Fuck apple beyond words for creating a bully situation with children because of their fucked UX design and unwillingness to simply release their own iMessage app for android.
this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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Jfc. The snowflakes here.
Yes, fuck Apple, sure. But tell your kids they don’t have to care. In the end it’s just a computer and any relationship that actually matters won’t teeter on which fucking app you use. If your kid is getting ostracized from a group ONLY because they don’t use iMessage, tell them they’ve found the wrong group and they’re worth way more than that. Real friends are more than willing to take a 2-second step and install a second chat app to accommodate friends who cannot use iMessage. There are more androids out there than iPhones anyway.
Corporations are not your friends. They will not take responsibility for your kids unless they’re forced or they decide they want to get paid for doing it. Your kids deserve to know how to navigate society despite this. Teach them.
WTF? Have you never met a kid in your life? Kids are stupid, their brains are still developing. You can't just reason with them, explain that the thing they want is stupid and that they should actually want something else. It gets worse with teenagers, they think they are actually smart and stop listening while thinking that every choice they make will have a huge impact on their entire life. Telling them to "suck it up and find some other friends" has to be the most pointless thing you can do.
Look, I hate kids, don't have any and never will but even I understand how fucked up it has to be for your kid to be excluded from activities because they don't have a phone or have the wrong one. Being a parent now has to really suck. All kids bond over things that are bad for them (social media) so you pretty much have to choose how do you prefer to hurt your kid: by giving them a phone or by making them an outcast.
If you think you know how bad one teen can get, try dealing with classrooms of them, for over a decade.
At that age in their development, their brains start sloughing off cells that it thinks it doesn’t need, so they go out and do stupid shit no matter what you try to tell them. They’re basically learning more from serious fuckups than anything else because those are the lessons that stick.
At that age you’ve just got to compromise. In this case, I’d say tell them they can get whatever phone they want as long as they pay for it themselves and hear out your concerns. If you’re the one buying, tell them tough shit, they get what they get, or make them write you an essay of why they think they deserve a one kind of phone over the one you think they ought to have. It gives you an opportunity to hear them out completely, call out bs, share some personal insight, or maybe even reconsider your own stance on the issue.
It's bizarre you're getting downvoted for saying this. Yeah, a lot of teens / kids won't understand, but that's fine if they don't immediately understand. Pain brings progress.
Downvotes don’t bother me. Both figuratively and literally, considering they don’t seem to be federating.
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That’s a real strong reach there buddy.
Eh. I think it's a lesson children need to learn eventually.
People with more money than sense are insecure about their lack of understanding.
Yeah! What a terrible job they’ve done raising those bullies!
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I recall some pretty bold statements being made that Apple couldn't stop this reverse engineering from working ever in the early days of tech reporting on this.
Even as a Android user I thought this was pretty bold claims to make as this whole walled garden is a big part of the Apple brand and they will need to protect this as they really don't have leading software inovation and they are no longer ahead on tech advances or specs that made the first couple of iPhones ground breaking.
Since they are a couple to a few years behind the Android features and specs, they need to protect the special brand identity above all else so I expected them to tweak things to break anything they don't want to have happen to their systems.
I can't blame them at all from a business prospective. While I don't like or enjoy their products, they had built a great brand that sells itself for those that "want to be different" but actually the same as all of their friends.
Yeah. I mean, the actual reverse engineering is something Apple wouldn't be able to stop them from doing. But anyone who thought Apple couldn't stop them from using that reverse engineering to connect to iMessage was delusional. And if it had become more of a cat and mouse situation where Beeper was able to keep gaining access, Apple would have sued the pants off them. Apple, as shitty of a company as they are, have every right to control access to their own APIs.
No matter what the technical reality of Beeper was, this was like claiming God couldn't kick you out of Heaven if they wanted to.
Apple has army of devs, a bottomless wallet, and is extremely petty and controlling about their garden. If you found a hole in the wall, they'd go as far as to build a whole new wall just to stop you. And they can do that, because it's their garden. You have no power there.
I support what Beeper tried to do, but it was never going to work. Apple's garden needs regulation to crack open, you can't do it with software.
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Like Microsoft had every right to control access to their operating system?
