It’s apple’s own private system and infrastructure and they’re within their rights to control content delivered using that system. It’s not free for them to operate.
I have seen lots of comments like “well we need some kind of solution to this problem, whether it’s Apple launching an android app or a 3rd party”, and to be honest with you, I don’t even understand the problem. Maybe it’s cause I’m not from the US and can’t wrap my head around the social implications of message bubble hues?
- It's not just bubble colors, those don't matter. What does matter is that image and especially video quality are absolute crap when texting between iPhone and Android, and almost all iPhone users in the US use iMessage instead of another platform like Whatsapp, so the experience tends to suck on both ends when texting between an iPhone and Android. It's all for vendor lock-in and it helps no one but Apple. Look up the "buy your mom an iPhone" bit.
- Not everyone cares about the private property rights of a trillion dollar corporation. I definitely don't! I think Apple can get fucked, and I think it's cool if people find ways to exploit their APIs to do things Apple doesn't want them to do.
What does matter is that image and especially video quality are
absolute crap when texting between iPhone and Android
That's funny. Today I sent a full resolution picture from my iPhone to someone on another continent using an Android and it came through just fine.
Oh. You mean MMS sucks? Why don't you complain to your carrier then? As of 2023 American carriers support attachments of roughly one megabyte. But the CTIA recommended supporting attachments of at least five megabytes… *checks notes*… back in 2013.
Remind me why this is an Apple issue?
I think Apple can get fucked
Ah. So it's not about attachment quality it's about your dislike for Apple. Got it.
Nah. The CTIA recommended support for H.264 video in 2013. But a megabyte of H.264 isn't going to get you very far. There's no technical limitation here on size or format since MMS is just SOAP over WAP and SMTP. That's why you see the odd MMS provider supporting OGG and whatnot.
The poor MMS experience is entirely down to carriers creating a mess of it, just like they did with RCS. Or have you forgot that T-Mobile had to run (and probably still is, but I'm too lazy to check) both a Google and non-Google RCS stack to get a semblance of interoperability?
As a jumping off point, lets say any corporation with a valuation less than a trillion dollars (Which literally more than 99.9% of all corporations would fit under this umbrella)
> It’s apple’s own private system and infrastructure and they’re within their rights to control content delivered using that system.
I dunno: to me, Apple's "rights" stop at their doorstep, and if they don't want their service to be accessible to third-party clients, they are more than welcome to just not build such a service (as we honestly don't have any reason to provide legal defense for this one specific business model).
We don't merely generally avoid extending rights over other people... usually we protect people from incursions into their rights by companies, whether by contractual or even by technological means: we have many laws and legal precedents designed to ensure interoperability, fair markets, and basic things such as "legal ownership" (see the right of first sale doctrine, for example).
When Beeper sues Apple (which I do hope is their next step), it is not at all obvious that Apple will get to keep doing what they are doing here... and, even without Beeper's involvement, we're already seeing government regulators and politicians rightfully poking around at the situation, ready to provide some clarification to the rules in order to prevent this kind of thing.
> and if they don't want their service to be accessible to third-party clients, they are more than welcome to just not build such a service
That is exactly what they did. Or rather didn’t. They haven’t sued beeper, or retaliated in any way. They merely blocked beeper from hacking into their network. It is crazy to think that beeper could sue them for that.
Beeper can sue. Anyone can sue. But it’s whether the case has merit. Beeper’s would have none. Apple would counter sue, claim CFAA, and probably win without much effort at all. Their network, their rules, period. I am truly baffled how many people on HN think it’s cool for some third party to circumvent protections and use a network they don’t own or control. Remember peaking? Yeah.
If this was YOUR network, would you be fine letting some third party, who’s not paying you, to use it as they wish and profit from that use? I really doubt it. If you say sure, that’s totally fine, I will challenge anyone here to prove it. Accordingly, please post your WiFi network credentials and GPS location here. We can use your network just like Beeper used Apple’s. Then sell access to others through our connection.
Comparing a third-party using Apple's iMessage API (not network) without their blessing to someone connecting to your home network, compromising your security, is laughable.
It's not about the button color, other than the fact that a green bubble means your group message is degraded and a bunch of expected functionality stops existing. It's hard not to feel some annoyance if someone is added to a group and that causes the experience to be degraded for everyone else.
I use Whatsapp for all my European friends, but getting Americans to adopt a different messaging platform is as unlikely as getting the Dutch to start using iMessage... So we're left with this situation, and it will continue until Apple/Google adopt RCS and cross-platform messaging becomes as seamless an experience as iMessage.
