whofearsthenight

For ~~apple~~ basically every smartphone maker except a small subset with the marketshare that is basically a rounding error that focus on openness, the ~~iPhone~~ smartphone is like DRM for their software and you buy the license to use iOS and not hardware. 😅

Just because Android is more customizable and has worse security practices that allow jailbreak/root easier doesn't mean that it's an intended feature or that most don't actively fight against it. The default for virtually all phones sold is lock you into their App Store and extract revenue from using their services. As much as I love the convenience of smartphones, it's frankly a mistake the entire consumer market made in allowing the default be that you can't fully control your device 100%, whether that's running root or just repairing them easily.

Right, the customers who pay them to make the products they buy don't care. Why would they put the immense amount of effort and money into building something for people who are not their customers? Apple isn't a non-profit or a government program paid for by taxes.

Yes, Google's messengers were available everywhere because that's their business model. Google sells your eyeballs and is an advertising company. They're not messaging, they're not video, they're not even search - those are just products to support their actual business which is to sell ads. Ad companies by default benefit from being anywhere that people who have eyes are.

Apple is not an ad company, they sell hardware. They gain nothing from making something for free for other platforms. They make stuff that enhances their products and provide them a competitive advantage. Like, basically every company ever. They do make things occasionally for other platforms, but only when it actually makes sense. The iPod, for example, launched as a Mac-only product, because at launch they thought this was an accessory that would sell Macs. When it turned out the iPod was a runaway success, they built iTunes and the iTunes Store for Windows and opened up compatibility. In modern times, AppleTV+ or Apple Music launched as Apple-only services. Then they decided to move to other things, so you can now watch AppleTV+ on a Fire Stick or Vizio TV, and Music is on Android...

Apple on the other hand is known to intentionally make things incompatible with other brands.

This is simply false. Not making something for everyone is not the same as making it deliberately incompatible. Even the only actual examples of Apple choosing something deliberately incompatible is often a trade-off that where Apple (and usually their customers) decide the trade-off is worth losing compatibility. The largest example is Lightning, and when it was invented it was the best connector available. Even now, I'd make a lot of argument it's the best connector available, but the drop off to USB-C is no longer worth the trade-off of incompatibility. MagSafe (the MacBook kind) is another such, where Apple tried to drop their proprietary charger early in favor of USB-C and there was enough customer outcry they had to bring it back because it offers something USB-C does not.

Outside of these few rare examples, Apple actually has had to put in a large amount of effort in order to ensure compatibility. Most obvious example is things like working with Microsoft so Office would run on Macs, who actually do a lot of the things you claim about Apple. Through the 90s-2000s, MS couldn't even be counted on to keep compatibility between it's own Office versions so you'd be forced into buying a new license.

More relevant to today, Apple is the major reason why the web hasn't developed into just Google Chrome, and other standards-based browsers like Firefox can still exist. Fortunately Apple is large enough that as long as they continue to run their own browser and engine (Webkit, which they contribute heavily to open-source) the web can't simply fall into Google's hands. Which, is another example of actual deliberate incompatibility, as Chrome/Chromium tends to only follow standards when it feels like it. Or even more simply, just run Firefox and see how Google's products perform compared to just changing your user-agent. Or many other "chrome only" web apps. MS gave up and now runs Chromium, pretty much every other goddamn browser is Chromium based (Brave, Vivaldi, Arc, etc) and Firefox is now not relevant enough to stem the tide of Google. It's just Apple and the few billion iOS devices that are keeping the open web, well, open. Because as previously described, Apple is not an ad company, and their benefit comes in continuing to sell devices that their customers like, which means a good web browser that isn't spying on them.

Anyway, I'm out after this one. You can not like Apple or Google or whoever all you want, but best to stick to factual reasons that kind of make sense, at least. It's like, I have another tab open where people are trying to argue with a straight face that Google should basically just make Youtube, which costs billions a year to operate, totally free with no ads and no fees. I obviously am not a fan of Google (I actually kinda hope they took the advice, Google dying would be a good thing for the web and privacy in general) but do people not understand that companies exist to make money and are by definition not charities?

