam on. I really, really like that. Anyone without iMessage can still contact me the same way, via SMS, and they're all grouped in the same place. But I love that in 10+ years of using iMessage, I've never gotten a single unwanted blue message.
I, unfortunately, have sent spam messages via iMessage a long time ago. I did it by faking a Bluetooth keyboard that connects to an iPhone and starts typing out phone numbers and addresses fed from a computer. I did it to mass-send a message to about a couple hundred people.
Desktop macs have i message too, so a determined spammer could just make a bunch of mac vms. Getting a valid serial with an unconfirmed purchase date is a massive pain, though.
It's trivial to use software to automate spam on more open web-based platforms, such as Facebook Messenger. This is a lot tricker with iMessage, where only authenticated Apple devices, with a unique identifier, can connect to the service. Buying truckloads of Apple equipment to spam iMessage is obviously uneconomical(and totally ineffective, given that Apple will swiftly ban any spamming devices), and software hacks to be exploited by spammers are either hard to come by or non-existant, and can quickly be patched by Apple
Again, not saying spam on iMessage is impossible, but it's clearly very difficult given the relative lack of spammers on the platform.
I thought Facebook Messenger was very strict about assigning page-specific user IDs to avoid this. Last I checked there was no way to send a message to a Facebook user using their profile ID.
Facebook Messenger (and similar) can be spammed through UI interaction automation (on Android) or even manually with cheap labor in third-world countries.
iMessage is more resistant to this attack because the device is your credentials to the network (instead of an account) which makes such an attack very expensive if you need to replace banned iPhones every day.
I’ve actually seen spam on iMessage (a friend’s Apple account was compromised and she started seeing the spam messages sent by someone else thanks to iMessages’s iCloud sync) but I’m not too concerned because I assume the offending devices will be banned relatively quickly.
How does it matter if the spam message is blue or green when it's going to the same app? I get the most amount of SMS spam on iMessage BY FAR. Have never seen one on WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram.
That's just SMS though - unless you mean blue bubbles being spam. I haven't received any of those, but if you do there's always a "report spam" link at the top of the conversation for senders you've never seen before.
That was my point with "when it's going to the same app". Messages from SMS and iMessage both show up in the same "Messages" app, and are indistinguishable from each other. So it doesn't matter if you're getting spam only from SMS when the app is still lighting up all the time.
My point is that this isn't exclusive to iOS; if you move to Android, that SMS spam isn't going away. Unless you can mute Android's SMS app because you receive 0 legitimate SMS messages, you'll be dealing with the same problem.
Is there a chance you publicly reveal your other IM contacts? Because as it stands I pretty much never get spam on Instagram, Whatsapp, Line, nor Messenger (FB). I don't even get spam in the "Message Requests" of FB messenger.
I get spam all the time on Instagram. Even the private account of the two that I have constantly winds up in random group spam messages. I'm assuming some spammers use scripts or other code to just comb through tons of high-profile account pages' follower lists and then randomly groups userid's to send mass messages to. It's completely frustrating.
The thing I wonder about iMessages, and Apple, is how I don't get spammed at all with iMessages when I have my ID linked to my normal email addresses, which do get normal email spam. You'd think spammers that do email spam would also be smart enough to try sending to iMessage accounts using those email addresses. But I'm guessing it's a limitation on the sender-side vs. the client side and maybe it's not easy to do due to how iMessages is such a closed-system.
The biggest problems are email and phone, which are the two most open systems. I get a decent amount on the ones you listed, but it's not as bad. A few messages a week on each. Most of those have ads, though, too. Different issue, but same problem... a cheap, unavoidable way to force me to see your message. iMessage is the only inbox I feel like I control. No spam, no ads, just friends.
(Not the point, but I'm looking at my Instapainting as we speak! One of my favorite things I own.)
It is really interesting to see the difference between countries, I travel between Asia and Europe and I knew that iMessage existed, but I thought people dropped it like SMS, years ago. Interesting to see that in a globalized world some differences still persist. I have asked around me to Iphone owners if they used iMessage and they almost never use it. It must be something specific to the US.
Please do not downvote me for not living in the US :)
Yeah, I thought the same thing. I had to check, and on my phone I have ever only sent 3 SMSes. I got lots received, but that's like "your token for service xxxx" or "your parcel is ready for pickup" kinda stuff.
No one uses SMS here (and by extension very few use iMessage). Everyone got mobile data turned on and has for almost the last decade. And then it still cost money to send sms, so other apps won.
I live in an international home in the US, and every person except the Americans use Whatsapp. The American compromise is usually Messenger or getting eventually strong armed into using Whatsapp too.
Texting was relatively expensive in Europe while it was almost free in the US. Then the iPhone was always more popular in the US as well making it something of a standard.
I notice that in the International School kids use iMessage more since it's so US/UK oriented and there are too many parents with money.
SMS is considered as really obsolete in Europe, even older people use WhatsApp. I think I have not sent a single SMS in the last 2 years. In Asia there are other services like WeChat (China) or Zalo (Vietnam) that are really popular, it really depends on the country. Sending an SMS feels like sendig a fax.
Regarding iMessage, I guess it's the same as BBM in the late 2000's, if you don't have it people might consider you are not cool enough to talk to them.
In Europe: WhatsApp, no one uses SMS anymore because WhatsApp started getting popular when people still had to pay for each SMS sent.
I currently live in South America, same story: Nobody uses iMessage, everybody is on WhatsApp. Even businesses prefer WhatsApp over phone calls.
The biggest difference between Whatsapp users in Europe and South America that I observed has to be the crazy amount of people using voice messages to communicate. Why don't you call and speed up the conversation by 50%?
That's not true, it may be true for some parts of Europe, but other countries had free or extremely cheap SMS before WhatsApp even existed.
Depending on where you are in Europe SMS may still be vastly more popular than WhatsApp. It also depends on the audience. Most of my family still use SMS. Technically it's iMessage but they don't know the difference, and they certainly don't care how messages are transferred. The build in messaging app is what is used.
Personally I've seen WhatApp installed only by people who have a large number of friends in eastern European countries.
Edit: Just to be clear, Denmark have had the one of the most competitive markets for cellular in the world for the past 20 years. Prices have been driven ever downwards for the last 15 year. So calls and sms have almost always been cheap.
It is asynchronous communication, like emails, the recipient can listen to it when they are available, but you don't need both to be available in the same time.
In ex-USSR SMS are dead, except on old "feature" phones. While in capitals a lot of people have iPhones it's share is not more than 50% and so iMessage never really picked up. Currently messaging it split between Viber (mostly older people) and Telegram (mostly younger people), plus some FB Messenger with FB friends. Whatsapp lost out market when it cost 1$ to install (yes, for many it was a decisive factor). iPhone users just install these apps too.
When traveling in Europe I usually see Whatsapp as a contact method.
I use SMSes for communication with people I don't know. For example, when buying/selling used stuff. For known people it's mostly FB messenger and WhatsApp, but sometimes also Skype and Viber. And then Slack for job related communication.
Different people use different channels, so I use different apps to be able to talk to anyone I need to.
WhatsApp, mostly, but also FB Messenger and Telegram depending on country. I just checked my phone and I have received just one SMS from a human this year.
Not Europe, but here in NZ I find most Apple owners use iMessenger. Android owners seem to prefer WhatsApp. However I'm finding more and more people using Facebook Messenger. As an Android owner I only really SMS with my husband's iPhone when I need messages to get through instantly but otherwise I just use whatever app the other person has. SMS is mostly for work contacts now days.
In The Netherlands (and most of Europe probably) for normies Whatsapp is definitely number 1, although most people will simultaneously use Facebook/messenger. Within businesses Microsoft Teams is starting to get popular, whereas Zoom seems to be more of US thing.
Wealthier "normie Apple families" use IMessage, but they'll always have a Whatsapp account on the side to talk to "the others".
Dutch nerds/early adopters will sometimes use Signal, but it's definitely not a thing most people know about. Telegram is even rarer in my experience.
French government uses Matrix/Riot.im
There are exceptions to the above though. I don't use Whatsapp or IMessage at all and never used it for more than a few days total in my entire life. My main messaging app is Signal and I'm totally fine. Got about 50 contacts on there and that's more then enough :D
Nightmare scenario for me: Google successfully integrates whatever there newest messaging brand is into the Android messages SMS client (now rebranded to Google messages) and all Android users switch to that because it's default. Result: Google messages becomes IMessage for Android, including the vendor lock-in with added tracking as a bonus. I feel this is happening.
In the US I would say it's not only "used" but is the default and almost only message system that most iPhone and Mac folks use. It works really well and it's built into the phone... that, and network effects are strong I guess.
"The looming demise of macOS as a developer platform".
There's some sentiment these days on HN about this but personally I think it's hogwash. No platform is perfect, but macOS to me is as close as you can get to a developer's dream workstation / laptop.
Remember all those years when we dreamed of a Unix with a proper UI? Well, it exists. Windows doesn't even come close.
I'd rather go Linux before Windows as a developer and hacker.
I know this varies based on industry and countries, but about 95% of developers I work with on a daily basis use Macs. These are everything from Go devs, JS devs to people working on ancient Java EE codebases.
A disclaimer; I haven't actually tried Catalina yet, all my Macs are still on Mojave.
Catalina is a significant downgrade in quality but it's still better than the alternative so your point still stands. My worry is what this means for the future, whether it will keep going downhill.
Well, that's a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, if you ask me. I've never personally known of a developer who's switched from MacOS to Windows without immediately going back.
WSL2 on my Desktop is competing with my MacBook as my favorite development environment. Remote-WSL on VSCode works excellently and allows me to do all my development in a seamless Linux environment.
For me, its the perfect balance between the power of Linux and the day-to-day usability of Windows
The only way I see macOS surviving as a professional environment is if they make it available for PCs. Their walled garden style just doesn't work in the open-source world Microsoft is pushing.
I came across this article[1] and this thread quoted[0] in article some time ago. I don't think of iMessage as a walled garden, it is almost like a low fence you can see across with a sign that "you must be this cool to participate".
iMessage is literally the only reason I have not tried an android phone because I don't want to deal with the fallout of all of my chat threads going back to 2011(?) getting disrupted. I don’t think I can come up with a better example of vendor lock-in.