Oh wait...
ikr internet Explorer? but safari a ok
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Everyone using Beeper was authorized to access those APIs. Apple didn't like how they were accessing those APIs.
Behind in specs? Depends on which specs I guess
but CPU/GPU performance is AFAIK pretty great? https://www.tomsguide.com/features/iphone-15-pro-benchmarks
Features, yeah, depends on what you're looking for. AFAIK iPhones are the only mainstream phone to offer satellite texting though.
I have both an iPhone (work) and an android (personal), and they both...kinda just work 🤷
Maybe one of the features they thought about is how some Android phones install Facebook and other crapware that you may not be able to delete.
That's pretty cool.
It's been awhile since I last used a iPhone 13 Pro Max for work but I do recall the constant announcements there with previous models when Apple would announce yet another great "new" feature for iPhone that Android users already had for a year or two at that stage.
Samsung also made some good media campaigns on the announcements and used the lineups for new iPhones fairly well in their advertising.
I will say I thought the iPhone 13 camera was pretty goof, the battery life was too, and within the Apple walled garden the texting of videos was nice. The overall user experience for me wasn't a good fit. I like to browse the web without ads and watch videos without them too. Some of that can be done with a iPhone but it's clunky and the web browsers are just safari.
There's other customizable options I prefer that I can do with Android that isn't an option yet for Apple but I do know they will be able to at some stage.
Overall the whole apple vs android has been great for consumers. If it wasn't for the competition between Apple and the Android products neither group would be as far along.
They technically didn't stop the reverse engineering from working. They threatened users with bans and scared them into not using the reverse engineered software.
Whole saga has been stupid
The whole reason for Beeper to even exist is stupid.
It was never going to work, but they shouldn't have needed to try in the first place.
Beeper Mini, I can agree the reason for existing is stupid. Not Beeper as a whole. I greatly like having a one stop shop for all of my messaging platforms. It's a straight up fucking pain in the ass to have Messages, Messenger, Whatsapp, Discord, Telegram, LinkedIn, and more all having their own specific applications with separate lists of people in them. Gaim/Pidgin/Trillian/Adium had the right idea back in the day and if it isn't done at an application level like Beeper, then I would really like it done at an OS level where all apps of a communication/chat type have their notifications and interactivity bundled. There's going to be platform exclusive features that don't have parity that wouldn't be able to be part through or presented the same, but communications are such a base level function of these devices and the generally one-application-at-a-time type of display of phones makes the balkanization of communication mediums even more annoying.
I think Blackberry had the right solution with their Hub app. It was just a big inbox with a lot of integrations. It would show you all the conversations from different apps (including email) with all the typical filtering, sorting and searching. You had a single screen to see all your conversations nicely organized but clicking on a message would take you to the external app to send messages. It was super useful but of course apps had to provide some API for this to work and BB wasn't popular enough so at some point it just stopped working. Android could easily do this but I think they are just not as good at UX as BB was (seriously, BB OS10 had lots of great features iOS copied a decade later and more, it was really nice).
Yeah also iOS is getting RCS support soon so the whole point is moot. The whole blue bubble thing is a lot of people with way too much time on their hands to get worried about stuff that doesn't matter at all.
The bubbles are pointless. What matters is that apple will not send media like videos or pictures over anything but sms to android users, which means it gets transcoded down to 2.5MB max. This means that any media, which is a lot of what people send nowadays, looks like absolute trash going apple to android.
Its a sleazy, underhanded way to get people to buy into the apple ecosystem so they can stop getting tiny, grainy videos of their friends/family.
Just don't send shit from apple? If you want to send me shit, get a decent phone or don't bother?
Not sure why apple enshittifying their messages is supposed to incentivise me to do anything but ridicule them.
Or send over WhatsApp,Signal, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Teams, damn Skype? Or any messaging apps
You just pointed out the problem. Instead of using the inbuilt iMessage that works wonderfully for everyone with an apple phone, they now need to install 6+ other apps to send uncompressed media. Signal for johny and sheri, teams for david, bill and fred, skype for Susie on and on.