Honesty, kinda? There are challenges to the connector when you introduce more connections than just tip-ring-sleeve, but the general vibe of it is pretty close.

The only reason why people use SMS in the US seems to be Apple. They didn’t make SMS worse than they were (which would be hard to achieve), but they basically force people to keep using them.

I can't explain why, but the default in the US is still to exchange phone numbers, and that means SMS. We have all of the same options, but moving to another messaging service just didn't happen here. Even adjusting for time frame - iMessage had little power until at least 2013-14, which I'm by that time was probably long enough to move on in the EU and quite a lot of the rest of the world, and we were still using phone numbers.

Only between Apple and Apple, and Apple and Android.

This isn't a standard that can be enshrined in law. I want to create NightOS on the NightPhone (which honestly sounds rad) this basically locks me out of doing that.

They don’t have to handle the data between Android phones if they support some form of federation.

Again, "support" doing a lot of work. You don't just "support" a billion users. Huge time, attention, cost, even if you're not storing the data.

Still, very malicious behavior.

"Malicious" implies intent. You can not like it, my post doesn't even indicate that I like it (back to the original, I highlight a business case that makes sense for Apple to open this up) but just saying "I don't feel like supporting your OS" is not malicious. Companies do it all. the. time. Any modern iOS device is many times more powerful than a Nintendo Switch or a Playstation 4, is every developer that doesn't support iOS "malicious?" Even just regular people do this all of the time - me being on some social media but not others is not malicious, it's just because I decide where my attention goes. We're all making trade offs. The game companies don't support Apple because the effort to profit ratio is too low. I don't go on Facebook or reddit because as trivial, my ad impressions are actual money and I don't want to support those companies. Apple so far hasn't put iMessage on Android because it just doesn't make sense for them to do it.

Your basic supposition comes down to "Apple should do a lot of work for less than free."

I actually think that a big part of the problem isn't reversibility or symmetricality, it's that that the ports themselves are not designed in a way that easily accepts the cable blind, and I think the best example of the way it should be is probably the SCOMP link. Or for those of that aren't super nerds, the star wars connector that R2 uses to stop the trash compactor, amongst other things.

Look at that thing. R2 could be stumbling around drunk after a weekend droid bender and still find the target. Now, I'm not saying that it should be that large, but imagine fi the receiving port had a 1-2mm meniscus like curve that allowed you to find the target more easily, especially combined with a modern cable like USB-C. If we just look at the physical shape of the connectors, I think Lightning actually got this more correct than just about anyone else - look at a Lightning connector, and the male end has a very small curve on the sides of the connector to make it easier to actually get into the port. The female end also has a very subtle version of the thing I'm talking about.

I think a real life connector should have a slightly more prominent version of this, especially if it's going to be the one connector for literally everything. Like, plugging into the back of a monitor or PC you can't quite reach or TV or something should be an easy no-look operation. I've ton tech support for decades, and there is basically no connector that doesn't absolutely suck shit to try to plug in if you can't actually see it. I want to be able to throw it from across the room and still have it stick though.

For more on this topic, buy a coffee in a DT in a place that has to hold the reader out for you. Your dumb meat body is holding the card and moving slightly, the dumb meat body of the person taking the payment is moving slightly, so you end up try to jam the chip in a way that makes you both feel like you have a stack of learning disabilities. It's just bad design.

Also very good point. My threat model is I don't want script kiddies with shit that they can get (optionally) off of eBay to be able to read my messages because too many places still default 2fa and other identifiers to SMS. Until RCS defaults to E2E at least in transit, that's tough. From there it's still going to be the mercy of what the OS vendor decides, like Apple in this case. That said, if I were worried about government actors or a targeted attack, I would 1000% used advanced data protection.

Anyway, upvoting your comments as much as I can (+1) because you're totally right and it's a consideration you should have.

