Fuck apple beyond words for creating a bully situation with children because of their fucked UX design and unwillingness to simply release their own iMessage app for android.
this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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Eh. I think it's a lesson children need to learn eventually.
People with more money than sense are insecure about their lack of understanding.
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I recall some pretty bold statements being made that Apple couldn't stop this reverse engineering from working ever in the early days of tech reporting on this.
Even as a Android user I thought this was pretty bold claims to make as this whole walled garden is a big part of the Apple brand and they will need to protect this as they really don't have leading software inovation and they are no longer ahead on tech advances or specs that made the first couple of iPhones ground breaking.
Since they are a couple to a few years behind the Android features and specs, they need to protect the special brand identity above all else so I expected them to tweak things to break anything they don't want to have happen to their systems.
I can't blame them at all from a business prospective. While I don't like or enjoy their products, they had built a great brand that sells itself for those that "want to be different" but actually the same as all of their friends.
Yeah. I mean, the actual reverse engineering is something Apple wouldn't be able to stop them from doing. But anyone who thought Apple couldn't stop them from using that reverse engineering to connect to iMessage was delusional. And if it had become more of a cat and mouse situation where Beeper was able to keep gaining access, Apple would have sued the pants off them. Apple, as shitty of a company as they are, have every right to control access to their own APIs.
No matter what the technical reality of Beeper was, this was like claiming God couldn't kick you out of Heaven if they wanted to.
Apple has army of devs, a bottomless wallet, and is extremely petty and controlling about their garden. If you found a hole in the wall, they'd go as far as to build a whole new wall just to stop you. And they can do that, because it's their garden. You have no power there.
I support what Beeper tried to do, but it was never going to work. Apple's garden needs regulation to crack open, you can't do it with software.
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Like Microsoft had every right to control access to their operating system?
Oh wait...
ikr internet Explorer? but safari a ok
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Everyone using Beeper was authorized to access those APIs. Apple didn't like how they were accessing those APIs.
Behind in specs? Depends on which specs I guess
but CPU/GPU performance is AFAIK pretty great? https://www.tomsguide.com/features/iphone-15-pro-benchmarks
Features, yeah, depends on what you're looking for. AFAIK iPhones are the only mainstream phone to offer satellite texting though.
I have both an iPhone (work) and an android (personal), and they both...kinda just work 🤷
Maybe one of the features they thought about is how some Android phones install Facebook and other crapware that you may not be able to delete.
That's pretty cool.
It's been awhile since I last used a iPhone 13 Pro Max for work but I do recall the constant announcements there with previous models when Apple would announce yet another great "new" feature for iPhone that Android users already had for a year or two at that stage.
Samsung also made some good media campaigns on the announcements and used the lineups for new iPhones fairly well in their advertising.
I will say I thought the iPhone 13 camera was pretty goof, the battery life was too, and within the Apple walled garden the texting of videos was nice. The overall user experience for me wasn't a good fit. I like to browse the web without ads and watch videos without them too. Some of that can be done with a iPhone but it's clunky and the web browsers are just safari.
There's other customizable options I prefer that I can do with Android that isn't an option yet for Apple but I do know they will be able to at some stage.
Overall the whole apple vs android has been great for consumers. If it wasn't for the competition between Apple and the Android products neither group would be as far along.
They technically didn't stop the reverse engineering from working. They threatened users with bans and scared them into not using the reverse engineered software.
Whole saga has been stupid
The whole reason for Beeper to even exist is stupid.
It was never going to work, but they shouldn't have needed to try in the first place.
Beeper Mini, I can agree the reason for existing is stupid. Not Beeper as a whole. I greatly like having a one stop shop for all of my messaging platforms. It's a straight up fucking pain in the ass to have Messages, Messenger, Whatsapp, Discord, Telegram, LinkedIn, and more all having their own specific applications with separate lists of people in them. Gaim/Pidgin/Trillian/Adium had the right idea back in the day and if it isn't done at an application level like Beeper, then I would really like it done at an OS level where all apps of a communication/chat type have their notifications and interactivity bundled. There's going to be platform exclusive features that don't have parity that wouldn't be able to be part through or presented the same, but communications are such a base level function of these devices and the generally one-application-at-a-time type of display of phones makes the balkanization of communication mediums even more annoying.
I think Blackberry had the right solution with their Hub app. It was just a big inbox with a lot of integrations. It would show you all the conversations from different apps (including email) with all the typical filtering, sorting and searching. You had a single screen to see all your conversations nicely organized but clicking on a message would take you to the external app to send messages. It was super useful but of course apps had to provide some API for this to work and BB wasn't popular enough so at some point it just stopped working. Android could easily do this but I think they are just not as good at UX as BB was (seriously, BB OS10 had lots of great features iOS copied a decade later and more, it was really nice).