Vendor lock is real, but would that not be rendered moot of other players could offer a superior user experience? Especially when you consider that Facebook, Google and others have a far larger base of potential users than iMessage. As far as I understand, the only iMessage feature that competitors couldn't emulate due to first-party entitlements is the SMS fallback functionality, which while nice, is definitely a feature that people could live without.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, every other messaging app I've used just has't lived up to the UX provided by iMessage. Spam is a major issue on all non-iMessage messaging platforms I've used. No messaging app I've used on any platform has performance as fast and fluid as iMessage on iOS. Competing products are often full with ads and useless features that clutter the user interface and degrade performance. And these platforms often have annoying restrictions on media quality. Facebook Messenger, for instance, has garbage quality images and video compression, while iMessage appears to apply no further compression on media files. Using any other messaging app, either on iOS or Android, has consistently been way more of a headache than its worth for me.
Google and Facebook may have a larger user base but it is not the in the same realm, e.g. I use iMessage to talk to my family, my close friends, parents from my daughter's preschool, co-workers, people I've only interacted with professionally - vendors etc - all it takes to connect is a phone number which is universal, and like you say it falls back to SMS. Compare that to Facebook where you have to add someone as a friend - which I don't do often because it just feels odd, or Google where messaging ecosystem is a bit fragmented with Allo, Duo, Hangout, Hangout Chat etc. Signal and WhatsApp are actually viable options but compared to iMessage feel heavy and not native, however I do use them both.
And like you mentioned - spam - I have yet to receive an iMessage spam message. That is pretty amazing.
How about all the iMessage created "Liked", "Loved", "Emoji" messages? Each and every one of those creates a message alert on non-iPhones. It is by far the most spammy type of message one receives on an Android device (in the USA at least).
What's app has a pretty massive spam and fake news problem. It's an unfortunate side effect of WhatsApp's ability to forward message to your contacts. Users will forward fake news to their contacts, those contacts will then forward to their contacts and so on. It's essentially a modern reincarnation of chain emails of the 90s and early 2000s.
I've had discussions with my friends and family on WhatsApp about them forwarding fake news, but they either don't understand (a lot aren't particularly computer literate) or refuse to listen. WhatsApp has tried to fix the problem by restricting the ability to forward messages, but this behaviour is so ingrained in the "culture" of the WhatsApp user base that software fixes are unlikely to resolve the problem. Anecdotally, I know a lot of WhatsApp's younger users refuse to engage with users on the app because of this behaviour. I've personally disabled WhatsApp notifications to control the amount of fake news spam I receive.'
Edit: This behaviour is highly regionalized, so I wouldn't necessarily expect all WhatsApp users to have experienced it
Has nothing to do with the software. I use Whatsapp as my main IM and never had this issue. Pretty sure the same would happen on iMessage too if it targetted the same demographic.
So your parent comment wasn't really a fair comparison because you left out the biggest IM service which does actually compete really well with iMessage without the vendor lock-in.
In my experience, it has. I use both iMessages and Whatsapp in India. I have never dealt with fake news and all the low signal forwarded memes and garbage on iMessages.
Whatsapp, on the other hand, is filled with it. The only solace in whatsapp is that I can disable auto media downloading to escape it to some extent.
This has more to do with people who use whatsapp vs people who use iMessage. If all the people who use whastapp migrated to iMessage, the same problem will happen there.
It might, but part of why it happens is that the app makes it easy for that to happen and users are trained.
Think how "redditors" talk vs how we do here in HN. We have clear rules about what this forum is about. Commenting "lol" -> "loll" -> "lolll" is not accepted. You'll be warned, marked "dead", or outright banned.
Moderation in a messaging app only happens at scale via UX.
One long press on WhatsApp to forward (on the same menu as copy, reply, and delete) as compared to a long pressed followed by “more...” to find forward on iPhone (and it was only “recently” added).
The propaganda spread on Whatsapp is happening because of external issues. There are groups of people paid or motivated to spread it on that platform. Such a minor thing wouldn't make any difference in reduction of propaganda spread to people dedicated enough to spread it.
> Such a minor thing wouldn't make any difference in reduction of propaganda spread to people dedicated enough to spread it.
You may have missed the part where I said it wasn’t even available at all until a recent-ish update.
Don’t forget that propaganda is created by dedicated people but it’s viral spread is via innocent, gullible victims. That’s where the inertia in forwarding comes in to play.
Same for me, but with my primary number on Google voice. Google dropped the ball here with an option to compete with iMessage, whether with Voice or Hangouts/Gchat
Funny, I've actually spent a good amount of time tearing apart the iMessage database back in 2016-2017. The queries you end up with are hilarious. Here's one from my website's sample code
```
INNER JOIN chat_message_join ON message.ROWID = chat_message_join.message_id
INNER JOIN chat ON chat.ROWID = chat_message_join.chat_id
INNER JOIN chat_handle_join ON chat.ROWID = chat_handle_join.chat_id
INNER JOIN handle ON handle.ROWID = chat_handle_join.handle_id
LEFT JOIN message_attachment_join ON message.ROWID = message_attachment_join.message_id
LEFT JOIN attachment ON attachment.ROWID = message_attachment_join.attachment_id
...
```
But it really wasn't that hard. I was able to programmatically send and receive iMessages. The problem (as the author pointed out) was that this changed, and didn't really work for the long. Although, I'm sure it could still be reveng'd – it's a pain in the ass, and (for me) not really worth it... =/
I've been working on a new version of [my iMessage bot](https://github.com/inculi/Sue) recently. Previously it was using Applescript handlers on Sierra, now sqlite calls to iMessage's chat.db (I have to give credit to another bot, [Jared](https://github.com/ZekeSnider/Jared) for help in this area).
I get latest messages with:
```
SELECT handle.id, handle.person_centric_id, message.cache_has_attachments, message.text, message.ROWID, message.cache_roomnames, message.is_from_me, message.date/1000000000 + strftime("%s", "2001-01-01") AS utc_date FROM message INNER JOIN handle ON message.handle_id = handle.ROWID WHERE message.ROWID > #{rowid};
```
and their attachments with:
```
SELECT attachment.ROWID AS a_id, message_attachment_join.message_id AS m_id, attachment.filename, attachment.mime_type, attachment.total_bytes FROM attachment INNER JOIN message_attachment_join ON attachment.ROWID == message_attachment_join.attachment_id WHERE message_attachment_join.message_id >= #{rowid};
```
where rowid is the max rowid from the previous search, and attachments with null mime_types get ignored (YouTube previews, etc). Sending through Applescript still.
I did something very similar, extracting the iMessage database. It works by you making an iTunes backup of your phone, and then accessing a specific file in the backup. I ended up with a query that looks like this (only tested with iOS 8, as I sadly lost interest afterwards):
WITH groupchat_membership AS (
SELECT cache_roomnames,
group_concat(id, ', ') AS members
FROM (
SELECT DISTINCT message.cache_roomnames, handle.id
FROM message
JOIN handle ON message.handle_id=handle.ROWID
WHERE message.cache_roomnames IS NOT NULL AND message.is_from_me=0
)
GROUP BY cache_roomnames
),
unsorted_messages AS (
SELECT message.ROWID AS rowid,
CASE WHEN message.cache_roomnames IS NOT NULL THEN groupchat_membership.members ELSE handle.id END AS recipient,
CASE WHEN message.is_from_me THEN 'Me' ELSE handle.id END AS sender,
message.date,
strftime('%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S', datetime(message.date + 978307200, 'unixepoch', 'localtime')) AS human_date,
CASE WHEN message.cache_has_attachments THEN '<Attachment>' || message.text ELSE message.text END AS text
FROM message
LEFT JOIN handle ON message.handle_id=handle.ROWID
NATURAL LEFT JOIN groupchat_membership
)
SELECT unsorted_messages.recipient, sender, human_date, text
FROM unsorted_messages
NATURAL LEFT JOIN (
SELECT recipient, max(date) AS latest_date FROM unsorted_messages GROUP BY recipient
)
ORDER BY latest_date DESC, date ASC;
Oh man. Apple has us by the nuts. I love my iMessage. I've been on a macbook for ~10 years, but I just started working at Microsoft and thus have been spending a lot of time in Windows. Multiple times per day I think of something I want to send my wife, like a link to something I'm reading or something, and I look for the iMessage on the dock and of course there is no dock and no iMessage. I want iMessage for Windows. and Linux.
I was in exactly this same boat for a long time. I bought maybe a dozen iPhones through the years to upgrade friends and partners from Android just so I could iMessage them.
Turns out, most of iCloud is not e2e encrypted, critically, notes and pictures and contacts and backups. Apple (and by extension, US military intelligence and FBI/DHS) can read your private notes and see your nudes, and review your address book and message history. I knew I was going to need to switch eventually.
* iCloud device backup is on by default. This syncs all of your unencrypted iMessage history to Apple. It also syncs all of your conversation partners’ message histories, from their phones, to Apple. It is not e2e encrypted so it suffers from the Zoom Problem: Apple has the keys and can decrypt it, for themselves or the government via the illegal PRISM program.
* iMessage (despite being e2e) can be arbitrarily wiretapped by injecting a surveillance key because the client trusts the key list from the server blindly, with no UI notifications for the sender on key changes/amendments.
* I can’t run the client on half of my computers
* Signal works on ios/android and has desktop clients for all major platforms... and critically now supports iPads. It also has the nice property of being e2e without implicit trust in the server, although hopefully the TOFU model can be improved.
I switched. I am now signed out of iMessage on all my computers, and it’s great.
If I can do it, anyone can. I was in as far as one can go.
Apple's refusal to support Windows in any real way and have inferior experiences with iTunes etc was absolutely fine when they had best in class solutions for all your work and home needs.
But in 2020 where their computing products have left so much to be desired this whole system just starts to fall apart. I'm forced over to Windows because they don't make a machine to fit my work needs and when I'm there in Windows I'm not thinking how much I miss iMessage and I wish I'd sacrificed performance and GPUGP just for iMessage, I'm thinking maybe I should stop using iMessage because WhatsApp works great everywhere.
Then now I've switched to WhatsApp well there's one less reason I have to buy an iPhone next time.
I don't give a f#%k about the color of my messages but being able to see them from a website/windows desktop would be useful. This doesn't achieve that.
> I do now have a fully working iMessage client that runs on Windows and sends messages via an up-to-date macOS High Sierra installation running on my rMBP.
Are iMessage communications signed with an apple device specific key?
I imagine part of the reason that it has proven to be so difficult to reverse engineer, is that it somehow utilises an apple devices secure enclave?
It uses some combination of the serial number and the NIC (at least on Macs, probably not on iOS) to authenticate with Apple. That's why it's fiddly on Hackintoshes.
They couldn't use the enclave because not all currently supported Macs have it, but maybe in 10 years when all of the old ones fall off the support tree.