That is simply objectively false. They can’t make the experience any better than it is. In a mixed group, they have to resort to the greatest common denominator which is SMS/MSM. They literally can’t do anything else.
Thank you for bringing this up again. The green bubblers who hitch about this fail to understand the difference between SMS, MMS, and better alternative. SMS and MMS are legacy “compatibility modes” in effect. Apple users happily enter the ecosystem to get away from legacy native messaging with SMS and MMS. It’s not the iPhone that “downgrades” anything, is that the default IS SHITTY, and iPhone upgrades the experience with a better protocol for Apple users. Don’t like your sadness with Android messaging? Switch. Frankly Apple should change the green bubble to brown, like crap, to really remind us of that legacy protocol use.
I don't expect 4k but I would expect that when my wife sends a video green with mms and then used Whatsapp to share it with me and I use my android to send the same video to the same group they should be the same resolution but mine is _higher_ even though she took the video.
That's not accurate. The "green bubble" is SMS/MMS. They operate on a standard protocol of decades as a fallback, which absolutely has lower quality.
You can blame your carrier for that.
It wasn't that long ago that MMS too large simply failed, or lived in limbo. I'm not a big fan of low res either, but it's absolutely an improvement and beyond what they need to do.
No. They love the iMessage experience and iMessage inertia means that people without iPhones have to negotiate to get people to use something else. It's not even necessarily malicious or obvious, but it does happen. I was a little hurt when I realized I had been left out of certain group communications that were happening over iMessage when I didn't have an iPhone.
>but for some reason they refuse to use any of the numerous free alternatives?
I guess you could say that, but it's more that the inertia pulls them back to iMessage. I'd try to get people to use Signal/Telegram/Whatsapp/Messenger and at some point, they'd stop checking those apps and I'd have to send them a regular SMS. I was the only person they were checking the app for, so any lapse in our communication could result in forgetting to check the app (and even having it get automatically offloaded).
It's also kind of like being the only vegan in a group of meat eaters. They just get invited to less dinner parties when people don't want to go somewhere that accommodates the vegan's diet. That creates a social rift even if it's not obvious.
> I'd try to get people to use Signal/Telegram/Whatsapp/Messenger and at some point, they'd stop checking those apps and I'd have to send them a regular SMS.
Android guy here, so I may be out of the loop, but why do they have to check the apps at all? Shouldn't incoming messages from any app be shown as a push notification?
Push notification bankruptcy. I don't think a lot of people make checking every single app they have installed for the number a habit. I guess I could have policed them on where they put the app so it would be on page 1 or whatever it's called. But that Messages app? It's always going to be noticed since it's in the dock on every page.
100% this. And sometimes I'll get logged out of a service and miss the notification that it happened, so I'll go quite awhile blissfully unaware that I'm no longer reachable. Had exactly that experience recently with Google Chat. Didn't see the message until I noticed the email it got converted to.
So because of a combination of social pressure, app inertia and that people let their chat ups run up lots of unread notifications, there are situations where it's inconvenient for some people to use Android phones in groups with iPhone users? This seems like a pretty weak basis for indignation, let alone a lawsuit.
>let their chat ups run up lots of unread notifications
I'm noticing a pattern here where people who side with Apple on this issue rephrase what people say, almost to the point of making it bear no resemblance to what was originally said, to make it seem trivial or, in your own words, a "weak basis for indignation". If you need clarification, just ask for it instead of assuming. I'd also ask that you try to charitably interpret what people are saying and use empathy instead of being so dismissive about it.
The issue I'm describing here is quite the opposite: specifically because the chat application isn't generating enough notifications being that it isn't the primary messaging application--remember, they were only using it to communicate with me--it's easy to forget about, especially in a sea of other push notifications. This is just one element of the whole problem as well (lest we get into the circular argument where someone suggests some other suboptimal solution when the obvious answer is to provide some way to have iMessage on Android in whatever way Apple sees fit). It's not the only issues I and others have with iPhone dominance and iMessage only being on Apple devices.
I also don't care if what they're doing is legal or not, they're still fucking with my social network.
I did ask for clarification, that's what the interrogation mark is for.
But it seems that your argument is exactly as subtle and indirect as I proposed. It’s not that Apple are stopping or even discouraging you from using third-party chat apps, it’s that your communication patterns makes using multiple apps slightly less convenient, hence you wish the first party one was more powerful.
It is quite amazing that you feel that they are “fucking with your social network” for not not making Messages more cross platform.
I have seen lots of comments like “well we need some kind of solution to this problem, whether it’s Apple launching an android app or a 3rd party”, and to be honest with you, I don’t even understand the problem. Maybe it’s cause I’m not from the US and can’t wrap my head around the social implications of message bubble hues?