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:
- Matrix
- Signal
- Facebook Messanger (very soon)
- Threema
- Telegram
- Viber
- Line
- Skype
And there are surly more …
cause of lazy iOS users that can’t be bothered to use anything else
Then why are we shaming Apple and not the iOS users? I think Apple is totally reasonable here.
Apple’s biggest crimes here are creating a proprietary platform with an exclusive protocol and making it the default messaging protocol on their devices. None of this is really new, though. All that shit is common. We need Signal or Matrix to improve in user-friendliness and even do some marketing to the point where they become viable solutions.
The default messaging protocol is SMS. Unless you are talking with another Apple user
in other words: the default messaging protocol is imessage, unless that’s impossible, in which case it falls back to sms.
I am not an Apple fanboy at all, I have used iPhones for work previously.
RCS debuted three years before iMessage, Apple developed iMessage because no one could get RCS standards together. We still don’t have this, Google has theirs, Samsung has another. Not all manufacturers support it and neither do all carriers. In my country it does not exist.
I use SimpleX, but when I used a company iPhone, iMessage worked very well, and it worked everywhere regardless of carrier. RCS does not 15 years after its introduction.
None of this is to say there should not be interoperability, clearly there should be. Historically at least, the blame lies with Google and mobile carriers.
I’m not letting Google off the hook, but Apple could also open the standard for iMessage and bypassed the whole problem. But they’d rather lock in customers than allow everyone to communicate securely and effectively.
More marketing would be nice
As for features, an easy remote backup solution (similar to be bettet than WhatsApp) is the big one for me. Especially on iOS
Android has an easy remote backup system built in. You can save a file to any location, including cloud locations, as long as the cloud service provider plugs into the API. Signal actively disables this feature because they would rather spite users than risk even the shadow of a chance that a user upload an encrytped backup to an internet service that could theoretically then be hacked and hypothetically maybe one day decrypted.
Matrix doesn’t have this issue, it just stores encrypted messages on servers.
I’m not sure about Signal being the one, then we just give the power from one company (Apple) to another (Signal). If we want to improve then we should push open protocols where people can host their own infrastructure.
Ideally, I agree. In practice, until federation / decentralization is completely transparent to the end user (unless they choose otherwise), it’ll never be adopted at a large scale. IMO that’s one of the main obstacles of Lemmy, Mastodon, and others.
Signal is only relatively popular among the privacy-respecting options because setting it up is as easy as setting up WhatsApp. Just by adding a “choose your instance” step, you can cut your user base by an order of magnitude. And that’s not mentioning the quality of service, which is much more achievable on a centralized platform, whether that’s in terms of feature parity, uptime, bug fixes, or cross-platform support.
Message works, it’s seamless and does a good job. Sure I’ll change to something else if I need to send images or group chat with Android uses, but in the UK that generally means WhatsApp, which I am definitely not keen on.
There is absolutely nothing reasonable with using an inferior and outdated standard compared to what literally everybody else uses.
Most of those are proprietary. My list:
- Matrix
- Session
- Signal and signal clients
- Simplex Chat
- Jami
- Briar (android only)
- Nextcloud talk (needs nextcloud)
- probably a lot more
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.
telegram is encrypted, but not end to end encrypted by default
so, relative to pretty much all other messaging services, it might as well not be.
You’re saying “by default not everyone can read your messages, only you, the recipient, telegram themselves and anyone who they might decide to share them with, with neither your consent, nor knowledge”
When compared to “nobody except you and the recipient” that becomes effectively equivalent to “nothing”.
also, not end-to-end ever when it comes to group chats
Almost all services in that list are closed source, so even if they use end-to-end encryption nothing stops the client from sending all your messages to anyone they like after decrypting (in fact some of them already have it as a built-in feature in the form of backups).
that would be very quickly caught by a network sniffer, because it would have to be sent from your own device. Otherwise they’d just be sharing the undecryptable ciphertext you sent to their servers
Just encrypt it before sending it to their servers. How would you tell that apart from any other traffic it sends? (E.g. to check for new messages, to update who of your contacts is online, etc)
what does that have to do with anything? if you have to encrypt your messages manually yourself, that kind of proves the point that the service itself is not secure. And it’ll still show up on a network sniffer that they’re sending it to two places
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.
Must eradicate it.
For the safety and security of our users!
For the greater good
takes out flame thrower
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.
No, they were charging money as they had their own APN to BPN bridge. Plus the usual cost of development and more.
To keep Beeper Mini running, Beeper uses a Beeper Push Notification (BPN) service to connect to Apple’s servers and notify you of new messages.
And it uses Apples gateway service for setup.
Yes. I did mention APN (Apple Push Notifications) to Beeper Push Notifications which then routes via FCM for Android. The whole setup does require active server cost + time to work on the app to bring it to parity with iMessage Features.
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Apple already knows that iMessage, alone, is a huge selling point for their iPhones. They held out for a few years keeping iTunes away from the rest of us before finally giving in, but I very much doubt that they’re going to open up iMessage any time soon. It’s pretty much the only thing that keeps iPhone users in their ecosystem anymore.
iMessage keeps in ecosystem? I’m using iPhones for 10 years. Sent my first iMessage 2 years ago. Definitely not a main ecosystem feature for me
That’s true, but it would be more Applelike to develop their own app. They obviously know how to do it, then they could have 100% of the profits and not have to deal with a partner. But Tim Cook said they re not interested in doing anything like that.
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
sheepahem user base don’t know any better.We care so much about our users’ privacy and security, we make sure their messages fall back to SMS when chatting with non-iphones. We COULD have dictated the future of messaging in North America, and demanded standards that would have benefited us, but we know we make more money by letting out customers bully the green bubbles.
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.
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.
Obviously I want RCS. But I’m realistic in what I have right now. And right now what I got was working group chats
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.
You can create a group chat using standard MMS. I have never heard of this being a problem.
Like I said, maybe I’m out of the loop or just lucky.
Meanwhile, in the UK WhatsApp is the default
That’s worse as it doesn’t even have sms
You would be right if SMS was still relevant in Europe (and asia and africa, I think). That would be kind of like saying a phone isn’t very good because it doesn’t support usenet.
Well nothing else is standardized in the same way SMS is. I don’t want to be forced into one application. SMS and MMS are older but they work across all devices.
There are plenty of standardized communication protocols. There are far less in the smartphone world, which is why we have this problem. Imagine if you couldn’t do voice calls between AT&T and Comcast, North America and Europe, or Apple and Android. Now why on earth would anyone think that text messaging should be that way, or shouldn’t have been standardized decades ago?
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?
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
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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.
Have teens not moved onto social media based messaging? Are they still using old school phone number based chats?
Yes but Apple has convinced a large swath of them that they must have an iPhone to be able to have any conversation with friends simply due to the conveniences of iMessage.
They also went out of their way to make SMS conversations harder to read the text by making the green just annoying enough of a color that it actually makes it harder. There are other things but that’s the gist.
The entire Fiasco is mostly US only. Rest of the World have different apps that dominate in individual regions like WhatsApp, WeChat, Viber etc.
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
Teenagers care about removed things like this. Big surprise.
Basic shallow and easily impressionable zoomer removed
Especially among teens, yes
American teens. It’s not the same around the world.
In the US, for sure. I have been just flatly if ored when they found out I didn’t have an iPhone, and I was just not included in group conversations.