The "always on mac functioning as a proxy server" is the same type of solution that the author spent the entire article figuring out how to implement. The only time he mentions the proxy server as something to be avoided is when the he talks about not wanting to be forced to run that proxy server on an older version of OSX.
> But I wanted to do this and I wanted to do it right. I wanted an elegant approach that I could deploy on the same machine I still used from time to time, without being stuck on an ancient (and insecure) legacy version of OS X that could suddenly be blocked from the iMessage network at any point.
Cloud + a probably similar method, but, the process the author used is not efficient in figuring out the private frameworks work. You could do a few things I think that would allow you to debug the framework calls & iMessage itself to understand what is actually going on / how it’s used.
I'm curious if they have a farm of iPhones somewhere to host this off of. They are sending the iMessages from phone numbers -- not email addresses, which means they didn't just get a bunch of Mac Minis and do it the (probably easier) way.
Jailbroken iPhones where you can automate the UI and (maybe?) access any private Messaging API Apple left laying around would make this scalable though.
Apple Business Chat doesn't seem to be Blue though, at least in my experience with Apple Card Support. Messages seem to be Black, unless that's exclusive to talking with Apple (maybe businesses can have configurable color schemes).
> For example, hackintosh PCs that act identical to genuine Mac hardware can use all macOS features except iMessage, which has been locked – so far as we can tell – to only allow network activation on devices that have “blessed” NICs that officially shipped with Apple hardware.
This isn't true! The computer I'm typing on right now can send and receive iMessages just fine, and I'm not using a donor MLB. You just need to get all of various parameters right, so Apple's servers are presented with logical information.
Not in this regard. I don't think there was any point at which iMessage on Hackintosh was impossible without a donor, but I've personally been using it since ~2015.
Maybe you got lucky with your hardware? I can’t remember all the exact details but these posts are all from the same 2017-2018 window and the solutions all resolve around network hardware: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&sa=N&hl=en-us&q=...
It’s been too long for me to remember more than this, but I did have iMessage on a hackintosh circa 2013 or so but wasn’t able to get that to happen when I tried in 2017/2018.
Much as I applaud the effort and ideal to make something open, I guess you acknowledge that it's crazy to think Apple will ever cooperate.
iMessage, plus pressure on your friends to not break the text thread with green non-Apple bubbles, Facetime, tie-ins to the Apple hardware, Find my Friends, etc. are among the most important loyalty factors and moats against people leaving the Apple ecosystem.
Especially with people getting (as you admit) less satisfied with the hardware, they would be fools to open this up and let people leave.
> the pure simplicity and sheer genius of iMessage’s “SMS backwards-compatibility” approach that upgrades iPhone-to-iPhone communications to iMessage while transparently falling back to SMS or MMS where iMessage was not an option.
This "simplicity" comes with a price. If your primary SMS device is non-Apple and you sign into iMessage from an Apple device, iMessage will start eating your SMSes from anyone texting you from an Apple device.
Yup. I temporarily switched from an iPhone to an Android BlackBerry when the one with the slide-out keyboard first came out and I did not receive SMS messages from iOS users for the entire duration.
I found training a bunch of birds to take notes to people for me to be much easier. I am in the process of training them how to use the printer and scanner too so i can text people who on my computer too.
I wonder what happened to “Business Chat”. It was announced on WWDC in 2018 and I have seen no progress since. It’s a shame. The potential of it is huge I believe, but Apple has a different focus it seems.
It exists for some retailers, like Home Depot. It doesn’t work like I would expect though, in HD’s case it looked like it was routed through a Salesforce extension.
It still exists; Apple themselves uses it for support and I hear some third parties have adopted it. (Though I haven't heard of many people actually using it…)
I'm almost certain I've seen other implementations too, but I can't find them now.
Edit: Oh, here was another one: https://github.com/RomanScott/weMessage It's for Android, but you could presumably reuse the server implementation to create a Windows version.
Edit2: And yet another one, fwiw, but this time it's Android-only and closed source so less useful. https://airmessage.org/
I feel like there was probably a way to publish this. Maybe the author couldn't brand it with their name, logo and other identifying information, and clearly that's a compromise they weren't comfortable with. That is, of course, their choice, but the large number of screenshots of the resulting application felt like a bit much. This work could increase accessibility to iMessage e.g. for those with physical or other disabilities were there a way to use it, and the post just ended up feeling like an exercise in navel-gazing to me.
> As someone that has never embraced the mobile craze, I sorely missed the ability of texting (or “iMessaging”) from my PC, and came to absolutely despise having to drag my phone out of my pocket and text from its cramped display, constantly fighting autoincorrect and embarrassing myself with typos and misspellings.
An alternative solution is to use a Bluetooth keyboard, possibly with multi-device support and device switching shortcuts, attached to an iPhone or iPad sitting on a stand.
As someone who learned to properly type on a physical (PC) keyboard, it's mind blowing to me how so many people swipe so many letters on screens.
Ignorance is bliss I suppose.
First I had Blackberry Blend around 2014 (SMS and BBM messaging through PC), now there's Signal for Desktop and the Your Phone Microsoft thing.
The wheel keeps getting reinvented.
I wonder when peer2peer messaging will become popular again. It's how Skype started out and became big back in 2003. Offered way better call quality and privacy, because: no server and peer2peer.
I did that, actually! Ran into some problems with the ux and lots of issues switching between soft and hard keyboards. I don’t know if the situation has improved since.
In 2017, a macOS VM (even on Mac hardware, iirc) would function impeccably with the sole exception that iMessage would be blocked. Hypervisors (and kexts) have improved considerably since then, however.
Its because they use peer pressure to get you to buy an apple device. You can invite an android user to an imessage group but it apparently downgrades the feature set of the group for everyone, they also color messages from android users differently. Its all designed to discourage talking to android users so they eventually buy an iphone.
SMS is colored differently (green) than iMessage (blue), regardless of the device on the receiving end. I'm not sure how they would even know the recipient is on Android.
If I send an iMessage to a friend's iPhone when they do not have service it automatically downgrades to SMS from iMessage. My brother didn't run iMessage for years so group chats that include his iPhone were still SMS based.
In a group chat with non-iMessage users everyone gets downgraded to SMS. I'm not sure how else it would even work?
It doesn't discourage talking to users with an Android or any other phone. I do that all the time, it's all in the same app. If they wanted to put up barriers they could do that but instead it's totally seamless.
> In a group chat with non-iMessage users everyone gets downgraded to SMS. I'm not sure how else it would even work?
I was thinking that there might be a way around it: send iMessages to people who are iMessage capable, and send MMS to people who aren't. The people who have to send MMS will just send their replies to everyone in the group over MMS, and the messages app on the iPhone would just figure out that the messages belong to the correct group.
But then I realized that I don't think there's an analog to the "reply-to" header for MMS. So there might not be a way to send that group message to the single MMS recipient without sending it to all recipients over MMS. In order to get replies to go to the entire group, each group member has to be in the "to" field for the MMS-using phone to know all the group members.
It's a shame, because my understanding is that the MMS protocol is actually pretty similar to email in some ways... and yet they apparently left out "reply-to".
The Mac client already drags years behind the iOS client, I don’t have a lot of faith in Apple’s ability to maintain a Windows version even if they wanted to.
On the Mac side it might catch up in the next release by throwing out the original version and replacing it with a Catalyst port, but there’s no similar solution to that for Windows.
Nor can I see them de-emphasizing the 3rd party app integrations to make the service available to people who aren’t Apple’s customers on platforms that Apple doesn’t control.
I mean, that happens to iPhone users too. That's the SMS fallback for iMessage reactions.
I wish I had an option to turn off reactions, or at least turn off notifications for reactions. When my sister gets a few minutes to review the family group chat she goes through and "loves" and "likes" and "laughs at" almost every message. My phone pings for every single one of them.
Yes, everyone knows this but you're not supposed to mention it. If you have green bubbles, you risk being a social pariah. Android use among teenagers, who are most susceptible to peer pressure, is >80%. Also I know several guys who switched to iPhones and suddenly had a much better sex life. It is what it is. Think of Apple buy-in like a tribal tattoo or rite of passage for young people.
If Apple released iMessage for Android or made it compatible with another protocol like RCS/WhatsApp/Signal/etc., then Apple would lose half of its market cap. I'm not exaggerating.
You know iMessage will always be there - at least as long as iPhones are anyway. You also know there's no third party snooping - not the case with other messaging systems. Also there's no cookies or location tracing (like I imaging there are with Facebook messenger etc). Thats how I feel about it - rightly or wrongly, its as reliable and secure as the SMS system, but without the spam.
Apple is caught in the constant push/pull of "we're compatible with stuff" vs. "there's a reason why you buy a Mac." Curating apps and keeping iMessage for Mac users falls into the latter category right now. Might be different tomorrow.
Apple is the biggest example in the tech industry right now of vertical integration; that a company controls not only the end product that they sell but also the component parts.
That's why it's best to think of Apple not as a software company but as a vertically integrated hardware company: Apple provides services (iCloud, iMessage, FaceTime, Siri) to add value to their software (macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS) in order to add value to their hardware (Macs, iOS devices, Watch, Apple TV).
To answer the question of why web browsers aren't allowed on Apple TV, it's because Apple does not deem that they add value at any of those levels — the Apple TV is not positioned as a general purpose computer but more as a sort of console, suited to consuming multimedia and playing games but not for general purpose web browsing.
But it isn't as though Apple hasn't anticipated the desire to see web content on the big screen. That's why macOS and iOS devices support AirPlay Mirroring.
I think there are a couple of generations that are unused to the idea of vertical integration in technology and view it with suspicion. Once upon a time, say the 80s and prior, it was the norm: you bought a computer, could only use their OS, and in certain cases could only use their software.
IBM PCs and MS-DOS broke the industry free of that mould in a major way, but Apple has proven to have some success with it — in fact, it's almost the entire value of what they propose: tight integration between hardware and software to provide, as Apple sees it, the best experience.
To come back to the first question: iMessage is both a service and software. It benefits Apple more to use iMessage to sell Macs and iOS devices; there's no benefit to Apple for people to use iMessage on Windows (or Android, Linux, etc.). Apple is, remember, not a services company; it is a hardware company. iMessage "sells" macOS and iOS which, in turn, sell Macs and iOS devices.
In fact, I don't even think Apple sells hardware. Apple sells experiences. That might sound airy-fairy, but it corresponds well to their approach.
Contrast this with iTunes. iTunes exists on Windows in order to sell iPods (and later, iPhones and iPads) and multimedia content to Windows users. This benefits Apple in a way that allowing iMessage on Windows would not.
