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Apple Puts a Stop to Beeper Mini's iMessage for Android Feature
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Most people here seem to forget, that this was actually playing out FOR them and not against them. This was a FEATURE! You could finally message Android users via the standard Message app encrypted, high res media. How nice would that have been? No more SMS chats or off-loading to WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram. People arguing about the costs this would incurr forget, that this would have made life easier and I think wouldn't have played against Apple. People don't buy iPhones ONLY because they have iMessage. More often people are already invested into the Apple eco-system with MB or similar.
If you buy a civic type R and modify it to the hilt and now you want to swap to a focus st, should you just be able to take those mods and move them over to the focus ST?
There are a number of apps that facilitate cross platform communication. Apple should not be forced by regulation to make imessage “interoperable”. People should acquire the products that suit them best.
The blue bubble is just the indicator. The actual problem is if you try and send a video or photo from iPhone -> android or vice versa, via the normal messages app. The quality is equivalent to maybe iPhone 3G quality, as an MMS can only contain kilobytes of content at most.
So users are forced to use third party messaging apps.
Given the drama I assume no other cross-platform rich messaging apps exist.
That’s true. But iPhone users tend to spend more money than android users. Google sure thinks we are valuable.and the US is still smaller than the rest of the world combinedI am American and i say we arent that important in the grand scheme of things.
So you’re telling me there is a well known and easy to use and obtain workaround?
Time to stop buying garbage apps that do nothing but attempt to fool people into thinking you have an iPhone, and just buy an iPhone! Or just give up live with the shame of green bubbles.
I havent dug into the PoC they posted on gh yet, but sounds like they reversed engineered the general protocol, encryption, and the undocumented API, no exploit needed (which is more impressive honestly given how thoroughly they managed it seems than finding a vuln and exploiting it)
I mean it also fully implemented imessage’s E2EE, that’s not just cosmetic
Seems this is criminal in nature. If someone leaves their door open you are not free to walk in. Of course we don’t know yet if that shoe is dropping.
…why would it be criminal in nature? they didnt walk in anywhere, they figured out how to interact with a publicly exposed API…
That's really really bad comparison.
iMessage is messaging platform. Infrastructure. So better to compare it to Tesla superchargers for instance. And these are being opened up. Because that just makes sense and everybody profits from it. Same deal with opening-up iMessage.
Everyone would profit from it (well except for Apple of course, because of their ecosystem lock-in), Android users and Apple users as well. Why? Because of privacy and E2EE.
If Apple really cared about privacy and security, they would open it up rather than closing it and forcing Apple users to send unencrypted and unsafe SMS instead of iMessage to Android users (and vice-versa of course).
And RCS is not solving that - at least not soon. The standard Apple is implementing is not encrypted.
This. A lot of people there don't understand this (they are not tech savvy I guess).
This was not a hack by any means. Reverse engineering is not a hack. You just figure out something, you really did not brute-force any security or break through some password or something.
If you figure out how to create your own engine management system (ECU) for some specific car and start selling that, you did not hack into anything. And it is completely fine to even sell such thing.
But its the meat of the matter.
Elon is going to make $$$ by opening up the Tesla supercharging network with reserving a good portion for Tesla vehicles. It was his call and if the government stepped in and regulated Teslas supercharging network I would have similar comments. (The difference is Tesla as other charging companies did get government $$$) Apple, while it may be nice if they expanded the imessage platform, I am against regulations forcing hem to.
that’s not ecosystem lock-in, it’s proprietary software on top of their platform the same as any other software service. As an example move from windows to red-hat Linux and see how easy that is.
The above is a logical fallacy when starting an assertion with “if”. If apple really cared about privacy they would have a separate sms app a keep imessage “pure”.
RCS is an SMS band-aid it seems to me.
Excuse me, I haven’t read this entire thread, maybe it was discussed after the first page but I don’t see anybody pointing at the elephant in the room: it was possible for anyone without an Apple ID to send iMessage-s to anybody. So much for how secure iMessage is 🤦🏻♂️
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This is just matter of opinion and view. There are many reasons why completely unregulated market is not good and goes against customers and there are many reasons why regulations are bending the market and why it's bad.
