this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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Platform exclusive software isn’t my favorite thing in the world but it seems unavoidable. Nobody is out here calling for legal action against Nintendo for not selling a pc copy of Mario. It’s the same thing. Why does iMessage exclusivity make people so angry?
One is a video game and the other is a company creating barriers to communication in an attempt to sell more devices. Not really equivalent imo
Are they really creating barriers?
You can still send an MMS to someone with an iPhone, and vice-versa. SMS and RCS is also supported.
If anyone is creating barriers to communication, Googles proprietary E2E layer on top of RCS is creating incompatibility much more restrictive than whether someone’s text is blue or green.
I'd say both Apple and Google are creating barriers. A common form of communication, sending a picture or video, is a degraded experience due to Apple.
I've been able to convert several people to use signal because of that limitation.
IMessage App without iMessage Service functions exactly the same as MMS functioned on pre-iPhone devices. There isn’t any “degraded experience” unless you consider a different coloured bubble, and no E2E encryption to be degraded experience.
We don't live in the past. Apple's decisions degraded the experience compared to what was already common outside of iMessage and non-iMessage intercommunication.
Th iMessage app does support RCS, which is the current bleeding edge, it just doesn’t support E2E encryption.
The thing is, unless it can vouch for the security of the keys, any product that doesn’t control the entire stack End-to-End doesn’t really support true E2E.
This is one of the drawbacks/benefits of the Fediverse. Since it is not possible to encrypt ActivityPub messages and still have them accessible, Mastodon doesn’t not offer any sort of guarantees of privacy.
As certain political individuals are finding out, Xitter’s claims and insinuations of privacy and discretion are only as secure as a legal subpoena. WhatsApp and Meta’s platforms have the same weekness. Apple’s architecture of iMessage (protocol) was designed so that (unless you backup to iCloud), your messages are truely E2E.
I don’t know enough about Googles implementation of E2E RCS to know how encrypted it is, I assume that if you are running a Pixel, and your recipient also has a Pixel, it should be fine, as long as you haven’t rooted your phone.
Could you do me a favor and point to where Apple announced that RCS is live on iMessage?
Last I checked they announced that they were merely planning to support it sometime this year.
After years of abandoning dozens of messaging apps and extinguishing XMPP, Google takes the most obscure and abandoned protocol to create a proprietary app to now blame Apple for being not interoperable?
iPhones can still use SMS, Macs and iPads can use other messaging apps. There’s no barrier here, there is proprietary service and yes that sucks.