Same reason why Apple TV+ and Apple Music are available on competing television devices and on Android: selling subscriptions to non-Apple users still provides Apple with a benefit (and valuable opportunity to advertise) that iMessage on other platforms would not.
This approach exists in sharp contrast to both the Microsoft of the past and present, as well as web-based service companies. Their goals are different.
Microsoft made MS-DOS and Windows available on as many types of computers as possible in order to sell Windows licences; Apple tried this once in the 90s and didn't make enough money to justify the operation.
Services like Facebook, that freely provide their messenger services on practically all platforms, have a different measurement for whether or not there is any benefit: they aren't trying to sell you on hardware, they're trying to sell data to advertisers.
There are other examples: LINE, for instance, doesn't necessarily need to sell users' data to make money; instead, LINE operates a content store selling additional functionality.
Therefore, it's impractical to compare Apple's approach with iMessage to that of competing messaging services. The apps and associated services serve different purposes to meet different ends.
To conclude: iMessage is there to make you buy an iPhone.
It's the same reason BlackBerry refused to make BBM available on other platforms (although I believe they actually did just that a couple of years ago when no one even remembered what BlackBerry was, perhaps after the company name was sold to a different manufacturer).
BBM was released on Android and IOS in 2014 (six years ago), but it never caught on. It's still around in the enterprise space, but barely.
And the company name was never sold to a different manufacturer. BlackBerry allowed TCL and an India-based company (I can't remember the name) to sell BlackBerry-branded phones running BlackBerry software, but that's all.
Having had this problem myself, my first thought was VLC or some other kind of Remote Desktop solution. Surely I can ‘stream’ a window from my OSX host and not care about the implementation or boobytraps?
In the end Windows was a complete fail for me so I never pursued it.
« A year and a half ago, I heeded the growing warning signs that indicated the looming demise of macOS, née OS X, as a platform for developer and true computer enthusiasts, and set about trying to find a new ecosystem.»
The power of synthesis
If there was an easy way to get iMessages in Windows 10 I guess it would just increase the number of people who consider switching from Mac? Maybe Apple can't fit that into their business model?
I have been a Windows user and an Android user for a long time, and I never seem to have the need to venture into the Apple ecosystem. I actually did have an Apple phone for several months and it was okay. No complaints. But there's just not an ecosystem that I need. I have everything I need without the Apple ecosystem. There's nothing that gives me passion to use something that is exclusively an Apple product. In a way it's kind of weird. I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here. But I'm sure there's other people like me.
You can get imessage for windows with way less effort and full functionality. Just have a VNC window to a mac with imessage on it. There you go, every functionality of imessage on windows. All it requires is a mac mini.
"You can get Adobe Photoshop for Linux, just run a Windows machine and use RDP to connect to it. All it requires is another machine entirely and for you to be on the same network."
If ever Apple needed to open source server and client code for a public good it is with imessages. Yes it has clear limits with a centralized server, but it is realistically how a lot of “secure” messaging happens and it’s very difficult to endorse being tied to expensive hardware.
You can say the same about facetime: it is clearly higher quality than competitors in every experiment I’ve tried, but their refusal to interact with the wider software community means we all use zoom or skype instead for personal chatting. These are tools; they should be effectively free and universal.
Apple set up colocated servers across the world and changed the Facetime protocol significantly to work around a single patent (a patent for direct device to device communication of all things).
I can’t imagine a patent dispute actually stopping them if they were firm on making FT an open standard.
I come from a land where patents don’t really work. I often wonder, are there any examples of patents in the field of software engineering that worked like they supposed to, protecting small collectives from powerful corporations?
Many of the troll cases actually do trace back to a small time inventor, very often a failed small startup. They then sell their patents to various intermediaries which winds up in the hands of a ‘troll.’ So the original inventor does get paid, even if it’s an NPE doing the actual litigation against the big companies. The reason these trolls are so abhorrent is that they seek to maximize their economic value in the patent by trying to extend it as far as they can go, which gives them a bad reputation, but they play an important role in the system which can reward small time inventors. Big companies don’t really buy patents from small inventors any more, so the only route to monetization for an invention is through NPEs.
Yes, that is generally how investments work. Companies determined to spend more money than they are able to make off of patents might have exist, but not for long.
As someone who pays attention but does not proactively search out patent litigation information most of the time, I would say it’s rare. The most benefit I see for smaller collectives is:
- Patenting an idea that’s core to their business. Doesn’t really prevent immediate attacks from clones, but it does make it much easier for them to get funding from VCs.
- Inventors who license the ideas: they patent, then contact manufacturers.
Note: These are not really software-specific as I’m not aware of any software cases where patents benefit smaller businesses.
Maybe we should call it patent fraud and make this kinda thing illegal? Patents should be for companies actually making products to get a market edge of sorts. Not a portfolio of things you never intend to build but instead berate other companies for cash over. Its okay if they are actually still in the process of building the thing but if your company has one single employee and 0 products...
Also wondering where WebRTC stands against that patent.
[not defending patent trolls, just poking what seems to be a hole in the concept]
> Its okay if they are actually still in the process of building the thing
what should happen with a patent holder who sells off their R&D department, and thus stops "developing things"? should they be allowed to keep their patents? (to keep receiving e.g. licencing fees for the stuff they did develop; i think that's how it works?)
Yeah, the problem people seem to have is with the transferability of patents. But the alternative is some sort of personal right rather than a property right, and the huge companies would run roughshod over a system of personal rights to inventions, only enriching the FAANGS of the world at the expense of literally everyone else. Think it through before you go attacking the patent system.
As described above, the trolls play an important part of the system that does reward small players at the expense of large entities. What if you have a startup that intends on making something, but for myriad reasons you go bust, and then you sell your patent to an enforcement entity? That’s what usually happens in these cases.
They should just expire much more rapidly. 20 years is an eternity in the software world, and 10 years, or even 5 years, should be enough to develop a lead, profit a bit, and fund your next invention(s).
iMessage motivates people to people buy iPhones instead of Android when everyone else in a social circle has it. Why should Apple give up on that? What will Apple gain from making it ubiquitous? It would in fact disappoint many people as now they can't use their phone to distance themselves from the people who don't have that blue circle.
Note that I'm arguing from Apple's perspective here. From my own I believe they should absolutely open it up.
> iMessage motivates people to people buy iPhones instead of Android
Why, though? Does your average iPhone user actually care if the bubbles they see in their chats are blue or green? If so, why?
Note that I'm talking about average users. Sure, there are likely a bunch of privacy-conscious users who believe in Apple's commitment to security and privacy and prefer iMessage on those grounds. But otherwise, why?
> It would in fact disappoint many people as now they can't use their phone to distance themselves from the people who don't have that blue circle.
If that's truly the case, I don't think I'd want to be friends with people who place importance on such superficial, trivial things.
Full disclosure: I've been an Android user for 10 years and the closest I ever got to owning an iPhone was an iPod Touch I stopped using in 2012 or so. SMS is fine for my needs most of the time, though MMS for group texting is ridiculously unreliable so I try to funnel people to Signal or WhatsApp for those use-cases.
I guess I just don't see a closed iMessage as that huge of a competitive advantage for Apple. But presumably they know better as to what drives sales.
> Why, though? Does your average iPhone user actually care if the bubbles they see in their chats are blue or green? If so, why?
They definitely do. Not sure what your age or demographic is, but young folks do care a lot about higher social status which is tied to blue bubble because of iPhone prices. It has nothing to do with privacy though.
I'm 22 and live in a mid-sized city, and I've seen people trying to get into a relationship (or even something more casual, but not a platonic friendship) get rejected because of the dreaded "green bubbles" - and really, I'm not exaggerating. And not from rich people who have the latest iPhone either.
In addition, I have been in friend groups that would exclude Android users because if you have even 1 Android user in a group chat on iMessage, you lose tons of features, like the ability to name the group chat (I'm being completely serious here; this was considered an important thing). The work around was "we'll take you out of this chat, and if something important happens someone will send you a text" - of course, it's not very easy to always remember to send that person an SMS, so they end up _very_ left out of things. This has also happened with middle-class people.
Honestly this seems like a feature of the social circles involved. I can't really imagine being, or even wanting to be, around people who are so shallow they won't have someone in a group because they can't change the chat name, or at least, people who wouldn't be willing to move to other types of software to accomodate people in the group. It seems like basic human decency that when someone in the group says "I can't xyz" you go "ok what can we do instead?". I'm not sure I can imagine caring so little about other people, and I definitely do not want to be around people who don't.
The parent comment mentioned some of the reasons why it goes beyond the normal "lol you're too poor to buy an iPhone". SMS chats are majorly crippled compared to iMessage ones, and this is technical functionality, not just bubble color. You can't really change the people in an SMS chat, iMessage features don't work (in some instances hilariously: you'll get a text like "so-and-so liked this message" instead of a reaction)…people just don't want to deal with it. And yes, iMessage makes no effort to destigmatize the person who converts your iMessage chat into an SMS conversation.
But people can just use LINE, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram, messenger, etc and get all the features and more which in my experience as an android user is what actually happens than this weird shallow world of green and blue bubbles I've heard about on the internet.
Different friend groups may prefer different platforms, but it's pretty rare where someone new to the group refuses what the group is already using, which is almost never plain sms/imessage.
Google voice/sms is almost always for one on one friends where we don't share anyone in common or older relatives.
> Different friend groups may prefer different platforms, but it's pretty rare where someone new to the group refuses what the group is already using
You made the point yourself here. If the messaging platform the group prefers is iMessage then it's somewhat awkward when someone new to the group refuses to use it. Have you ever tried to get a bunch of people to switch platforms for a single group chat? When most of the people have a working solution already it's practically impossible.
As has been mentioned many times in the other comments, those force you to download something, perhaps make an account, make sure everyone has it…whereas 90% of the people might already have an iPhone, which might be better than the number for anything else.
I'd argue that that is irrelevant. What's the point in having anything other than a flip phone if you refuse to download apps. It's not a barrier to entry in every other case and it's never been a barrier to entry with my friends.
Why would you download an app for the basic functionality of a phone? Texting is an integral part of phones and I haven't met a person in the US without unlimited texting in years.
I know a lot of friends who use WeChat to avoid things like international texting rates, but Americans talking to Americans generally do not need this.
Thank you for making my point. iMessage is not texting. I'm responding to this.
"Why would you download an app for the basic functionality of a phone? Texting is an integral part of phones and I haven't met a person in the US without unlimited texting in years."
