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Apple Removes Group FaceTime From iOS 12 and macOS Mojave, Says It'll Launch Later This Year
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That Samsung commercial is very funny because goes against their own philosophy!
Why would I want a silly stylus?
Why would I want a half of terabyte and memory card slot on my phone when I use cloud storage?
Why would I want ancient 3.5mm jack when I only use wireless?
Why would I want the stupid Bixby on a phone when I can use Googles voice assistant?
Why would I want a countless other gimmicky features on Galaxy phones?
Oh, that's right.... because it is an option for these who find it useful and options are good for customers. But that, according to silly Samsung does not apply when Apple does it.
So yeah, why would I want to do that?
I supported Skype for Business, the Lyncs, the OCSs and LCS for many years. It offers far more that FaceTime will ever offer. We often have SfB calls with 900 participants but we do block video for those. Audio and all the collaboration tools are used though. This includes the Office tools via Office Webapps.
Knowing how SfB works, two people calls are peer to peer while more than this needs the conferencing services running on servers. Design with performance in mind is crucial. Maybe this is associated with the delay ?
I’m not sure where you’re getting your information from with this statement either, but that’s simply broad stroked. I don’t know how you can speak for every company not knowingly what platform they are using without providing a statistic or source. Even one Law enforcement agency‘s/government agencies Are primarily on iOS simply because the security methods, where this would be a useful feature for meetings and conferences (And I can attest to that). Let alone I Think of at least six or seven major corporations and manufacturers in my state that are on iOS because of Apple security methods, iMessage and ecosystem.
For the record, I don’t think it necessarily has to be 32 people using group FaceTime altogether, it’s simply could be between numbers of 15, 20 or 25. Being this feature is not released yet, I don’t think we can make any anecdotal assumptions that group FaceTime time would not be useful in every application.
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And iMessage in the cloud
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Like iMessage in the cliud, AirPlay 2 and other things? I think with apples recent history people have a reason to believe there will be huge delays
A group call of 32 is not enough if you factor in the enterprise market that they are probably going after. We have hundreds in calls at once, albeit that you probably don't need to see more than 10 video streams in the call.
[doublepost=1534240487][/doublepost]I just wish facetime worked all the time. Picture quality isn't as good as it used to be and you can't always connect. Whenever that happens, my parents get me on messenger/alexa which never has that issue.
This is such a goofy thing to call a "feature". No one will ever use it. Businesses won't. You might click ok on your contacts and try to add them all to Group Chat ONE TIME then realize it's a confusing mess of absurdity.
What if they've been able to do it for a long time and don't feel it's necessary in the betas any more, they just plan to pop the feature back in at release? During the beta testing stage, features are added and removed all the time. Maybe I'm just hopeful and trying to keep it positive.
It’s examples like these that make FaceTime seem like a toy for serious business users. Without the collaboration tools, there’s so much less productivity.
I suspect the issue is bigger than performance. Even if FaceTime had the necessary checkboxes, it doesn’t have integration with Office and perhaps more importantly brand recognition in the business world.
I think this stems from the fact that 1) Apple is allocating to few resources to macOS and 2) iCloud is showing its limits. Almost all the delays in introducing new features are related to iCloud. I remember a few years back there were rumours that Apple was thinking of introducing a unified Apple ID regardless of country but later shelved the idea. I think it probably has to do with iCloud too besides copyright issues. For simple online messaging and video conferencing, Apple should allow some anonymity, such as the use of a nickname, rather than forcing users to use their Apple ID for everything. It in itself is a security risk.
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Apple should buy TeamViewer and develop some kind of tools to facilitate collaboration with their own office applications based on TeamViewer's technology.
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Apple should buy TeamViewer and develop some kind of tools to facilitate collaboration with their own office applications based on TeamViewer's technology.