Talking about this we're getting into political debate.
Well, it is part of the Apple's ecosystem lock-in. It is not cross-platform intentionally and everyone knows iMessage is one of the reasons Apple customers are not considering to switch to other platform. So no, comparison to two different operating system is - again - very wrong. Messaging platform is not comparable to RHEL and Windows.
Totally true. And you know why they did not do that? Because it would be much more natural and easy for people to use another messaging app that way. If it was separate it would be easy to differentiate between SMS and another messaging platform. There would not be any "green" and "blue" bubbles. There would only be iMessage separate app which is not cross-platform and therefore it would be inferior to other alternative apps like Whatsapp, Telegram or Signal which are cross-platform. But integration to the default SMS app is the major part of Apple's game. With this move many US customers know just one messaging app and it is de facto standard for them. They don't know the technical side behind all of this, they just know "blue good, green bad. Green Android. Android bad.".
I agree with this one as well.
You guys are already getting RCS. Which you would THINk would end this debate. Nope, we are still talking about blue bubbles literally almost 2 months later.
Not true. Maybe Android users in US? Definitely not in the EU. Majority of ppl are using Whatsapp or Telegram there.
So they really do not care about message colors in the iPhone's messaging app. And definitely not Android users (because guess what, they don't see those iPhone message app colors).
Why Apple’s iMessage Is Winning: Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble
The iPhone maker cultivated iMessage as a must-have blue-bubble texting tool for teens. Android users trigger a just-a-little-less-cool green bubble: “Ew, that’s gross.”www.wsj.com
Yeah, it's the US iPhone users who care about green bubbles. The article above is just one of many.
It is not about YOU seeing the colors or not. It's about some perceived notion that iPhone users think that they are better than Android users and Android users hate the idea of us knowing they use anything non-android. Android users are literally making themselve victims of a situation that in YOUR WORDS is likely an American Android vs iMessage thing...not a rest of the world thing.
I work in a bar setting. The amount of women I have seen go home with a guy is hundreds nightly. Girls are not asking "OMG, do you have an iPhone?" They don't care lmfao.
One, it is offensive and borderline misogynistic implying women are that superficial to care about phones as a whole. But two, it's sad because it goes to show android men are insecure if their self-worth is tied into a phone(ironically, accusing apple users of doing the same thing).
Kids are not being bullied to the extent that people want to make it out to be.
I am 28 with younger brothers (15-19) and i talk to some of their friends as well since I do alot of fashion consultation for them.
Kids care about tik tok, insta, Snapchat, Messenger, Whisper, lapse, Bereal, etc. They dont care how you get to use it. They just care that you use it.
I at 28 thought my demographic outgrew snapchat and instagram. Boy was I wrong. The amount of dudes always asking for either of them when we meet in a bar or online dating. I now actively use snapchat and I am posting more on instagram.
It's definitely an Android envy problem. Because as you said, IOS users are the only ones who see the color. Therefore, we don't care. Android users know we can see it and they have the issue because they create this narrative that MOST iPhone users are looking down on them.
True. I guess it's because Google wants our data, as per usual.
Why is that a security problem? iMessage has always only guaranteed E2EE, it’s a messaging protocol not an identity provider backed by verified positive ID….
Why? They will roll out RCS support and then will not have to waste any time or devs to work on an app for their competitor.
The only people making it a green vs blue thing are Android users lmao.
I got into a whole debate with Android users on reddit last night in the beeper sub because even with RCS, they still want and feel obligated to iMessage simply because they want blue bubbles.
Android users really think that IOS users use iPhone for iMessage when outside of the US, iMessage is in fact highly irrelevant to most and imply that the only thing keeping us on IOS is iMessage.
I unfortunately use Android from time to time (usually when my phone is dead OR if I am going out on a trip that my phone may get damaged OR i use my Galaxy sometimes to control the music at work) and I have never gone "OMG, I miss my blue bubbles so bad."
I do go "Omg, this OS is terrible. Where is my iPhone?" fairly quickly.
Blue good, Green bad is not a thing. Green Android does mean Android bad because Android sucks.