I don't actually think this is true. Is there any verification that most iOS users do not have a single one of the most popular messaging apps in the world?
I never said they don't have anything but if you ask someone to download an app specifically to contact you they're going to be very bothered by it. It's like how as streaming services proliferate there are only so many services people actually want to subscribe to, or how pre-unlimited calling people were very judicious about calling people not on their network.
Anecdotally, in my social group:
- Snap: withering on the vine.
- Messenger: generally declining with the declining popularity of Facebook in my age cohort
- Instagram: everyone has it, but messaging is definitely a second class part of the app and no one really uses it other than to send instagram memes
- GroupMe: I downloaded it once for one person, most of the people in the chat have iPhones anyways, and people don't really use it other than to contact the non-Apple users specifically.
Well, here's an anecdote for you. I am a US iPhone user and I use zero third party messaging apps. I know of no one in my friend circle who has an iPhone and uses a third party messaging app.
The whole point is to be about your social circle. If 90% of my social circle is on iPhone, they're on iMessage.
What the rest of the world outside of my social circle does isn't really relevant to my conversations inside my social circle.
I've run up against this reality multiple times. I personally prefer signal & whatsapp for group chats than iMessage. If only because I can mute them and not get an annoying red bubble telling me about the hundreds of messages I'm trying to not react to in real time when I'm busy.
That doesn't stop the red counter bubble from appearing and incrementing on the messages app, sadly.
Whereas a muted group chat in whatsapp is completely muted, unless someone explicitly @tags you in a message or explicitly replies to your message (another feature iMessage group chats lacks - tagging specific people, and explicit/contextual replies to specific messages)
Never understood this argument. My parents from a 3rd world country who barely understand English are able to use 3rd party apps like Whatsapp, Duo, Skype just fine. And Duo works directly from your contacts app too (at least in Pixel and Samsung phones), in fact you can see options like "Video call xxx Message XXX with a logo of the apps that support it right in the contacts apps.
Duo came out too late, and Google has a reputation for changing things. Years ago, I tried setting up my family with google’s apps, and they kept changing, and it burned me and wasted my time. So years ago, I switched everyone to Apple, and haven’t wasted any time since.
WhatsApp is really nice, but you need a phone for it, which some of the older grandparents don’t have. But they do have cheap iPads, so everyone uses FaceTime.
I find it astounding that the grandparents have iPads before phones. Most elderly people I know have cheapo Android phones or a few with "accessible" android phones target at people with sight or mobility problems (usually amounts to buttons and a skin with large icons). A few still have older Nokia phones, but these are the ones least likely to have iPads and more likely to have an old Windows 9x/XP computer hanging around for solitaire.
The iPads are usually bought by the adult children to replace the aging computers because they are both much simpler to use and much harder to screw up. I gave my parents an iPad and added them to my plan for $20/month unlimited data. They don’t have to worry about WiFi or anything.
In my family, the grandparents live with their children and grandchildren sometimes, so they don't need phones (or at least only grandma or grandpa needs them, but not both).
But the younger set of grandparents all have their own phones, so it's only the very old that don't.
And then that’s another thing they have to sign into as opposed to just looking in their contacts and choosing the FaceTime icon.
And as far as Duo - only if you have a Samsung phone or Pixel? If you have to buy a new phone anyway - since the entire Android ecosystem is a clusterf* when it comes to upgrades - you might as well get one that is going to be supported for years.
It’s often not malice or conscious choice as you seem to think. It’s that technical designs have effects on social dynamics. Here’s an example I wrote elsewhere:
> Social dynamics are subtle. For example, group SMS doesn’t support contact names. If you add someone to a group SMS, the other people only see a phone number unless they go out of their way to add the new guy to their contact list. Likewise, the new person has to add everyone else to see names. Decades of research in behavioral economics show just how powerful defaults are, so most people probably won’t bother to add names. Without names, the new person will have a more difficult time connecting with the group.
I've seen this exact behaviour with non-tech friends in 20s-30s people. You have it exactly right. There's a stigma to being a green bubble.
It's stupid, but whatever. If you're going to be my friend, first things first: no tech prejudice :-) Apple might be more willing to interop if it had less of a network effect. Hell, I'd sub to iMessage if I could get it on Android.
Yeah my feeling is that there are a lot more important things going on than the color of chat bubbles (or the status/system it implies). Sorry if it came off as though I meant this is more important than other serious things going on.
I don’t think it’s just Android users who see it. I’m on iPhone and in a group text with a mix of Android and iPhone users I see it that way too. Maybe I’m on the cusp of being old and cranky but it seems a silly thing to worry about.
I actually like the "so and so Loved blah", because otherwise it would be really easy for non-iphone users to not know that someone actually acknowledged their message.
I've found that, in my social groups, "Liked" gets used as an acknowledgement for anything that doesn't require further discussion. Seems to clear up group chats of endless OKs back and forth, so I'm all for it.
That, "ha ha", and "?" are probably about tied for my most used. I find that they are all useful ways to acknowledge or question something without cluttering chats.
It’s much easier to heart the thousandth photo of a fuzzy critter my sister has saved than to formulate a response. When it’s all iPhone users the chat is a lot cleaner too.
There are two reasons which together make it all make sense:
tldr; It's pre-installed and way better than SMS
1. iMessage is leagues more reliable and faster than SMS/MMS on even horrible connections allowing a real-time cadence to conversation with indications if messages were actually received and possibly if they've already been seen. Its features are also not crippled so simple things like sending photos between $1k+ phones does not end up with MySpace quality photos that are otherwise supposed to be 12MP Live HDR photos. Let alone sending longish videos (3 min+)
2. iMessage is already installed and integrated in iOS unlike WhatsApp which literally has all the most important features and MORE, but, for reasons I do not fully understand, I simply like using iMessage more. And so do most of my friends.
iMessage and FaceTime audio. There are occasions where T-mobile’s voice network won’t let a call through, but I can use the data network to do FaceTime audio.
I’ve had to use FB Messenger at times to contact my one or two relatives who just refuse to by an iPhone.
I wanted to do a group video chat with relatives and we all had to use Facebook Messenger because one person didn’t have an iPhone. We just left the person out a few times because we didn’t want to bother with lower quality messenging.
There’s also the fact that WhatsApp is Facebook. I dumped Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all at the same time and will not install any of them on my devices.
It might be possible to be in a majority-Android friend group outside of North America, but not really here. iMessage is far too entrenched in the US for that to be possible.
> I've seen people trying to get into a relationship (or even something more casual, but not a platonic friendship) get rejected because of the dreaded "green bubbles"
Good, fuck those people, I probably don't want to associate with them anyhow.
I consider this line of thinking to be on the same level as face tattoos, and social media posts about meals multiple times a week.
>I consider this line of thinking to be on the same level as face tattoos and social media posts about meals multiple times a week.
You're mad at people for succumbing to a dark pattern in tech that they themselves don't completely understand, but are going off on people who post pictures of their food or have tattoos like it affects you in any way?
>Good, fuck those people, I probably don't want to associate with them anyhow.
You know, blue bubbles may in fact feel the same way about you.
They care because the green bubbles indicate a severely impaired user experience. For example, multimedia may not work, and even if it does, its typically very poor quality.
I don't see how it conveys status when used iPhones are cheap, and brand new ones start at $400 now. My lowest paid hourly employees all have iPhones, even the ones who don't speak English.
Status signaling might be a thing in certain circles (middle school and high school), but I think it's simpler than that. It's about being in or out.
People might have gravitated towards iPhones for status signaling in their youth, and by association and inertia, their inner circle uses iPhones. now, as adults, any person coming into the circle needs to conform to the group or be seen as clueless.
No? Something serves as a status signal when the person who has it has a high probability of being different from someone who doesn’t. A private jet is a status symbol because you have a high probability of assuming the person who owns it has a level of wealth or influence that most don’t. A degree from Caltech has status compared to a degree from random college because there’s a high probability the Caltech degree holder is more competent.
An iMessage chat tells me nothing about the socioeconomic characteristics of the owner of the iOS device, unless I am missing something.
Edit: although, now that I have read this whole thread, I am thinking that maybe it’s not the economic status people are looking for, but are somehow deriving some assumption about their “socio” part of “socioeconomic” status, as a non iOS user is perceived to be maybe “different” or “weird” in some way for not conforming and having an Android versus an iOS device.
I personally have never thought that, since I use Signal/WhatsApp/iMessage, and if you don’t have iMessage, I just use one of the other two, and I don’t care. But evidently, some people do.
The worst part is, an excellent upgrade exists. The RCS experience between Android users is pretty much as good as iMessage. Apple could support this; not to replace iMessage, but to upgrade SMS conversations. My tech-illiterate mom's Galaxy S negative 12 has it. Of my contacts, every single Android user I text (maybe a dozen) has RCS. Its standard.
When I put my iPhone XS and my S20 Plus side-by-side; chatting with Android users using rich text via RCS; animations at 120hz on a display so blindingly bright the brightness slider turns red at the end; so seamless with the device's edges its like looking through a portal; unlocking with a sonic sub-pixel fingerprint reader; swiping notifications away at a rate the iPhone can't approach; charging my computer keyboard, mouse, phone, laptop, and smartwatch with the same cable... I've religiously used both iPhone and Android, I switch every year, and the iPhone feels like its years behind Samsung right now. Its not close.
RCS: no e2e, multi-device support, or any 3rd party application APIs on Android. In other words, gimped by Google.
Google's messaging department has been chasing it's tail for 10 years. Unless they clone iMessage from the inside out, RCS has no hope. Personally, I want to see RCS fail. It's a lousy spec with few privacy protections built-in. I had it enabled on my phone for a while and there was no indication as to whether my messages were passing through my carrier's servers or Google's RCS endpoint.
Google's been unable to build a iMessage competitor because they don't have the same leverage with the phone carriers that Apple does - because they don't even sell what few phones they manufacture in the carrier's stores.
They built out a technology and gave carriers the option to implement it themselves, or they could just piggyback on Google's servers. Carriers obviously opted to implement it themselves because they don't want to become dumb pipes, then dragged their feet for years.
As I understand it, Google wants to get a basic version in place with all the major carriers first, then start rolling out many of the other features you've mentioned.
Apple's been holding out on supporting it because it's not encrypted, but it'll be interesting to see how they respond to carrier-wide adoption of encrypted RCS when that comes. Will iMessage chats fall back to RCS with Android phones? Or will they continue to fall back to unencrypted oldschool SMS?
