From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved. They want the experience to suffer when somebody outside of the ecosystem is involved so as to create social pressure for the outsider to change.
The ironic part of all of this is that while the EU may be forcing Apple into supporting RCS to fix the situation, Google has resisted every effort to extend RCS to their own Voice platform.
It's really a shame that Microsoft gave up on mobile, because they really could be a real middle ground for the rest of us that just want interoperability.
> The ironic part of all of this is that while the EU may be forcing Apple into supporting RCS to fix the situation, Google has resisted every effort to extend RCS to their own Voice platform.
Google Voice has been in maintenance mode for years. It's unlikely that Google resisted adding RCS, but rather there's been no effort to actually do it.
Google voice has a paid version via Google Workspace, so I doubt the service will go away. But I wouldn't bet on the free version staying free, or not losing features forever.
> It's really a shame that Microsoft gave up on mobile,
Nokia's Lumia phones were so good at one time. The hardware was top notch (including cameras). The software was smoother than android and more intuitive than iphone. It was just a solid platform.
I would buy one in a blink if it was available today in the high end segment. I'd not even be bothered about google's anti competitive behavior wrt youtube and other apps.
Massive shame we lost Nokia and windows phone both due to the de facto duopoly that has taken hold in the market.
I used Windows phone only once, while I tried to find where I can remove SIM card’s PIN on my father’s phone, because he couldn’t find it. It took us a solid half hour, because I never imagined that it’s an application setting.
> From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved.
I'd be sure this was why, if Google hadn't once tried to get me to use a combo SMS/MMS + some-other-Google-messaging-service app on my phone (by replacing the normal SMS app on OS upgrade—this was on a Nexus phone) that was so broken and janky it was unusable.
Like, it is for-sure the case that a rich, huge, "smart" company can fuck this up a lot worse than Apple has. iMessage is easily good enough that I haven't had to go find some alternative SMS app, at least.
> iMessage is easily good enough that I haven't had to go find some alternative SMS app
(Almost) nobody here is challenging that it is, under the condition that you communicate exclusively with iPhone users.
MMS group chats are an absolute dumpster fire from an UX point of view. In some countries, a single MMS costs about half an USD as well (per recipient)!
No, I mean as an sms app. It’s fine for that. Group sms can get kinda rough but I’ve also never had a phone that did it better, including pre-iPhone phones, and a few Android phones. Of course it’s better if you can stay in iMessage, to avoid SMS, same as switching over to WhatsApp or whatever is way better.
> MMS group chats are an absolute dumpster fire from an UX point of view. In some countries, a single MMS costs about half an USD as well (per recipient)!
It doesn’t support delivery receipts (my old Nokia could do that in 2003!), doesn’t let me send texts to a specific number of a given contact, doesn’t let me pick what number I want to send texts from (for dual SIM), and most frustratingly I can’t send an SMS to any contact it believes to be on iMessage.
I can choose what number I want to send from when using two SIMs. It's shown as "From" below the "To" when you write a new SMS using the new message button. In an existing conversation you need to tap on the contact icon and change the "conversation line" there.
Only if the message didn’t go out to Apple’s servers. That doesn’t help me when I know the recipient won’t be able to receive it (e.g. because they are on roaming or out of mobile data).
To send to a contact's specific #, there should be a disclosure arrow to the right of their name (as you're entering it) you can tap and then pick which # you want. You can also double-tap a name in the To field.
There’s no visual indication of which number messages are going to and arriving from for an existing conversation, though. Messages to and from all numbers are just collapsed into one thread.
It gets even worse when iMessage and multiple devices come into the mix. It all kind of works for 95% of people I’m sure, but it completely falls apart in some cases with absolutely no way to be more explicit.
Totally agree. I was on Google Voice till earlier this year and that was its own kind of awful. After more than a decade on GV, I ported my number back to my carrier. I keep WhatsApp on my phone to use with a single family member on an Android phone. Another member with an Android phone uses whatever the built-in messages app is. Everyone else is on an iPhone. It's a mess.
The annoying part is, that this ends up going back to the lowest common denominator. Where users that wont install another program end up being the boat anchor dragging everyone else to the bottom.
You can long press on the message bubble after hitting the send button in Messages to switch between sending as iMessage or SMS. Discoverability of UI/UX features on both iOS and Android is inscrutably horrible.
delivery receipts = read receipts? They are a setting.
Tap on their name to change the "to" address; here it gives me a list of their Apple ID email and phone number to pick from.
