I predict one of two outcomes once Apple becomes aware of this. Either they’ll modify the iMessage protocol to break Nothing Phones compatibility, or they’ll sue Nothing Phone for violating some kind of IP law. Apple absolutely wants to maintain their walled garden and letting a non-Apple product transparently interact on equal footing with Apple products runs counter to that.
Outcome 3: they buy whatever company is responsible for creating this compatibility layer, slowly integrate it so they can skate past several international regulations/lawsuits trying to open iMessage, and declare victory.
Why would they buy a company that is using a workaround when they could just make an iMessage app for android
Because that’s not their goal, they absolutely don’t want iMessage to work on Android, at least not without severe limitations. They want Android to look like a second class citizen. If they bought the intermediary company it would be with the intent of strangling it not expanding it. They’ll just slow walk the murder so that regulators don’t take too much notice.
For one: it helps them avoid any adjudication that would force them to do just that while avoiding admitting they have the ability to.
Nah, Apple doesn’t care.
These bridges like the ones found in Beeper/Matrix require a Mac server to perform the handshake with Apple’s.
As long as these servers require Apple hardware to function Apple is making money.
It’s roughly equivalent to running iMessage on your Mac at home and making an Android/PC app that remotely sends/receives messages to/from that iMessage app on your Mac.
Nah, if it gets big enough, Apple will care. They literally said (based on court document) that iMessage on Android is a horrible idea because it’ll make it easier for people to switch platform.
The messaging is provided by a third party who is dedicated to working on their iMessage compatibility. Apple has no reason to stop this because this is a good move for them in the larger battle between mobile messaging standards.
Google owns Jibe, the company behind RCS messaging found on all Android phones and an emerging, competent product from the only game in town that can compete with Apple. Google has decided to take this to the government level and push for a unified phone messaging standard, normally a good thing, but proposed their own RCS solution. The one they own and whose servers Google scrapes for user info.
Apple is pushing iMessage as a protest against Google and their inevitable lawsuit to conform with RCS adoption. Android may win unless Apple shows it has parity and provides a non-legislative option: if enough people use iMessage then governments don’t have to make any laws or enforce changes. The company Nothing is using iMessage, which helps Apple prove there is both a significant user base, which would cause a burden on Apple and it’s customers to change, and there is no monopoly on iMessage or messaging in general. So if enough people use iMessage, Apple sees it as a good thing.
RCS is not a Google product, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSMA
Apple has been pushing iMessage for quite some time, but they want to keep it just to their platform and have made no attempt to make it open to other users. That’s Apples way and it’s not as a “protest” to Google lol
That’s like saying they made the lightning port as a protest to USB standards, nah they just want their proprietary shit.
Google’s RCS service is unique in that it is not telecom based. I would advise looking at the RCS Wikipedia article here.
Can you please point to me where it states Googles “version” of RCS can’t also interface with telecom based RCS?
Because it seems from my reading the Google just has some enhanced features on top of RCS (like e2e encryption) when both sides are through Google, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work with telecoms as well, unlike Apples walled garden of iMessage which doesn’t work with anything else lol.
Google RCS was designed to be interoperable. Apple iMessage was not.
And…? I don’t get your point, that’s what I’m arguing, Apple specifically made iMessage unable to interact with anything else intentionally, they very well could have figured out a way to bring it to other platforms but specifically chose not to.
No worries, I’m just sharing information and answering questions. Not trying to argue a point.
Reasons why Apple iMessage does not support RCS has way too much speculation around it from what I’ve briefly read so I prefer not to comment.
Apple’s ideology behind not expanding iMessage to other platforms has been - at least in part - due to the security of the iMessage platform and how it authorizes senders and recipients (like many encrypted services on Apple devices, tokens are encrypted/decrypted in the Secure Enclave on the SoC). Apparently, Apple has low confidence in the diaspora of Android devices and just decided to forget even trying to create a client for Android it could tie down to hardware authentication due to not having a reliable hardware base. This was many years ago.
I don’t know if this is still true or even necessary today, or if they’ve even bothered to explore it recently, but that’s Apple’s main issue. Sure, it also benefits them in other ways such as driving users to their platforms, but this is their main issue.
Not according to the leaked emails… https://x.com/TechEmails/status/1589450766506692609?s=20
Also, the secure enclave wasn’t added until the iPhone 5s in 2013, whereas iMessage had already existed as of 2011.
Clearly they also saw the benefits of keeping it to Apples platforms, but that doesn’t remove the technical limitations, at least, early on.