I just know how large scale businesses tend to work. They buy crap software that can technically run on everything and use that instead. I've seen it happen time and time again over the years. It's because IT people who predominantly use Windows make these decisions. They see Apple's FaceTime with Memoji animated heads and special effects filters and consider it a toy and deploy enterprise software instead or use Google's platform because it's fairly platform agnostic. I'm not saying everyone but I'm saying that most businesses will never use this because it's not practical for the needs of business. Maybe some smaller design studios or other trendy startups but they're far from the majority and off doing their own thing while everyone else is stuck with stupid enterprise software that many employees hate using. I hope it changes but doubt it will anytime soon. Perhaps I'm just jaded but I just don't see some business integrating FaceTime group chat with dozens of person bubbles floating around on a small screen into their workflow. From my experience most businesses implement video chat on desktop because they do it while working/taking notes and unfortunately Macs have shallow penetration in business.
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They're going after enterprise with Memoji heads and effects filters? They're going after Snapchat, lol. Businesses deploy enterprise video conferencing software on desktops/laptops because people are working and taking notes and most businesses unfortunately use Windows.
Sorry. You obviously have never authored anything more complicated than "Hello, world".
Why do you think there are Public Betas? Do you really think Apple enjoys having their not-yet-released OS software pored-over by the competition?
No.
It is because there REALLY is no substitute for "field-testing". None.
Google and Samsung make iphone apps so I'm pretty sure the "competition" pays for developer accounts, so they don't exactly need public betas to sneak a peek at the OS. I agree that field testing it critical though.
I agree. But even a Developer Account only gets you so-much access, and that really doesn't include poring over the actual source code; but still...
Nice try...
But I actually DO remember Steve Jobs convincingly displaying a prototype iPhone in a very specific sequence of activities so it didn’t crash & burn, and nobody would realize how far from ready the “pre-alpha” software was, months & months before release...
And I seem to remember him saying a white iPhone 4 was going to be an option, when demoing it prior to release- then not releasing it for 9 months after the black version came out (so... 75% of the way through the hardware cycle).
But hey... how about you remember things the way you want to- & the rest of us can remember them how they actually happened, k?
Sorry. You obviously have a very limited view if you think the competition doesn’t have the resources to just get paid developer accounts and needs the public betas to gain access to pre-release iOS versions. The public betas don’t offer any advantage over the developer ones except being free.
At this point it seems clear that Apple is trying to push more than they can actually deliver. One of the downsides of forcing themselves to release a new major iOS and macOS version at largely fixed moments. Pretty much every year we see promised features being scraped from the initial launch. We even see it happening in the hardware department (AirPower or whatever it’s called per example), there’s no public beta testing there.
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iPhone? Maybe not many. But on an iPad and MacBook? Well I will for sure. I can’t wait. It’s going to make my live teaching sessions so much easier.
Your right. There's always going to be some people to whine about stuff. That's just people. However, Apple has started advertising things and then not releasing them in the planned timeframe. Like software features, AirPods, the charging matt and AirPod charging case or even not being able to update iOS home screen because iOS 12 is really about fixing iOS 11. That's just a few of many. I'll never believe a company presents products while knowing it will be year before they're released. That gives the competition way to much time to make something that "out preforms" the year old unreleased tech. I also understand that Apple Maps were delayed. But that wasn't the norm way back then. I still love Apple. But I can see that things are different right now in a lot of areas. Different isn't always bad though.
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Virtual classroom is one of the main reasons why I'm looking forward to the new FT group chat. Right now I use FaceBook live to teach most of my lectures. Being able to actually interact with their questions in more of a live manner will be great. Looking forward to group FT.
Pretty sure it is common knowledge that Apple wanted to decouple new features from the core of iOS and macOS - and this is it in practice. Better late than buggy!
It's not just Apple that has that problem (which I agree IS a problem); Microsoft has fallen into the same thing; not so much with its OSes; but with its other software Products.
So is FaceTime useless because nobody is going to use it, or is it useless because 32 slots is still too little?
Seems like the haters here are really bending over backwards to hate on FaceTime here. I don’t think Apple is going to invest all that resources into improving said feature if they didn’t think there was a legitimate use case for it.
Seems like the haters here are really bending over backwards to hate on FaceTime here. I don’t think Apple is going to invest all that resources into improving said feature if they didn’t think there was a legitimate use case for it.