You can enable fall-back for contacts which fail to send via iMessage to instead send via SMS, but I don't think you can send SMS to a phone number registered with iMessage by default without disabling iMessage globally.
Have you tried sending a picture via iMessage MMS? My wife's iPhone compresses every single picture she sends down to like 32kb and converts it to a JPEG. That's with the setting to compress images to save data turned off (I'd hate to see what it sends when its turned on). The pictures I send her arrive only compressed down to 700k-1.1mb and retain formatting and even transparency (our carrier limits MMS messages to 1.2mb).
Oh, what's even better is that it tricks the iPhone owner into thinking that a full resolution image was sent. On my wife's end she see's the full resolution original format image in the messages thread, not the blurry 32kb version everyone else gets so she had no idea that this happens.
Yes I'm well aware. What I'm talking about is iMessage doing it's own compression, which is more than what the carrier limit requires, as well as stripping file formatting from images and making them all JPEG. Me and my wife are on the same family plan so we have the same carrier. If the 32kb was a carrier limit, then the pictures I send my wife would be 32kb and just as blurry as the ones she sends me. They aren't, however. They're only compressed enough to where the fit the MMS size limit for the carrier
SMS works quite well for what it was originally designed: Short, text-only messages to a specific mobile phone number. Using it for instant messaging has always seemed like a very weird usage of the protocol to me.
The two just have very different semantics, just like how it's generally accepted that email is not a great medium for group chat either.
I don't remember Hangouts being broken, but Google didn't keep their attempt to onboard people by making it the default SMS client going very long. To me, that seems like a major error on their part, though I think I'm glad Google didn't succeed in popularizing a proprietary unencrypted messaging service.
It would have been encrypted by now (at least for hangout to hangout chats) had it hung around.
And at least it was cross platform but overall I agree that mobile messaging should be standardized and open. So while the Google messaging strategy has been an abject failure overall, they did eventually trip over themselves and stumble onto the right path.
WhatsApp is that middle ground in some parts of the world.
Upon moving to Europe we discovered that WhatsApp is the preferred way to connect with friends, employees, social groups and schools. It was actually the driving factor in me conceding and setting up a FB account.
Let's imagine it is an engineering problem; how do they solve it? Give a disclaimer that "your communications are not encrypted" and turn the bubbles maybe light green?
Release iMessage on Android. If there is a concern that it wouldn't be secure with Google controlling it, then they could put it out on F-Droid, which would simultaneously prove that they're serious and also undermine Google's own efforts at controlling the culture war.
Part of the iMessage security model is that devices are attested. Without this, the service as-is becomes widely open to spam and other forms of abuse.
Yes, there are other solutions to the spam problem. They are nowhere near as effective as what I’ve witnessed as an iMessage user so far. I regularly get spam chats on WhatsApp and Signal.
As we know, the devices are not attested, because beeper works. They're also not attested on old iPhone versions which are valid iMessage parties. Some new devices being bound to the hardware key doesn't change that.
Spam doesn't matter here - same app is used for SMS, which gets spam, so there's nothing new here.
But if Apple wanted to, they'd just sort out a deal that allows hardware signing of iMessage accounts on Android. That's not an unfixable problem.
>As we know, the devices are not attested, because beeper works.
This argument doesn't make any sense.
They managed to figure out a way to create valid attestation data via old Apple binaries. Just because a security (well. "security") measure was circumvented, doesn't mean it doesn't exist at all.
From the way I see it described here, it's more in-depth hardware attestation on newer models. So they're doing the good security thing here, but also not making millions of users' lives worse by outright blocking old phones that don't have the necessary hardware features to perform this attestation. x (5? 15?) years in the future they'll block super old stuff that doesn't meet these security requirements.
That's not how it works. Beeper uses the old binaries, because those come from older iPhones where the hardware signing was not possible yet. It's not circumventing anything as far as I understand, just connecting the way an older iPhone would connect.
I mean, we're splitting hairs on terminology here I feel like?
Apple does not want you to connect to iMessage with non-Apple hardware and Beeper uses old Apple binaries to let you do just that.
That, to me, does fall under the umbrella term of "circumventing" some measures that Apple put in place to stop you from doing that; but I guess I can see the point where you'd object to use of that word?
That's a different argument. I was responding to you saying "This argument doesn't make any sense." to the attestation not being required. Whether you call that circumvention or not, ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
The point was that if you can replicate it in software, then they're not requiring hardware attestation.
Google. The company that defines what can you call "Android". They can define it to include a hardware crypto chip, signed with the right keys for Apple interop.