Yeah also iOS is getting RCS support soon so the whole point is moot. The whole blue bubble thing is a lot of people with way too much time on their hands to get worried about stuff that doesn't matter at all.
The bubbles are pointless. What matters is that apple will not send media like videos or pictures over anything but sms to android users, which means it gets transcoded down to 2.5MB max. This means that any media, which is a lot of what people send nowadays, looks like absolute trash going apple to android.
Its a sleazy, underhanded way to get people to buy into the apple ecosystem so they can stop getting tiny, grainy videos of their friends/family.
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RCS is not end-to-end encrypted, so their bubbles will remain green.
Google's proprietary extensions add E2EE, and Apple's not going to pull a Beeper on Google.
Google has been begging Apple to implement RCS for well over a year now. They wouldn't need to pull a beeper on Google since Google actively wants to help Apple implement their standard.
I'd count on Apple making the RCS bubbles green too, just to sow further confusion.
Yeah and anybody complaining about it at that point is just being a whiny child.
How is that going to help if the only RCS apps for Android are proprietary Google or Samsung apps?
It's actually not that RCS. Apple is saying they'll adopt RCS the standard which would likely be a big wildcard.
Yes, so which FOSS Android app will be interoperable with the new iMessage?
Propably when Google allows Android apps to access modem-level RCS message sending. Right now Google Messages do everything via Google's some sort of a proxy server.
A whole lot of mess just like always when phone operators do anything.
Imagine how cool it could be if every mobile provider would just provide data and free XMPP account with autoconfigure instead of RCS or VoLTE crap.
RCS is nothing like a proper network based messenger. It is too little, too late.
I for one will never use it.
I was using XMPP on my phone in 2010...which was years ahead of RCS even then.
RCS is still tied to a phone number... Why would I want another version of SMS?
it’s now fully focused on “our mission beyond iMessage” and building “a universal, multi-network chat app.”
I would absolutely love this. I really miss Gaim, Adium, libpurple, etc..
I recall the early days of PC chat services like ICQ, MSN, AOL and the clients like Pigeon and Trillian to try to have them all in one place. It didn't always seem to work the best for long.
It's too bad BBM took way too long to open up to others beyond BB devices. They had some of my favorite emojis and they had for a time a big user base that they could have kept in their services.
Thank Google for killing xmpp.
Last I checked Google doesn't control XMPP, it still exists, is still being developed, numerous apps us it.
Speaking of, does anyone remember Rockmelt? It was a weird older browser that had all the popular chats in its sidebar where you can access them without going to each website separately. It was pretty cool until Yahoo bought it and it died instantly.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Rockmelt is a discontinued proprietary social media web browser developed by Tim Howes and Eric Vishria based on the Google Chromium project, incorporating social media features such as Facebook chat, Twitter notifications and widgetised areas for other content providers such as YouTube and local newspapers. The Rockmelt web browser project was backed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. In April 2013, Rockmelt discontinued its desktop web browser, replacing it with a collaborative project bringing together social elements from various sources. Rockmelt was created by Rockmelt, Inc. , located in Mountain View, California.
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fyi the mentioned app they're working on is already available in limited release: https://www.beeper.com/
just keep in mind that if you connect any service to it, the messages will be decrypted on Beeper's server before sent either way, so theoretically they could be reading your messages even if you send them through an e2ee service.
it’s now fully focused on “our mission beyond iMessage” and building “a universal, multi-network chat app.”
Throw it on the pile with all the others.
My beeper app on PC finally stopped working. It wanted me to sign into a Mac and do a bunch of shit I wasn’t going to do. RIP
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Beeper announced it’s removing the Beeper Mini app from the Google Play Store and moving the iMessage bridge to the “Labs” section of its cloud version.
No new users will be able to use Beeper Cloud to gain entry into Apple’s messaging service, but the chat app acknowledged that iMessage may still work on Beeper Cloud for some existing users.
Beeper also made the iMessage bridge (which it noted cost $750,000 to build) open source.
The company doesn’t plan to provide help or troubleshooting to current users who run into problems with the iMessage fix, as it’s now fully focused on “our mission beyond iMessage” and building “a universal, multi-network chat app.”
The chat app released one last workaround (asking its users to buy or rent a jailbroken iPhone) but stressed it would not respond if Apple retaliated.
Several Beeper customers lost access to Apple’s messaging service on their Macs, too, reported The New York Times on Friday.
The original article contains 216 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 24%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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