Like I said, I don’t know if those limitations still exist. Clearly, the profit motive would if it weren’t for all of the legal and regulatory liabilities that exist abroad. This is why I suggested in another comment that purchasing and integrating this compatibility layer would be a good workaround for them in that regard.
The limitation was added after the fact anyway, like I mentioned in my edit, secure enclave wasn’t added until the A7 chip, which was first used in the iPhone 5S in 2013, two years after iMessage became available.
Although true, it was added to make iMessage (and every other service) more secure, not just as some sneaky way to keep iMessages off android devices.
This is dumb. For two reasons:
- the fact that a messenging service locks users into an ecosystem.
- the fact that to use this an apple device is still used in the background. This means you log in with your apple id on a device that does not belong to you and that can possibly read all of your messages.
I think issue two is a great way to address issue one.
They have made a closed ecosystem to support their lack of innovation and address their declining sales.
But now people could be able to get into this system that otherwise wouldn’t and use it without giving apple any information, other than potentially putting actual customers messages and AppleIDs at risk.
Because the android forever people who this is for will not have anything important linked to their AppleID but the people they message likely will or at the very least now their communications are at risk given they go through a third party machine.
RCS is practically limited to android ecosystem. Many of the carriers are dependent on Google Jibe to support it.
No one except Google and approved manufacturers can make a RCS app.
It’s limited to Android because this is the only alternative to iPhone and iPhone doesn’t support it.
Many carriers rely on Google Jibe but not all of them, and they don’t have to.
That’s true and I agree that this also stupid. We should all go back to emails with pgp encryption. These are both open standards.
Teenagers today suffer unique threats to their health and wellbeing from technology. It may be super easy for you to say “who the fuck cares about the color” but that is far from the case for US teenagers. Willingly setting yourself apart from the group in high school is a precarious move in the best of circumstances.
And for the rest of us, this goes way beyond the color being used. The SMS/MMS fallback in iMessage offers a terrible experience for non-Apple users. Low quality media, inability to manage one’s own memeberships in groups, and no encryption. For those worried about the lack of e2ee: Android users participating in an iMessage conversation don’t have that today. You’re not losing anything from this solution.
Legal disclosures prove that Apple knowingly uses iMessage in an anticompetitive fashion. It’s a moat to keep people from switching away from iPhone. They are leveraging their position in the messaging market to shore up their restrictive phone products. I wish US antitrust enforcement was stronger in this area but until then, I hope Nothing has great success in breaking down this illegal barrier.
Personally, I miss out on a lot of group chats because all of my friends have iPhones.
They’ll create a group chat, I won’t get any messages, then suddenly I’m getting a call on Saturday saying “hey are you coming to the party?” or more often than not I don’t get notified at all and end up hearing about all of the things I miss at a later time. It’s annoying, but I really hate iOS so I deal with it.
I’ve got an iMessage server running on my NAS but it’s not perfect, it requires that the iPhone user send the message to my iMessage account associated with my email, not with my phone number.
PyPush lets you link your number to your Apple Account using demo.py if you need that. It needs a cron job to sit on it for the first few weeks but after that its fine.
Hmm good to know, but if my server goes down (power outage, hardware failure, etc.) I’m not sure how I’d receive messages lol.
How is Apple keeping iMessage an Apple exclusive anticompetitive? That’s like saying Google needs to share their search algorithms because they’re “leveraging their position in the search engine market to shore up their restrictive products.”
In the end, Apple created a service that is massively popular and makes people want to use their products. The fact that US teenagers refuse to use one of their many competitors is hardly their fault. The rest of the world doesn’t give a shit about iMessage either.
You can read about it here: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/09/epic-apple-no-imessage-on-android/
Using a dominant market segment to reduce competition in another has always been an antitrust violation. A notable example is MS leveraging their Windows monopoly to force Internet Explorer on people.
RCS sucks ass. I have had more missed messages and fucked up communications due to it NOT USING SMS FALLBACK. other person isn’t available via IP? Then FUCK YOUR MESSAGE.
Want a different app? FUCK YOU
Wanna sort your messages, or filter them, or run an automation? FUCK. YOU.
I don’t blame apple for not implementing this shit.
Also, fuck bubble shaming
There is a reason they don’t send it until someone is online. On iMessage, you know if someone read it, not if they actually are able to receive it. If they fix the bug where the time of the message is when it finishes sending, it will be a great feature because you know if they have access to their phone and data. It will try to send it throughout the down time. Also you can use other rcs apps and have things go through rcs messages because of desktop authentication.
Do you know of a different RCS enabled app than messages? Honest question
Most carriers either have their own app or their own rcs network for rcs. It is also possible to use the web interface of Google messages to make one, not sure if anyone except beeper has done this though.