Was it from a number with the same area code as your Signal number? What was the spam for? Care to share the message if you still have it? I research around spam as a hobby.
No, F-Droid builds almost all apps from source. Even some open source apps don't make it to F-Droid if the F-Droid maintainer doesn't manage to build it themselves on their build server.
The reason F-Droid does this is reproducible builds. Which is a big advantage because the code you see on GitHub is the binary you get in your device. It also means it's quite obvious when code is being added because you can reproduce it.
Of course the build platform being compromised is possible but that can happen even with binary distribution.
I thought they only allow you to guild/sign your own apps if it is a reproducible build, and they verify that the version they build is identical to the one you supply.
The presupposition was "let's assume it was an engineering problem, how would they solve it". Obviously we can revert it back to a business choice rather than engineering problem rather trivially.
Wouldn’t entire thread need to be light green. Wouldn’t android users not see the Tapbacks/threads in same visual UX. It makes sense to turn it off entirely than to deliver a subpar and confusing UX
Actually both tapbacks (for a long time) and reply threads (since the latest iOS release) are both supported in MMS group conversations. The iPhone will send a tapback as an SMS message such as "Liked 'contents of message that was liked'" and other iPhones convert that back into a tapback. Google Messages also does this (and in fact did it before Apple did). iOS does not convert Google Messages style tapback messages into tapbacks though, so iPhone users only have half of the solution.
As for reply threads, when it's used it creates a lot of confusion for non iPhone users and it's not clear how Google Messages and other texting clients can fix it post-hoc. I'm not even sure how iOS reconstitutes it-- perhaps Apple sends some message metadata on the side via iMessage?
Bizarre take. I had no call in electing any politician that has any influence over Apple or Google, nor do I really have the choice to pick beyond the one of the two systems. Neither does the rest of 95% of the world.
iOS does attempt to properly inline Android tapbacks and has done so since IIRC iOS 16. It's not perfect, though: if the tapback isn't one Messages recognizes, then you get it in message form, e.g. ":smile: to 'Have a nice day!'" (only with the actual emoji). It also fails all tapbacks if it's an image, presumably since it can't know which image is reacted to.
Hopefully the experience is improved when they implement RCS, though I'm not sure if tapbacks are part of the spec.
I just tested it in a group MMS with an iPhone user running iOS 17, and alas no, this is incorrect. Neither thumbs up (like) nor heart (love) apply as tapbacks when the tapback originates from android.
Unless there's something I'm missing, only Android users get cross compatible tapbacks.
Ironically, iMessage is not that common in Europe. WhatsApp and Facebook messenger won the game here (but they are also targeted by EU).
Anyway, I hope for Apple that they have numbers proving that this bullshit strategy really makes them sell more iPhones because it makes them look really stupid. In any sane society, nobody cares about the color of a bubble, in fact, as an iPhone user, I blame more Apple for the lack of basic SMS features than of the bubble color. I’d be a stupid friend if I pressured my friends to get a blue bubble, that’s insane.
> From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved. They want the experience to suffer when somebody outside of the ecosystem is involved so as to create social pressure for the outsider to change.
This makes no sense. What’s the point in degrading the UX without telling the user 1) why the UX is degraded, 2) what they can do about it? If the point is to steer people towards iDevices, why is it degrading the UX specifically for these people? Honestly, this sounds like a knee jerk reaction where you are convinced that Apple is bad and are looking for confirmation instead of trying to actually think rationally.
> It's really a shame that Microsoft gave up on mobile, because they really could be a real middle ground for the rest of us that just want interoperability.
They could not. They were neither here nor there in terms of platform use and applications availability and poured tons of money into it for no result. Nothing in their behaviour at the time showed that they even understood the problem they were trying to solve.
> What’s the point in degrading the UX without telling the user 1) why the UX is degraded, 2) what they can do about it? I
Because 1) everyone in the Apple world knows, and 2) they want the answer to "What can be done about it" to be "Shame your peers into switching to an iPhone".
And it works. A little too well, especially with younger folks.
I have never once felt any shame for using Android, nor have I felt any pressure to switch to Apple. If anyone in my social circle tried that sort of nonsense, I'd never stop ridiculing them about it.
The ironic part of all of this is that while the EU may be forcing Apple into supporting RCS to fix the situation, Google has resisted every effort to extend RCS to their own Voice platform.
It's really a shame that Microsoft gave up on mobile, because they really could be a real middle ground for the rest of us that just want interoperability.