It's no wonder I just get a thumbnail sized pixel fest of my relatives instead. Apple has very astutly leveraged "ease of use" and "monopoly action" to all but literally lock the majority of their users into an ecosystem that makes it worthwhile to buy into it to end the issue apple created.
It’s always android users complaining about this. Why should Apple care if its users don’t?
I’m an iOS user and I use iMessage with some people, discord with some people, telegram with some people and Skype with some people and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest to do so. It’s not even cumbersome to do so, the contacts show up on the same share screen regardless of platform.
If the people you are communicating with don’t care enough to send something to you in a format that works for you, that’s on them, not on Apple.
Demanding that Apple make an app for android so that you can use their service without paying for their product reeks of entitlement though.
Chat and messaging was interoperable for years, even between platforms. Go look up the history of XMPP. It was a shared protocol many different companies implemented before they realized locking down the messaging medium meant locking in users.
Chat working on whatever platform is incredibly basic and easy, even with modern features. Its is only monopolistic action that keeps these things from working together, companies engaged in capturing customers with bad practice instead of good products. In no way, shape or form is it "entitled" to expect apple/google/facebook/et al to not hobble human communication for profit, and to just use good, interoperable standards.
The fact that Apple won't, and at most has pretended to make gestures while an intense FTC has started filing lawsuits against tech giants, tells you that they fully understand the value this brings them as a company.
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So your answer is "everyone I know with an apple device should stop using the thing that apple made sure works wonderfully for them and shift to another app to talk to me."
That's just not in touch with reality at all. What people actually do is keep using iMessage and sending shitty compressed media to android users. That's the problem people are actually complaining about, not some "bubble color" strawman.
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RCS is not end-to-end encrypted, so their bubbles will remain green.
Google's proprietary extensions add E2EE, and Apple's not going to pull a Beeper on Google.
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I'd count on Apple making the RCS bubbles green too, just to sow further confusion.
Yeah and anybody complaining about it at that point is just being a whiny child.
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RCS is nothing like a proper network based messenger. It is too little, too late.
I for one will never use it.
I was using XMPP on my phone in 2010...which was years ahead of RCS even then.
RCS is still tied to a phone number... Why would I want another version of SMS?
How is that going to help if the only RCS apps for Android are proprietary Google or Samsung apps?
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it’s now fully focused on “our mission beyond iMessage” and building “a universal, multi-network chat app.”
I would absolutely love this. I really miss Gaim, Adium, libpurple, etc..
I recall the early days of PC chat services like ICQ, MSN, AOL and the clients like Pigeon and Trillian to try to have them all in one place. It didn't always seem to work the best for long.
It's too bad BBM took way too long to open up to others beyond BB devices. They had some of my favorite emojis and they had for a time a big user base that they could have kept in their services.
Thank Google for killing xmpp.
Last I checked Google doesn't control XMPP, it still exists, is still being developed, numerous apps us it.
fyi the mentioned app they're working on is already available in limited release: https://www.beeper.com/
just keep in mind that if you connect any service to it, the messages will be decrypted on Beeper's server before sent either way, so theoretically they could be reading your messages even if you send them through an e2ee service.
it’s now fully focused on “our mission beyond iMessage” and building “a universal, multi-network chat app.”
Throw it on the pile with all the others.
My beeper app on PC finally stopped working. It wanted me to sign into a Mac and do a bunch of shit I wasn’t going to do. RIP
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Beeper announced it’s removing the Beeper Mini app from the Google Play Store and moving the iMessage bridge to the “Labs” section of its cloud version.
No new users will be able to use Beeper Cloud to gain entry into Apple’s messaging service, but the chat app acknowledged that iMessage may still work on Beeper Cloud for some existing users.
Beeper also made the iMessage bridge (which it noted cost $750,000 to build) open source.
The company doesn’t plan to provide help or troubleshooting to current users who run into problems with the iMessage fix, as it’s now fully focused on “our mission beyond iMessage” and building “a universal, multi-network chat app.”
The chat app released one last workaround (asking its users to buy or rent a jailbroken iPhone) but stressed it would not respond if Apple retaliated.
Several Beeper customers lost access to Apple’s messaging service on their Macs, too, reported The New York Times on Friday.
The original article contains 216 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 24%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
It shows how closed and limited is the Apple environment.
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