SMS works the same as it ever has. Apple hasn't broken anything, they're not polluting SMS, it's always been shit. The Tesla (probably touching a little more on real life) shipped with shitty QA that gave you a crap light and bad stereo. If you take Apple completely out of the equation and just process standard SMS between two Android phones, it's still going to be garbage. If you add an iPhone, nothing changes. When you add iMessage into the mix, it's still not breaking anything, only adding a shim on top of SMS, which admittedly sucks, but I think users would rather see "float liked your message" rather than no acknowledgement. This is also what's happening on Android (and also iOS) a lot of the time.

But just opening up your infrastructure

"Just" is doing a frick-ton of work in that sentence. At a minimum, they would have had to build and maintain data centers, or at the very least add a lot of capacity to existing centers to support potentially quite likely a few hundred million to a billion Android users. Now you have to design and document APIs for other people's use. This alone is why I said just build the app themselves, believe it or not it's probably easier/less headache in the long term. And then there is supporting the API, the users on non-Apple platforms...

And why do they want to do that? We're talking about many millions in expenditure per year for Apple for which they get nothing except less competitive advantage.

Fair point. It looks more specifically they're not if you enable "messages in iCloud" or iCloud backup with messages.

Honestly, the original is pretty good, bare bones start up. Most of those comments are recommendations, not show stoppers.

Like, the suggestion to use lets encrypt is kinda moot if you don't expose to the outside world. I personally choose to add a VPN (wireguard) and access services from outside of my network through that. OP kinda mentions adding a vpn as well, I do that through gluetun.

I'll also take just about any opportunity I can to point out yams.media which got me started using docker for this and you can see how easy it is from this post to add additional services. You can be a real noob and still get a functional server in like 10 minutes.

Of course the idea wasn't new. That's very nearly Apple's business model - they're rarely first to market with a technology. I'm sure if I go look, AIM was probably in there pretty close the App Store launch. But Apple's implementation was quite new. Everyone in the US at least was texting with the phone number as the identifier. Apple made it so that no one had to change any habits, use the same method for texting you have been literally in the same app you always have, and if you text another iPhone it just works better. They didn't make it worse on Android.

I'm not sure how this is "lockout." I already made the argument it's a lock-in tactic, but like when Tesla came out with the supercharger network, should I be mad that it doesn't gas up my Honda? Why would we expect that Apple is going to develop and maintain an app for Android for free and the massive amount of infrastructure that goes with it any more than I would expect Tesla to have added a gas pump to the supercharger network? And similar, it's not like superchargers existing means all of the gas stations are gone.

It's also worth noting that RCS functionally didn't exist during development of iMessage (I think they were forming a committee to decide which committee will implement committee structure votes or something) and that even now RCS implementation is questionable at best between not having E2E as a requirement and the fragmentation that exists even across Android and most especially carriers (lots of examples of RCS being iffy in this thread alone) so it wasn't like Apple looked at a fully-formed SMS/MMS replacement and chose to do their own thing.

Then you tack on 10 years of Google absolutely fumbling the bag with their messaging strategy (everyone reading is thinking of a different one - you're all correct) and now we end up in the situation we're in where not only did iMessage lock-in work for Apple, it worked better than they hoped and it's not just keeping people on iPhone, it's actively attracting people.

My optimistic take on this is that I hope they decide the lock-in isn't worth it in favor of the type of model where they monetize through Apple Pay and stuff and build an Android app because I sincerely doubt there is any other way toward unified messaging, in much the same as Tesla now licensing superchargers to other EV makers. As it stands, Apple could give a shit about Samsung's ads, and aside from the lock-in, a core of their brand is privacy/security so RCS as-is will be a non-starter. Well covered in this thread, but the EU isn't coming to save us and the US has congress that can't even regulate it's own bowel movements, so

Because the technical part has been solved for a while and this has moved into being a social problem. My kids only use iMessage/SMS for people over thirty, and use Snap with all of their friends. In family groups, you standardize on on whatever. Most of my extended family decided on FB Messenger a while ago (I don't participate, but my wife does and can fill me in.) My immediate family just uses iMessage. Friend groups I've seen generally do the same. They pick Telegram or WhatsApp or whatever, and then the quilting club just uses that. This also seems a very US centric issue - basically everywhere else is either on whatsapp or Line or WeChat or whatever.

why use many words when few words do trick