Under display scanner on Samsungs is so horribly bad that I'm not worried about it at all :) . I often can't unlock my S10+ in five tries after which it forces me to enter pin. And S10+ cost 1000$ on release last year. I don't use any screen protectors and I've rescanned fingers after Samsung rolled out "fixes" for the scanner. It's junk.
Zero issues with the S20. It works great; not as great as TouchID on older iPhones, as if that were still an option, but barring super wet fingers or gloves, it unlocks every time while declining the fingerprints of my other fingers and the half-dozen other people who have tried mine.
Every part of the world has its own messaging apps. Depending on where you live, it might be WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, LINE, or I’m sure others. In Europe I know for a fact that the popular app varies from country to country. So you could just as easily dismiss LINE as a “purely Japanese phenomenon” but the fact is each app is popular in a certain part of the world.
Because network effects are more important than UX or features.
Sure it does, but cross platform IMs are not so socially discriminating. You can easily download LINE and move on with your life in Japan. But getting iMessage is an economic barrier for many, for which they end up being socially ostraostracized
Are you really going to buy, charge, supply with data and carry around a second phone, no matter how cheap, just so you can send blue messages? That attitude is, like many american ideas, really whack.
I think the best reason is explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23412067 - ie. how most social circles will exclude Android users. I imagine this is only be the case when only one or two people of the group are using Android though, so if even a few people in the friend group are in that situation you might see more WhatsApp/FB Messenger.
My mid-30s colleague went back to Tinder in recent years and he mentioned he got questioned by his target market about not having a blue bubble. They were all Asian (but mostly Chinese) women in their late 20s who moved to Australia.
With reference to a recent HN thread, I wonder if saying "I'm a developer/security expert/working on a classified government project and HAVE to use a special phone" would garner sympathy or admiration and stop the questions.
This is funny because as someone who works on important but non-classified stuff for the government, I do carry around a government issued phone so that I can access my work email/IM anywhere. But, (a) it's another iPhone and (b) I'd get in an awful lot of trouble if I installed Tinder on it. Most people probably wouldn't realize that though.
Well the most annoying thing about whatsapp (other than its owned by Facebook) is that it can't automatically fallback to sms for contacts not using it.
But not all of the world have moved to whatsapp. I am from Scandinavian and I only have a very limited number of contacts available on whatsapp, most are on iMessage.
Not really an Android or WhatsApp user, so my perspective there is probably not all that relevant ;) I am curious if any apps there fall back to SMS? I think Hangouts might have a long time back?
No, WhatsApp does not bring the same features. WhatsApp is very different. You can react to messages in iMessage, which is just one among other features WhatsApp doesn’t have.
Yeah I mean there will little tiny things different on each app, but it's not a big deal breaker for many. Whatsapp is the biggest IM on the planet for a reason. People could easily ditch iMessage in favour of Whatsapp if they wanted to, but for some reason Americans don't do that.
The absolute deal breaker for WhatsApp for me is that it is owned by Facebook. There is zero chance I would consider using it for anything, ever, because of that fact.
The idea of moving to a different chat platform won’t even come up if your current system has the features you need and everyone you want to reach is on it. What would nudge a group to collectively move to WhatsApp if iMessage is the default and works well for them?
I don’t use What’s App for the simple reason I like how my contacts are integrated across my Apple devices. From email, to “normal” phone calls, to Siri, calendar invites, and even directions “hey Siri, directions to Tom’s work” — it all works seamlessly. If I want to send someone a location from Maps, it’s seamless. If I am using something like Find My, I can easily send a message from there — or even create a Shortcut to send a geofenced message. And Memojis are just simply fun. When I am on the road, sending my kids a message with a talking robot really makes their day.
I also have big trust problems with Facebook products. Apple makes iMessage to sell devices, what does Facebook do with What’s App? There have been reports in the past that installed Facebook, Inc., apps were sending analytics from devices on other apps people were using, pretty much like a Trojan horse. I don’t want any installed Facebook related apps on my devices because Facebook lost my trust long ago. While supposedly What’s App is “secure,” the entire history of Facebook has been littered with “oops, you caught us and we are really really sorry this time.”
It's not a problem on Android at all and just a limitation of the Apple platforms.
When I try to use a "share" action for example, I get my contacts from the phone and Whatsapp at the same level. My list of contacts actually has a merged view of all my contacts stored on my phone, Whatsapp and other services. Contacts on multiple services are merged appropriately.
Social dynamics are subtle. For example, group SMS doesn’t support contact names. If you add someone to a group SMS, the other people only see a phone number unless they go out of their way to add the new guy to their contact list. Likewise, the new person has to add everyone else to see names. Decades of research in behavioral economics show just how powerful defaults are, so most people probably won’t bother to add names. Without names, the new person will have a more difficult time connecting with the group.
This isn’t stupid. It’s the natural consequences of tech that doesn’t conform to real human behaviors and social norms.
Your argument fails when you consider Whatsapp - the biggest messaging platform, where you need to add people's number in your contact to be able to see their names.
I agree with power of defaults though. Only reason iMessage took off, and so did other Apple services.
You definitely don't... Unknown contacts show as e.g. "+1234567890 ~Bob" (their WhatsApp display name). When you save them to your contacts it switches to the name you added instead.
Exactly this about excluding names. I was sent a group message and didn’t reply because I didn’t recognize the number. I started another chat, deleted the number and then responded.
This is mistaken. I'm in the EU and do not know a single person using SMS, nor Whatsapp, they use iMessage, however, bigtime.
Whatsapp used to be a thing, but that has been over for some time. Now, most are using Messenger, Snap, and Telegram.
And iMessage is not a craze or a phenomenon, it is a simple convenience; it's on your phone already. For most people using it, it is not even a deliberate choice. The younger generation grew up with it, they do not even really know the difference between SMS and iMessage, except that if the bubble is green, the other user does not have an iPhone.
The older generation remembers SMS, so they still tend to call it SMS, even though they are using iMessage.
Android users are in the minority around here, well, at least between family, friends, and at work.
Well, I'm in the EU (France/UK) and do not know a single person that doesn't use Whatsapp. I'm also not even completely sure what iMessage is, nobody ever mentioned it.
All I mean is: anecdotal evidence and social bubbles
It’s a bit more than that though - try to send a picture to an Android user. It will work sometimes. Sometimes it won’t. No rhyme or reason and no way to control it. Send a picture to another iPhone - works exactly as expected every time.
It’s not just social status. It works much much better than SMS, it’s a superior experience and interacting with green bubble folk ruins it. I’m not particularly young or concerned at all with social status, but I urge people in my circles to just get iPhones because of iMessage and FaceTime. Both vastly superior experiences to any alternatives available.
Individual SMS is fine. Group SMS stinks. You can’t remove yourself from a conversation unless everyone else moves on to a new thread without you. Also, you don’t get contact names for ad hoc group conversations with new people.
Trying to get people to agree to a proper chat platform is like wrangling cats. If everyone in the group has an iOS device, then there’s no decision to be made.
I’ve never seen people exclude someone with a green bubble from a conversation, but I’ve seen this behavior (use iMessage as a high quality default) in spades.
Definitely people care about blue vs green bubbles. Have you ever tried to send videos back and forth between the two? It looks like it was shot on my old Nokia flip phone in either direction. Plus no "typing" bubble, texts seem to take longer to arrive, group chats are degraded if even one green bubble is included, etc. It sounds like Android has finally caught up with RCS, but iMessage was one of my favorite features when I switched years ago.
MMS and SMS are extremely unreliable, especially if you were out of the coverage area when a message was sent (half the time I only receive some of a conversation and have to try to interpret what happened). RCS is supposed to fix this, but no carrier seems intent on sunsetting SMS to force Apple’s hand. At least with iMessage, I’ll eventually get the message (they’ll hold it server side, encrypted, until I get back online).
I still use SMS a lot, because it’s more important to me that I can talk and send pictures to people than worrying about them being on a certain platform or app (Discord’s notifications aren’t great on mobile if you haven’t opened the app for a while). But it’s super annoying, and if Apple made iMessage an open standard (they probably won’t, since people buy iPhones for it), I think many people on Android would move to it.
I would buy an Android if it weren’t for the social force behind iMessage blue bubbles and the smoothness of FaceTime.
Green bubbles signal low status. It also makes it more difficult to communicate: no read receipts, no live location, photo/video/audio messages are clunky, worse emojis, no reaction option, and so on.
It’s not about Blue/Green bubbles. Everything messes up once you have one person in a group that isn’t on iMessage - including reactions to messages. Instead of getting an icon on top of message you get “John Doe liked ‘We will be there soon’”.
IME there's a loss of a number of features when communicating without someone with "blue bubbles", that you come to take for granted, and that cause a bit of friction when you realize the messages/functionality you took for granted in your exchange aren't there. If I find myself chatting with someone with green bubbles, I find I tend to transition the conversation over to whatsapp.
It's not like a "relationship killer" or something, but I imagine it is a low-level contributor to my lock-in to the platform.
Which is why 99% of Americans get a to live in a shitty Nash equilibrium of either being socially ostracised and excluded or being locked into an expensive monopoly of a single smart phone vendor.
People buy android phones for all sorts of reasons (in the US, mainly price). But in the US, it’s nearly impossible to have a broad social circle that doesn’t want to ‘text’ so I’d guess at least 99% of US users regularly engage with default messaging apps. if given the choice, of bet nearly all of those users would prefer to centralize their ‘texts’ instead of multi-apping
Look what happened to groupme as soon as iMessage group chat got good...
So you are saying 99% of iPhone users would prefer to use iMessage. Yeah I don't doubt that, it's built in. Still you only need one or two close friends or family members with Android to install WhatsApp.
Why don't people use WhatsApp? Do Android users just not have any friends? Or do they use SMS? which is a joke next to WhatsApp and iMessage.
I was thinking about moving to Android about three years back. The thing that stopped me from even seriously considering it was iMessage.
Everyone I know uses iMessage. SMS is unreliable, works poorly in group chats, and can't easily be sent/received from my computer.
(I will still eventually need to go to Android because I'm not giving up my headphone jack, but I'll be hanging onto my iPhone 6S for as long as possible.)
WhatsApp sucks. Message delivery/notifications are unreliable, the interface is hideous, it lacks the Tapback/reaction feature which is heavily used in iMessage, and it dumps pics from group chats into your photo library automatically, as if you took them yourself. Idiot posts racist meme to a group chat? It lives in your photos library forever until you notice and manually delete.
Notifications being sporadically (at best) delivered is the real deal breaker for me.
