But I think it's because when a message uses iMessage, then there are reactions and other features available, where messages from Android are regular SMS and will lack those
Sending video from iPhone to Android generally gets hypercompressed
I think bubble color implies that SMS and iMessage are interchangeable applications, but they are not.
Bring back the old days, please.
It's spam.
Edit: and this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38272193
As another commenter states, it’s about taste or “weirdness”. Similar to making assumptions based on clothing or clothing or other chosen attributes.
Most people carry Redmi phones and use wired headphones here. It's absolutely about wealth.
Higher resolution photos, location sharing, in-line replies and emotes, etc etc
Group threads with a single Android user get annoying.
If Google gets everything they ask for, the shallow people will instantly move on to something else because that’s how people like that work.
But in the US, communication with Android users on iOS sucks. Garbage quality media, none of the usual features like reactions or groups or sharing things works well.
Your comment history suggests you have a personal identification with Android, which I think is making it hard to evaluate it rationally. I’d suggest considering whether that’s really a lot of money for something people use so much every single day, and whether your position might be one of the goals of the intense PR play Google has been making to get the EU regulators to make them less of an also-ran in the messaging space - they know it depends on convincing the regulators that Android users are being discriminated against, which is why you hear so many stories about that which turn out to be sourced back to Google and the phone companies.
>As someone who cares little for the ideology of consumer choices, I don’t think we’d get along
This means you actually _do_ care about the ideology of consumer choices, no?
Honestly, this was self-evident from the comment. I’m surprised you’re questioning this. Similarly, when I say I don’t care, I really mean I don’t care. I don’t want to spend time thinking about things I don’t care about. So I would be unlikely to enjoy time with someone who forced me to think about things I don’t care about. That doesn’t mean I do care about it.
It feels a little bit like you’re taking plainly self-evident facts and trying to find some deeper meaning or nuance where none exists. That feels like an error-prone way to view the world.
But on some level, I think I agree with you: the system is working, and just as someone might not want to date me because I use a low-status Android phone (regardless if it cost as much or more than an iPhone), or I prefer a different brand of shoes to the ugly white sneaker currently held in highest esteem, I would not want to date that person if they are so...shallow, I suppose, since I can't think of a less inflammatory term...as to select their mate based on trivialities.
Incidentally, my wife has been an iPhone user since she switched to a smartphone with the 3GS. She has used a spare Android device for a few months between iPhones after an untimely accident, but finds it frustrating because it's not like an iPhone. She also actively prefers Windows, having tried macOS. We met at age 20 in the dumbphone era, and have somehow been married 10 years, and together 19. We bought a farm a couple years ago, and I've recently retired from tech and taken up hobby farming. She loves the quiet of the Irish countryside, and so do I. The house and farm were bought with cash. We've never had a new car; in fact, we've never had a car newer than 9 years old or costing more than €7950. Had she selected against me as a partner all those years ago because I had a Siemens phone rather than a Nokia, our lives would both be very different, but thankfully we both value things that tip the balance materially, rather than peacockish status signifiers that may have nothing to back them up but a costly monthly installment plan with the mobile service provider.
Kids these days, and in all days preceding...
> Will the app be open source?
> Some of the messaging community believes that software that is open source is more secure. It is our view that it is not. The more visibility there is into the infrastructure and code, the easier it is to penetrate it. By design, open source software is distributed in nature. There is no central authority to ensure quality and maintenance and by putting that responsibility on Sunbird, development would not be feasible. Open source vulnerabilities typically stem from poorly written code that leave gaps, which attackers can use to carryout malicious activities.
Not sure I’d be willing to trust them with my Apple ID credentials.
Security by obscurity has failed every time it's been attempted. every. time.
Honestly this is a bad example, given the Linux kernel maintainers shitty attitude towards security bugs, and that Windows these days does have a good security design and has had since Vista/7.
> From other sites, it seems it uses a Mac Mini in a server room as a proxy for iMessage to accomplish this, with the massive drawback of having to provide Nothing your Apple ID credentials.
No thanks, I’m good.
So in their minds, closing the source automatically leads to well written code? And conversely, if they decide to open their (presumably well-written and secure) code in the future, it will somehow magically turn into poorly written and exploitable code? smh
As for why blue bubbles? No idea. Best guess is it's seen as a status thing - green bubbles are non-iPhone users. The only other theory I have is that iMessage is cross-platform with other Apple devices, but that is a strong argument for other messaging apps IMO.
I think I've cracked it though. I've noticed that Apple's service inside the U.S.A. is different to the level of service they provide outside of it (briefly; it's better). This led to the 60%+ market share there, whilst the rest of the world is Android dominated.
iMessage was adding cool features, and it makes sense that if most people you know already have it, there's no reason to look at things like WhatsApp. The rest of the (Android dominated world) had to look for something else for the same fun, which is why WhatsApp is the de facto messaging platform in Europe.
