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Nothing Phone builds a blue bubble iMessage bridge while Google and Apple fight over RCS
(www.androidcentral.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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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.
Really interesting how different the US is. Here in central europe it's pretty much whatsapp, telegram, signal. Most people use 2 or 3 of those. Doesn't matter what device they are using
iPhones are really popular over there. Most people have one. For teenagers it's something ridiculous like 85% of them using an iPhone. In Europe we have a more balanced split, so only using iMessage wouldn't fly here.
I've seen a bit of an uptick in the use of Signal in the US, like it's worth having it installed...sorta.
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 the hell do so many teens afford these??
It's far cheaper than your first car and arguably more important. You find a way when you have to.
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.
Google search is available on apple devices though. Same with stuff like Gmail. Imagine if YouTube didn't have an app for iOS and you had to use the browser. That would be worse for consumers, but Google could use it as a way to force people into Android. That's what Apple is doing with iMessage and the whole phone ecosystem is worse because of it, whether you care or not.
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.
You'd have a point if Apple was in the search engine market.