This really demonstrates how apple has its customers and competitors by the balls when it comes to messaging. This OEM is putting time and resources into developing an unauthorized iMessage app using banks of mac minis as servers and requiring users to grant them access to their iCloud account, a system that apple could “break” or sue out of existence on a whim. RCS isn’t the perfect solution, but it’s better than this.
Google wants everyone’s message data, that’s why their pushing it so aggressively.
RCS is technically an open standard. But in reality it completely depends on Google’s Jibe system to make it work for many carriers.
The recent anti competitive trials has shown Google is willing to pay apple billions for people’s internet activity to go through them. With Google currently pushing anti iMessage ads to shame apple into supports RCS, Google has most likely offered Apple a lot of money to use RCS. Apple has decided it’s not worth it.
Why apple isn’t supporting RCS is unknown. But it either user privacy or user retention to their ecosystem. Either way they don’t think more exposure to Google is good for their users. This ‘open’ standard is a joke. If it doesn’t make Google money soon, they kill it like all their previous messenger projects.
It’s not unknown, it’s clearly user retention. And it works in the US where they turned their users into salesmen pushing everyone to buy iPhones so they can use advanced features without having to install a free app.
User retention and RCS sucks. It has serious reliability issues.
Your getting downvoted for RCS issues. I’ve experienced them as well. It doesn’t reliably send messages. It also fails to inform you the message failed and fails to fall back to SMS.
RCS is far worse than this. It’s garbage, doesn’t work.
Honestly I’m typing this on a Nothing phone and if this appears on my phone instead of them actually fixing the many bugs I’ll be quite pissed.
Every update this phone gets worse both in bugs and battery life and the company seems more obsessed with things like beer, clothing lines and now imessage than actually trying to fix anything that’s actually important.
Nothing often gives me the impression that they sit around and get high off the smell of their own farts. Glad to hear there is some truth to this speculation.
They are the punk-rock of smartphones
if it was imagined by CEOs of a major label.
At least, they got the cover art right.
When I watched MKBHDs video on this, my first thought was whether or not we could selfhost a service like this. If I could run this through my own Mac mini server to my own / family’s phones, that would be great. I don’t think I’d ever feel comfortable logging into my iCloud account on some company’s server with just their pinky promise as a guarantee.
You can self host this already, most likely what nothing is doing https://github.com/mautrix/imessage
That is fascinating. Thanks for the link.
The blue vs green bubble thing never really bothered me. As long as I can communicate with the person I’m talking to, I don’t care how the messages are sent, unless maybe if I don’t want a message to be sent over plain sms. It’s ridiculous how it has become a status thing.
It is though. I’m the only developer in an agency of designers. Yes, they all have iphones and I’m the only Android lol
It’s absurd, but i get the blue bubble looks of superiority all the time.
I’m the only developer in an agency of designers
In the US. Outside of the US no one uses iMessage, not even iPhone users.
I’m in Germany, at least my designer colleagues love iMessage, but not for work. Since we know each other for a long time, there’s lots of semi private messaging going around.
Not only someone using iMessage but at the same time not using Signal or Whatsapp? Thats the first time I’ve heard of either of these two.
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WhatsApp for the older generation, Signal for the younger (Germany).
I knew it lol
It’s not just about the color of the bubble. If you go on an outing with a group of iPhone users, there’s a high chance they’ll create a group chat with and without you, because the group chat with you won’t let them send HQ photos. Even if they aren’t trying to be exclusionary, someone will inevitably forget to send messages to both group chats. iMessage incentivizes situations like this which socially punishes Android users.
This could easily be blocked by Apple
This sounds promising. But given how much money there should be in this, their timidity is puzzling. Perhaps the solution is brittle or subject to legal or technical challenges. Just read between the lines on this. They’ve got the cure for cancer but there keeping it in animal testing for now…
The app is currently in beta and we’ve decided to keep availability more focused to ensure the best user experience at this time. Although we’re excited to be the first mobile company to introduce a blue bubble solution and we’d like to make it as widely available to Android enthusiasts as we can, we’re prioritizing delivering an optimal user experience before committing to expansion at this time.
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Who fucking cares about the color of a text message? Stop catering to childish trends. My god what the ever loving fuck is wrong with people?!
The subject of the conversation here is literally children.
How embarrassing for you to admit that you cannot read.
Think about what you just said, and the environment you just said it in- put that into context, and then delete your comment in shame.
This is just retarded. If you need those bubbles or whatever features Apple provides - just use an iPhone.
I am using Android and I have no issues with Apple users. 🙆