It's completely absurd on so many levels of course, but it appears to be some sort of status attribute.
Another alternative for iMessage is Beeper: https://www.beeper.com/imessage
They both have a waitlist at the moment, but Beeper seems to be opening up to a lot of new people.
I like Signal but haven't been able to get my family members on board.
Edit: Alternative ongoing discussion I noticed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38268184 (3 comments)
Also I wonder if there is any feature disparity between nothing/songbird and iMessage. In my experience, dealing with these bridges is far from perfect. Especially if one or more of them is closed source like imessage. Never know when a change will happen and break your flows
> Nothing Chats is built on Sunbird's platform and all Chats messages are end-to-end encrypted, meaning neither we nor Sunbird can access the messages you're sending and receiving.
> Nothing is powered by Sunbird, and Sunbird's architecture provides a system to deliver a message from one user to another without ever storing it at any point in its journey. Messages are not stored on Sunbird's servers and are only live on your device – once a message is delivered, it can only be recovered locally from your personal device.
From: https://us.nothing.tech/pages/nothing-chats
The Verge claims:
> Marques Brownlee has also had a preview of Nothing Chats. He confirmed with Nothing that, similar to how other iMessage-to-Android bridge services have worked before, “...it’s literally signing in on some Mac Mini in a server farm somewhere, and that Mac Mini will then do all of the routing for you to make this happen.”
From: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/14/23960516/nothing-chats-i...
It seems to me like if they are doing the typical thing of using a bridge like https://github.com/mautrix/imessage then that isn't really E2EE, the messages are being stored, and could be accessed by Sunbird. I don't really see how their claims could be true. Does anyone know? Am I missing something?
I highly suspect that they’re doing a sort of Matrix hosting thing and can then claim E2EE because Matrix encryption or whatever. But based on how the bridge works (or used to? it’s been some time), then yes - there IS a point in time in which it has to be a plaintext string. Unless they somehow managed to reverse engineer iMessage’s encryption - in which case, well shit, there’s bigger problems now - eventually you have to tell IMCore/imagent and/or ChatKit what it is that you want to send, and who to send it to. And thus it can’t be E2EE otherwise it would be unintelligible to the recipient.
Curious to know if they’re actually talking to imagent and using chatkit (and thus have iMessage features ie typing receipts, sending reactions) or if they’re just using AppleScript and reading the sms db…
God I should go back and rewrite Brooklyn. Now that I’m more than halfway through a CS degree and know how to make a binary search tree and how to not leak memory. lmao
Not to be confused with Mozilla's (if anyone remembers that one):
Their piece about E2E seems especially misleading. I can see how it's "technically true" i.e it's E2E from their servers to the clients + iMessage being E2E itself, but consistent omission of what the E are sounds designed to mislead into thinking that it's device to device. The consequence of a hosted server being pwnd would be catastrophic, essentially meaning full access to the iCloud account.
One of the unspoken underpinnings of iMessage not being available on Android is that the endpoint (the phone) might not be secure, so iMessage had a sort of guarantee that its E2E wasn't compromised via that endpoint. Now I wish Apple would just get an iMessage app on Android out of the door.
I also don't see how they plan to have this be free forever (and what the business model is), especially given the costs associated with hosted Macs.
IMO, it seems like there's a small, if vocal, minority of folks with a deeply weird inferiority complex around blue bubbles and most people don't care at all. None of my Android using friends seem to give a shit.
I'm curious what people think the game plan and business dynamics is for this decision?
Follow the wind and self-police before more lawsuits are filed or regulations are imposed.
All the cool kids are (finally) starting to do it.
To this day, the best solution for imessage on Android is BlueBubbles or Airmessage. I use both for redundancy. It does require having my Sim in an iPhone, and having a Mac, for everything to be bulletproof.
I don't recommend it to people who aren't technical, but it's helped me with my dating life to have blue messages...
If they wanted to do this properly the answer is to reverse engineer whatever protocol imessage uses under the hood and make their own client - this is most likely just a simple rebrand of the few FOSS tools that already do the same imessage relay thing.
And of course, when apple inevitable does fight this, the average person will chimp out thinking it's apple doing apple things when in reality no other company would allow a third party to harvest their user's credentials and data in this manner.
The following statement from Sunbird makes no sense, and only serves to imply that they don't practice code review: "There is no central authority to ensure quality and maintenance [of open source contributions] and by putting that responsibility on Sunbird, development would not be feasible."
If they're worried that open source contributions will sneak flaws past code review, then they clearly aren't ready to review existing closed source contributions either.
Let the competition dictate it. No need for the government to get involved. Maybe Google can spend $50 billion to create and market an alternative to iMessage if they truly care instead of these half-ass attempts once every 2 years.
Let's be real here. The only reason Google is pushing this is because they're losing Android users to iOS in the US due to the green/blue bubbles. It's a huge thorn for Android in the US. There is absolutely no reason any government, particularly, EU to push private messaging services to open up so Google can make more profit.