What’s more fun than a party you missed because WhatsApp didn’t feel like delivering notifications for a day?
1. Settings → Chats → Disable "Save to Camera Roll", done.
2. WhatsApp has rock-solid message delivery, otherwise it wouldn't have 2 billion users (https://blog.whatsapp.com/two-billion-users-connecting-the-w...). It's the default messaging app in most of the world. You don't become that popular with unreliable message delivery.
Notifications only seem to work if WhatsApp is actively running, unlike every other app on the iPhone.
I checked again, and yup, a bunch of messages in a group chat I never was notified for.
That behavior is fine if it’s your primary app, but it sucks if you’re not constantly checking.
Also, 2 is a bad thought in general. Consider: “Windows has a billion+ users, of course it doesn’t crash. You don’t get 1 billion+ users with bsod and forced updates.”
Your comparison to Windows is probably more appropriate than you think. When is the last time Windows crashed on you (and it wasn't a dodgy third-party driver that caused it)? It works fine for nearly everyone using it. So does WhatsApp.
The US is a big place. WhatsApp has plenty of users in the US. It’s easily the third messaging app I use, after LINE and iMessage. And the people I talk to on WhatsApp are US natives, it’s not like they picked up WhatsApp in some other country and brought it here.
If you're using three messaging apps on a regular basis, you are either an extreme outlier or have lots of contact with people who are in other countries or have strong ties to other countries.
One thing I have come to appreciate about WhatsApp is its ability to handle low bandwidth environments better than iMessage. Back in 2015, I was traveling around Europe and had T-Mobile's unlimited roaming plan. I think the data speed was capped at like 64 or 128kbps? In addition, many hostels had less than 1Mbps wifi. iMessage would just choke trying to send pictures or large messages. In particular, it would be stuck in the middle of that "sending" blue line indefinitely like it was quietly timing out and would sometimes require a reboot of the phone to recover because it would remain stuck in the "sending" phase forever. Whatsapp seemed better tested and more solid when it came to transmitting messages. You'd see consistent progressing updates in the progress bar until it either timed out(unlikely) or finally transmitted.
Other messaging apps have the same features as iMessage, but not the same user experience. For example, WhatsApp has a pretty massive spam and fake news problem, and Facebook messenger is significantly slower and applies a high degree of compression on media. iMessage offers the best UX, and that’s why, in my experience, iOS users will almost always opt to use iMessage over competitors when communicating with other iOS users.
Depends where you live. No one I know uses SMS or iMessage. Everyone uses whatsapp. SMS is a weird appendix of a thing on your phone contract, used only for automated reminders from companies. And iMessage is pretty much useless because then you can't send messages to 60% of people, and besides, they're in whatsapp anyway.
The ux is very debatable. It's the same as every other messaging app now adays.
They will opt to use imessage just the same as everyone pretty much opts to whatever is already installed. You could swap out imessage with a 1990s version of aol messenger and people would opt to use that.
Apple does not have a monopoly on good ux. In fact a lot of it is just garbage
Speak for yourself, I have never encountered a spam problem on Whatsapp. Fake news - maybe, but it was from the "usual suspects" ie. people who believe in every conspiracy theory they encounter.
It’s the combination of features and the network effect iMessage has. That’s what makes it special to a lot of people. You get rich chat features (especially in group conversations) and you don’t have to negotiate what platform to use if everyone happens to have an iOS device.
Great for you if you live in an area where all of your friends have the same messaging app. They’re all a big step up from SMS, but there’s no messaging app I know that will reach everyone I want to talk to.
For me - it's simply a question of reliability. SMS is not reliable in the US, and I live in an area with poor coverage. My preferred mode of communication is texting but SMS is a no-go.
SMS is very reliable here in New Zealand, even more so than any IP-based systems. I've had SMS get through easily in one-signal-bar situations where IP data was nearly inoperable (especially if I happened to be attached to a 2G GPRS cell). Wonder if SMS reliability is really an issue peciular to certain networks. SMS reliability has been good for me both in NZ and all the foriegn networks I have used in my travels around the world. 4G is very good though in low signal situations so IP based protcols are improving in reliability... Just need networks to hurry up their 4G roll out and turn off their 2G/3G networks.
I did for a while, especially to keep in touch with overseas friends, but I've been Facebook-free for a few years now and that meant deleting WhatsApp as well.
There are other people on this site, too, besides you and 'elliekelly. Please don't do this even though you think a ban to punish you is appropriate. (As punishment, it sure doesn't help the people who had their discussion quality lowered…)
iMessage is ABSOLUTELY brilliant if your family and friends are all on iPhones, which I'm pretty sure is fairly common in most Western countries.
Regardless whether you agree with that, it is super practical for me and my family. It also means we don't have run other chat software like WhatsApp.
The whole experience is just so seamless and well integrated across your devices. Everything from regular messages, voicenotes, sending cute animojis to your wife, or doing a FaceTime with my 102 year old grandmother. I do that on a daily basis. And I can easily continue a conversation from my computer, or even respond from my Apple Watch when exercising.
I am still on WhatsApp though as there are millions of users worldwide, but I keep notifications off and check it only once a day.
> brilliant if your family and friends are all on iPhones, which I'm pretty sure is fairly common in most Western countries
iOS market share is 60% in the US which is the highest worldwide, and only above 50% in a handful of other countries (UK, Japan, Oz, Canada)[0]. If you have any friends who are not rich, or are European or South American, there's a good chance they won't iMessage you but try to add you on WhatsApp.
>If you have any friends who are not rich, or are European or South American
One: 55-60% market share in the US, by definition, is not confined to "the rich."
As to the other categories: my personal answer to "If you have any friends that aren't American" is "that's what whatsapp is for." I imagine for a lot of people the answer is that, or "I don't, actually."
Like, all the teenagers in my family. Their list of non-US friends is near-zero. Their non-US family are all on whatsapp.
In my social circle everyone uses something completely different, not just for messaging.
I need all of Threema, Signal, Skype, iMessage and email just for my closest friends and family.
I also need Google Photos, Google Drive and OneDrive to share data with them.
Apple is the most anti-social platform of them all. I can't even use it to share photos with my wife.
I have never used FaceTime with anyone, because no one uses it, not even those who do have iPhones, because they all have to use something else to communicate with others.
Even when it's not majority, I agree with sgt that initially the experience was much, much better than with other apps, especially for the older people in my family.
It degraded a bit, however, with the time. Adding features is not to the benefit of the less young, whereas young tolerate UI getting more complex and less intuitive.
I have an iPhone. I have a MacBook. I have AirPods. I have the watch. I use a PC for work and am considering moving away from the iPhone because I miss texting on my desktop.
They could bind a windows iMessage install to your iPhone the same way Signal/whatsapp do.
Right, I'm trying to understand Apple's motivations, and this question applies not only to iMessage but their general approach regarding macOS, apps, app store, the proprietary/locked-down nature of their software and hardware.
The opposite of ubiquity would be "exclusivity" - and that does explain a lot. The reasoning must be that there is value in making their apps exclusive to their own OS(es). The same way you can't (easily) run macOS on any old PC, or the way their hardware doesn't allow users to repair or extend it.
Does it? iMessage is really US thing. The consequence of this strategy is that no one uses it outside the US. Whatsapp is a lot bigger and the leader in this market. Zero chance that will change because of this strategy.
I have noticed that many of my iPhone friends start using WhatsApp for group and personal chats as default. I don’t get why. I switch back to iMessage in those cases, which irritates people too. I think iMessage would be way more successful if it was available on other platforms.
You’re absolutely right, that is a large part of why I keep using iOS. It’s also a very common exciting part of switching from android based on my own social circle.
Maybe the marketing and “coolness” is what initially attracts them but once they try it they stay because of the user experience.
I had a non-technical friend with an Android phone (full of malware btw). She didn’t care about Apple, never used any of their products nor need it for the “social status” or anything (her friends are all on WhatsApp so no issues with iMessage). I gave her an old iPhone 7 to try out, a couple weeks later she would never consider going back to Android ever.
It was a mid-range Samsung probably a year old. The problem wasn’t really the hardware but the fact that it was full of malware and crap apps, which is what you’d expect with a non-technical user. iOS mostly avoids that problem thanks to sandboxing.
Can you name a single android phone that is superior in performance with last year’s iPhone? Can you name an android phone that will be stable and up-to-date 5 years after it was released?
Yes, Apple gives 5+ years. My iPhone 6s from 2015 is on latest iOS and still fast with a new battery.
Pixel might count, but they don’t guarantee more than 2 years of Android updates. The built-in processors are years behind what Apple provides, so it’s understandable.
Network effects. All your friends are using iMessage.
This is mostly a US phenomenon because in other countries people had already adopted other messaging apps due to higher text messaging costs and for free international voice/video calls
The features aren’t special by themselves. It’s the features combined with the fact it’s the default SMS/chat client on a huge portion of the smartphones market.
It’s a social product. You can’t discount its social appeal.
Because tying your company to one product is an economic disaster. It's very clear that drop in iPhone sales causes a very direct impact on Apple and the reason why they started moving towards SaaS model. But their SaaS isn't big enough yet. If today China retaliates with ban on Apple, the company is pretty much dead because no other country is capable of manufacturing at the scale Apple needs it to.
According to their last earnings - 50% of their revenue was outside of the iPhone.
You also have to remember even the Mac by itself brought in higher revenue than all but the top 100 companies in the US and it’s only 10% of Apple’s revenue. The watch is a bigger revenue generator than the iPod ever was.
The Apple watch, Airpods and everything else except Macs are tightly coupled to the sale of iPhones. If you stop making iPhones, the rest is pretty much dead too.
AirPods are Bluetooth. The Beats division of Apple was already profitably selling headphones before Apple bought them. You act as if it would be a great technical hurdle to make the Watch work with Android. Apple is making the Watch a more standalone deceive with every release.
There is also the iPad that gets you another 10%. If just 10% of Apple’s revenue from the Mac puts it in the top 100, what does 30% do? If Apple created the “Mac company” it would still be the most profitable computer company in the world. It makes more selling Macs than any other company makes selling phones besides maybe Samsung.
But isn’t kind of silly talking about Apple being dependent on the iPhone when after two decades and billion of dollars, Google’s profit is still 90% from ads?
> The Beats division of Apple was already profitably selling headphones before Apple bought them.
It made a few billions in revenue, that's far cry from trillions a tech giant is expected to make.
> You act as if it would be a great technical hurdle to make the Watch work with Android.
That's exactly my point. They shouldn't be making such closed ecosystem, their products will be more popular if anyone could use them. This is why they caved in on Apple Music and TV like services which are available on Android, Roku, Fire TV etc.
