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I don't understand why the article writes that iMessage is the only way for encrypted messaging between Android and iOS. I can thing of several off the top of my head:
And there are surly more ...
Most of those are proprietary. My list:
telegram is not encrypted by default, and does its best to make you forget to enable it for each individual contact. if you want to do a group chat, you're out of luck.
Telegram is only (partially) secure for pedantic power users, which most people aren't.
Technically, yes, this is a solution.
Socially, no. This is not a solution. People are just too lazy.
I assume that if people are too lazy to switch to a solution which works for every one then they are not very interested in talking to you anyway.
Except it’s not a solution that works for everyone. It’s 9 solutions. If it were one it would be a lot easier.
7 once you take out the ones owned by Facebook.
Apple protecting it's precious garden.
Oh look, a weed slipped through.
If only there was a secure and open standard that would work on any platform, regardless of ecosystem...
Oh well!
Signal
The problem is actually getting people to use it since they're all too busy arguing over the color of a message
our walled garden*
Aside from the obvious reasons of competition, Beeper also used Apples infrastructure, that Beeper was then going to monetize. Not too surprising they shut it down.
our shareholders*
We took steps to protect or users by forcing them to communicate to Android phones using unencrypted channels. After all, those peasants are not iPhone users, they deserve to be spied.
At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading privacy and security technologies designed to give users control of their data and keep personal information safe.
At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading vendor locking tactics to distance our brand from other lesser ones.
We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage.
We're not letting anyone breach this walled garden, but nice try.
These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users.
By using these tactics we can keep our users away from solutions that have any interoperability whatsoever and keep promoting decade-old features as new, as our ~~sheep~~ ahem user base don't know any better.
x
Funny how the EU just recently found them to NOT be gate keepers.
Text messaging market in EU is totally different from in the United States. This is because US texting was cheap always— not so with the EU.
They're not gatekeepers in Europe because nobody uses iMessage over there. Their predominance in the US market is outside of the new EU laws.
So many of these comments are pulling up the other encrypted alternatives that you can use between iPhone and other platforms. But few seem to actually be addressing the problem of actually getting other non-tech savvy people to use this stuff because they don't actually see a problem with what they have.
You may not realize it, but not everyone is thinking about whether or not their messages are encrypted. My own family looks at me like "🤨" when I try to convince them to use something encrypted, like I'm trying to hide a crime or something. And I've only gotten my parents to use other services (WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger with end to encryption turned on) by digging my heels to get them to stop using SMS. I still haven't convinced my almost 16-year-old sister (she doesn't really message me that much anyway. But she's in that phase where she thinks she's all independent, and her first places are the simple stuff she knows).
Might I add that digging your heels at every attempt for someone to use SMS isn't socially acceptable. I've only done it because they're family and I love them
Gotta protect your users from fake blue bubbles, I get it I get it
Serious question since I don't use iMessage whatsoever, what's going on with the iMessage stuff? Seems like multiple companies recently have tried to make apps that connect to iMessage, but there's nothing I've heard about Apple opening that up. Did something happen for this to suddenly pop up more frequently?
Someone (possibly recently?) figured out the protocol and how to register a phone number without needing an apple device. Older versions of stuff like this required having a Mac virtual machine and routing messages through it using a user's AppleID, so this was much easier. I saw a video that was bragging about how this new method would be very difficult to block because doing so could affect regular users, and I just kinda laughed at the naivety.
In the US it's the messaging standard because they are too lazy to install a cross platform messenger like everybody else in the world. So Android has a 40% market share there, which is the minority but not a crushing minority like Windows–Linux but for whatever reason American society rather focuses on iMessage than just to install Signal or whatever.
Pretty much it's the Beeper devs and one other. But the initial setups were really nothing more than using a Mac on the backend with a an adapter to Android.
Beeper and one (maybe two) other were pretty effective at it.
Beeper Mini is a different thing altogether. It uses a service to translate ANP (Apple Notification Protocol?) to GCM (Google Cloud Messaging), which are the respective notification handlers.
The Android client is able to comm directly with iMessage servers, unlike the original Beeper and the other ones.
Lots of sarcastic comments in here, but Beeper’s method was to literally spoof the serial numbers and whatnot of real machines. Do people really not see how that would be a problem?
Do people like relying on service that requires their real device's serial number to function?
You can use any apple device to use iMessage, your account isn’t only usable on your device. They were effectively stealing people’s machine IDs to provide this service. That’s fucked up.
not surprising, but super disappointing. Beeper Mini was a dream come true
You need to dream bigger. That should be the companies (Google, Apple, carriers, etc) working together and using a non-proprietary standard (an open RCS). Mini Beeper, to me, was just a proof of concept to show something akin to what Apple could do.
For those not in the loop, why? It seems like people who want to use Apple products would just buy a iPhone.
Those of use who have friends or groups of friends that use iPhones but us ourselves do not. In the US, iMessage is the #1 way to create a group chat, and if you don't have an iPhone you're often just excluded and rely on someone else to update you about plans, etc.
If I had friends that would rather exclude me from communication than either use a different app or find some way to include me then I would absolutely not want those people in my life.
I think everyone saw this coming
Beeper already fixed iMessage on Beeper Cloud and is working on restoring Beeper Mini. Might take some back and forth but it still wouldn't be surprise if it makes their reimplementation more resilient to Apple tampering.
Until Apple will inevitably litigate them to death when they figure out they can't out engineer them
Apart from online commentary I don't know a single person that gives a shit about this blue bubble green bubble thing. Is it really such a big thing?
Green/blue bubbles is just a simple way to say sms sucks. Besides those stories about teens getting social pressured, all anyone cares about is basically just sending photos that don't look like they were taken 20 years ago.
The entire Fiasco is mostly US only. Rest of the World have different apps that dominate in individual regions like WhatsApp, WeChat, Viber etc.
Basic shallow and easily impressionable zoomer bitches
Teenagers care about retarded things like this. Big surprise.
I honestly don't understand it either. As of yet I've never had an Apple device and I am unlikely to buy one in the future