It is letting the competition dictate it by leveling the playing field for a behemoth like Apple with every single other messaging app developer/company.
Large tech companies vertically integrating by using their walled gardens as a weapon is literally the point of the EU regulations. For EU regulators, its not taking a side in apple vs google. Its taking a side in mega corporations vs any other company or person
Apple users are as far as I can tell happy the way it is.
Lots of providers implement RCS, lots of people use it. Perhaps none of the people in your particular region/circle of contacts do? My contacts almost all use signal. The exceptions where there are people that don't have any third party messaging apps, they use RCS. To those people, it's "just like a better MMS", they don't know any different, it just improves their messaging with no effort.
At least for the region I know, there are _a lot_ more Android users than iOS users, and third party messaging is really common. In practice, SMS is the last resort if you have nothing else.
Consider that if Google’s goal was actually interoperable messaging they could have opened up their own services at any point since they shut down federation for XMPP, and they could right now be offering E2EE as a free community standard rather than something carriers pay Google to get. They spent money buying Jibe and are hoping to use RCS adoption to make that more profitable.
(I'm sure someone out there knows a clique of European iMessage partisans, but that someone is not me!)
I think you're right about the feature set. It's a big historical win for iMessage, and it took a while for Telegram, WhatsApp, etc. to catch up.
I think the other thing here is that a lot of people in Europe have friends from other countries, or travel outside of the country often, and European phone plans don't generally offer good international rates. In the US, most plans offer unlimited SMS/MMS, including international messages -- it wouldn't cost me any more to send SMS to people in Europe from my old American plan (i.e., it would still cost me nothing beyond my base plan price). For Europeans, using WhatsApp is a convenient runaround for this issue. It's a single platform that works internationally, with no particular hurdles aside from "Do you have WhatsApp?"
As an extra little anecdote about the challenges present here, I had to get a Google Voice account and transfer my American number to it, and I now use the Google Voice app to message my family back home. It's pretty annoying, and generally a terrible experience for me, but getting people in the US onto another messaging platform is pretty much a lost cause at this point. I have all of the major messaging apps on my phone - iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, etc. But I just text with most of my American friends, except some of the more privacy-conscious tech nerds who use Signal.
Anyone is a weird way of spelling Google and Apple. Neither Android nor iOS let anyone make an app that can do RCS.
RCS is better than text, but let’s not delude ourselves, it will likely never be better than iMessage or even WhatsApp.
If Android had invested in that, they would have something that's very commonly used in everywhere except US.
This is not E2E. Their servers are the middle. Not an end.
Absolutely zero of my contacts use signal. Some use element. Zero use iMessage. Almost 100% use WhatsApp.
I’m in Europe, middle class, family with kids, both parents working here.
I use Google Docs exclusively. Sometimes I'll use Apple's built in document apps for local.
Microsoft probably makes more money having Office on Macs than not having it. Office software competition would have built up from Macs not having MS Office. And MS Office would have stronger competition than today.
Different platforms have become the standard de facto in different regions of the world (iMessage in us, WhatsApp in Europe, WeChat in china, ..).
All of these platforms belong to private companies.
A sane landscape would be having platform interoperability, at least for the most common features and then let companies compete on features, not on user networks.
In Europe it is virtually impossible no to use WhatsApp, especially if you have kids. I don’t like it, but it’s one of the service I use the most, because I’m forced to.
What's the problem exactly?
To have a standard? Isn't that what phone numbers and SMS are if you want a standard way of reaching someone?
If you have other standards, you reduce innovation because in order to change anything, you have to get 100s of companies to agree and comply.
But if Whatsapp, iOS, Viber, WeChat, etc wants to make something better, they can write the code and release it tomorrow.
Users have chosen the private model. It's better. It's faster. It innovates more. If you want a standard, it'll just become like SMS years later. I don't want one single app. Each app does something better.
This is why we have regulated interoperability on many mass-market technologies. Imagine requiring a Ford to use certain gas stations or a Sony TV to view certain channels. There is no upside for the consumer when mass-market products leverage their popularity to create walled gardens.
If you want a group chat with friends, there are a bunch of apps for that. If your friends wants those cool features but refuse to use any one of existing apps besides iMessage to talk to you, then they are not your friends.
Unless it's an actual feature, you are tied to a phone number.
All the examples require your phone number.
Or do you want the open, subpar protocol instead?
I think it will hit production in early 2024, pretty soon. Whatsapp is also going forward with a similar feature as a reaction to the Signal updates [1], although not entirely sure if it will work with no phone number at all.
[0]: https://community.signalusers.org/t/public-username-testing-... [1]: https://www.androidpolice.com/whatsapp-usernames-channels/
Considering the issues folks are mentioning here about moving on to RCS and then possibly being unable to receive messages, etc... Americans can just do what the rest of the world does and use any app available on the app/play stores to chat. Whatsapp, kakaotalk, line, telegram, etc...