> There is also the iPad that gets you another 10%. If just 10% of Apple’s revenue from the Mac puts it in the top 100, what does 30% do? If Apple created the “Mac company” it would still be the most profitable computer company in the world. It makes more selling Macs than any other company makes selling phones besides maybe Samsung.
Nobody cares about "Mac Company" or "iPad Company". They don't have any clout. Hundreds of companies come and go from the top 100 but only a few can last for decades. Microsoft is still standing today even after a failed Mobile venture only because of the money they made during desktop era and still cashing in on that success. If iPhones stopped getting manufactured it's pretty much the end of Apple today regardless of their Mac, iPad or Airpods business.
> But isn’t kind of silly talking about Apple being dependent on the iPhone when after two decades and billion of dollars, Google’s profit is still 90% from ads?
Since when did whataboutism became a valid rebuttal?
It made a few billions in revenue, that's far cry from trillions a tech giant is expected to make.
Apple doesn't make trillions in revenue....
That's exactly my point. They shouldn't be making such closed ecosystem, their products will be more popular if anyone could use them. This is why they caved in on Apple Music and TV like services which are available on Android, Roku, Fire TV etc.
Why because the "open" ecosystems are doing so much better? Android manufacturers aren't exactly bringing in boatloads of money. In fact, Google isn't even bringing in boatloads of money from Android. It came out in the Oracle trial that Google had only made $23 billion in profit from Android from inception to the time of discovery. Google reportedly pays Apple $8 billion a year just to be the default search engine on Apple devices. It seems like Apple makes more on mobile from Google than Google makes from Android. That whole open thing doesn't seem to be working...
Nobody cares about "Mac Company" or "iPad Company". They don't have any clout. Hundreds of companies come and go from the top 100 but only a few can last for decades
You realize Apple lasted "for decades" - from 1984 - 2001 just from selling Macs. It lasted another 6 years selling Macs and iPods. Apple went public before Microsoft.
Microsoft is still standing today even after a failed Mobile venture only because of the money they made during desktop era and still cashing in on that success.
And Apple survived almost going bankrupt by selling desktops....
If iPhones stopped getting manufactured it's pretty much the end of Apple today regardless of their Mac, iPad or Airpods business.
We have an existence proof that Apple could survive just selling computers and one or two other devices --- they did so for almost four decades.
Since when did whataboutism became a valid rebuttal?
Apple is better diversified than most of the tech companies and they have been around for longer and pivoted better than any of the big 5.
Who's "we all" here? The "wider software community"? There are certainly tens of millions of users of FaceTime; I'd wager more than the entire population of the "wider software community".
I don't disagree with the ideological position but personally I find it harder to argue with the economics without having also created and operated a billion dollar services and hardware business.
Absolutely have been saying this for years. It’s ridiculous for iMessage to be a walled garden. How would it be if emails from iPhone could only go to other iPhones? Yet shrink the email and put a blue bubble around it and that’s just fine.
I think Google Duo and WhatsApp are the competitors to Facetime. Zoom is more of a competitor in the video conferencing space along with Google Meet, Skype for Business and Cisco WebEx. Regular Skype is more of a competitor in the all-in-one consumer messaging space along with Google Hangouts.
Unfortunately all are proprietary and it was the previous generation, iChat and Google Talk, that were based on the open XMPP standard.
Is Google Duo much of a competitor? Hangouts is circling the drain, Allo is dead, and everyone I know is confused by Duo, including Google employees. If you made a list of the ways Google employees made video calls to each other outside work, I’d be suprised if Duo were in the top three.
Duo: A simple app with a confusing name, released four years ago to compete with another app that Google made that did the same thing but more, and released as a matched set with a different app which also had a confusing name but is now discontinued. Forgive me if I’m getting old and can’t keep up with this shit. I make video calls through four different apps depending on who I’m talking to, and I just can’t be bothered to deal with Google’s constantly-changing messaging landscape.
I know people who are still angry about the Messenger app being split off from Facebook, but that’s nothing compared to the dumpster fire that is Google’s messaging app landscape. So if I want to make a video call to one of my Google employee friends it’s not going to be through Duo because it seems like they don’t have time for this shit either.
> That's the case for many people these days–in fact, every week, over 10 million new people are signing up for Duo, and in many countries, call minutes have increased by more than ten-fold.
https://www.blog.google/products/duo/4-new-google-duo-featur....
Disclaimer : Google employee but work far away from duo but use it daily with family and friends.
Genuinely surprised by this, because I have circles in WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Snapchat, Signal and iMessage, but I don't know a single person who uses Duo.
Perhaps a geographical thing and it's only popular in a couple of countries?
I think Duo is here to stay. Google is even tightening the integration of Duo with the Android dialer, while at the same time doing things like dramatically improving group calls and integrating it with Google Home devices.
Has it not taken off? It holds the #5 spot in "Social Networking" in Apple's app store, where it must compete with Facetime. I've been using it to talk to my mother for 4 years. She certainly doesn't care about Google's past messaging blunders; she just likes that it works.
I don't really think Duo would be the best option for Google employees to video chat with each other. They'd use Hangouts, because they all already know each others' G Suite accounts.
Would have agreed pre-covid but post-covid it's clear than Zoom is actually a great system for social calls too and the distinction between business orientated video chat and social isn't as harsh as it seemed.
I'm from a big social drinking country and our Friday bar visits are now just a link we can share into a group chat and people can drop in as they please, you can share things from your screen and it all just works great.
the state of messaging is quite depressing. You have apple doing its own thing and with apparently no intention to have its communication service on all the major platform.
Google doing what google does and running like an headless chicken creating a new service every minute instead of creating one good one.
Last time I tried to launch WeChat, you had to surrender to it a disgusting amount of personal information to even launch the app.
You have some outliers like Telegram or Signal, but good luck getting all your contacts on there.
As a result I just have a dozen of messaging apps installed on my devices.
Apple built iMessage and FaceTime to move Apple devices. Why would or should they open it? Not to mention, it is probably tied into the hardware at a deep level — it clearly works much better on more modern phones, and better on iOS than MacOS.
As services grows to become a larger portion of Apple’s revenue, extending it to other platforms is an interesting idea. They already make Apple Music available as a paid service on Android. I could see an Apple TV+ app being developed as well. They could bundle those together with FaceTime and iMessage for a single monthly fee.
It may not have too many takers (I’m willing to bet that most people currently using Apple Music on Android devices are iPhone users with Android tablets), but it would help families or groups of friends who have that one person on Android, and those folks would bear a visible monetary cost that they could partially recoup by switching.
Remember how surprising it was to everyone when Apple announced a windows version of iTunes in 2003. Jobs resisted the idea, and then publicly acquiesced, standing in front of a slide that said “Hell froze Over”. Aside from the additional iPod and iTMS revenue, the halo effect of widespread iPod exposure likely sold a lot more macs than platform exclusivity would have.
I'd read about an article how there is a significant "dark" black hat companies which do nothing but dig up into the open source codes to find the exploits. They invest big time to develop proprietary tools for autonomous scanning of latest vulnerabilities. Such exploits then get sold for millions of dollars. They do open source code scanning to everything from popular Python packages to popular Chrome extensions to Office plugins to Linux kernel to open source phone apps.
One might think that opening the source will lead to code reviews by many and fix security bugs. In my own experience with open sourcing few projects, I've not seen that happening. Vast majority of contributors aren't willing to spend a lot of time in reviewing security issues and fixing for you. In fact, virtually all contributors will send you patches that are often half assed and have security issues which you might unknowingly accept because all tests are passing, you don't have much time and in code reviews everything look ok. For things like iMessage, I suspect billions of dollars worth of important decisions are made by everyone from Jeff Bezos to the President of USA. In my opinion, open sourcing something like this would give a handsome payday to many black hat hacking groups including state owned agencies.
So you would prefer to keep open exploits around and approach with security-by-obscurity?
Somehow I think Apple can muster the resources to respond to vulnerabilities in exactly the same way you’re claiming they respond to open source exploitation. You may have a point with much smaller projects, but this is apple and they can easily outfund exploiters before there’s mass exploitation according to your analysis of increased attention.
That's not how it works. I think you have little idea, if any, how easy it is to find exploits if you had a source code vs if you didn't. With source code you can immediately see the conditions that will cause buffer overruns, for example. One of the huge target has always been jpeg decoder code in Chrome. If you can somehow figure out conditions that will result in buffer overrun, you will have exploit just by creating artificial jpeg. Your victim simply needs to visit your webpage with that jpeg which even can be pushed by narrowly targeted ads, Facebook etc. Building such exploits is much harder to accomplish without having source code. This is rather outdated example but think about possibilities in JavaScript engine, HTML rendering, graphics drivers, OS calls, extensions, APIs etc. When you have 10 million lines of code, you almost inevitabily have some exploit. Such zero day are often sold for 10s of millions of dollars. Its much much harder to find same vulnerabilities without having source code.
Your argument that somehow Apple will do better than these black hat guys is also flawed. Apple can higher N security experts but Apple will always unlikely to match in number of firms and state agencies who can hire M >> N in aggregate. Think of Apple running centralize effort with N people while whole world running distributed attack every day every hour with 10X more eyes and time on hand. Also it has been very well understood within security professionals that source code gets far more scruitiny from black hat then white hat guys.
Finally, remember that people don't update their systems for months and even years. You should know that Bezos iPhone was hacked by an exploit developed by a black hat firm which ultimately cost him $40B in divorce. Think about that for a second. A single software vunerability cost was $40 billion, more than market cap of many companies and GDPs of many countries. This is a guy who literally owns huge chunk of public and private infrastructure, has the best of the best security experts at his finger tips and he got hacked.
I doubt anyone will argue that it’s easier to find exploits in closed-source code, but it’s really not that much more difficult. Like, maybe an order of magnitude harder at most. To a nation-state, does it really matter that a zero day chain costs $100,000 rather than $1,000,000?
Even in an all Apple ecosystem my family is using Zoom because we can't add multiple Facetime people to a call for some reason and there is no messaging explaining why.
Probably one of us running an old OS or something (All devices are recent) but whatever why should I waste my time debugging that with my elderly parents when Zoom just works.
FT goes up to 32 participants now I think. Well before that you're into 1-many kind of mode vs a 1-few, they're very different experiences and different use cases.
Is't facetime pretty must a standard softphone (eg: sip/srtp) using h264? i wonder if it's only "closed" due to authentication concerns there's not much else to "open up" that's not already
