“Oh, what’s this unauthorized bullshit on our servers?”
[block]
I’m just surprised that it took this long
same. there seems to be a lot of people that don’t realize some things don’t get done, not because they’re impossible, but because as soon as they do it a company will put a stop to it.
it’s like cracking a Xbox or something. the very next patch will render the method obsolete and nonviable. when i heard this workaround was coming for Android, my immediate reaction was how long it would last before Apple just changed something so that it doesn’t work.
I’m really curious about how it was detected, how it was different from Apple devices. If nothing else I’m looking forward to reading about how that all worked.
It is usually easy to detect a specific client. Like even if you ignore the keys there are dozens of little details like the TLS fingerprint of whatever library they use not matching iOS. Things that are easy to miss and sometimes hard to bypass. Then there are heuristics on how it is used is likely unique.
Can all the folks saying “I don’t care” on this just stop? If this doesn’t affect you, why are you commenting at all?
Some smart folks managed to reverse engineer Apple’s secretive tech that they refuse to put on any platform they don’t own, which is fucking awesome. Even if you don’t give a shit about using iMessage, it’s awesome they were able to stick it to Apple at all, and make the gap between iPhone and Android that much smaller.
And of course Apple comes in and breaks it. Do you not wonder why? Does this mean there was a minor security hole that was exploited or was it something else that changed? This arms race is fascinating, regardless of your preferred mobile OS.
We’re literally on a platform designed to escape these closed ecosystems and walled gardens. A platform built around open communication standards.
And still there’s a downright bizarre contingent of people around here that seem to be chomping at the bit to defend or downplay Apple’s iMessage shit.
Yes, but no. RCS itself is. Google RCS however, not especially. Google keeps promising to open up the bits they’ve tacked on but have yet to. Which includes things like the open end-to-end encryption. Apple will be implementing vanilla RCS which does not have that yet. But they have claimed if I remember correctly that they are going to help develop that. I don’t know if I believe that or if that’s just something they said to foster some false Goodwill
The “I don’t care” crowd could be the rest of the world, that use messaging apps instead of SMS or iMessages. Try to consider this factor first. Not everything should be centered in America, or exclusively to what happens there.
I understand that. But that doesn’t have anything to do with my point, which is that if someone doesn’t care about this issue, they don’t need to show how much they don’t care.
In fact, I would argue that your general sentiment – that of considering others in different situations than oneself – applies more to the people acting like this topic doesn’t matter because it doesn’t affect them personally.
Guess you’re right. I’m not justifying them, but trying to put a bit of light into why a lot of people don’t care. I’m not the kind of person to express such a moot opinion, but I guess some people get tired of seeing a conversation that only affects only a portion of people and feel the need to express their feelings. Again, I’m the kind to remain silent, but there are all kinds of people out there.
Can all the folks saying “I don’t care” on this just stop? If this doesn’t affect you, why are you commenting at all?
Haven’t you heard? Lemmings are all about “Stay alone in a basement and never get out and socialize, because people use something you don’t agree with. If they really want to talk to you, they’ll switch.”
They didn’t, but now they’re on lemmy with more people with the same attitude, trying to socialize but never realizing why they don’t have any friends.
Reddit migration brought all the entitled, self agrandizing, freeloading, weirdos to the fediverse.
The fact that people care about whether their messages are blue or green is so absolutely ridiculous.
I’ve known people who literally refuse to message anyone who doesn’t use iMessage (and by extension has an iPhone).
Every one of them turned out to be a twat in every other facet of their personality as well.
yeah people should use this a a filter for people they should be avoiding.
This reminds me of the blackberry ping days, everyone and their mom acting like a diva for having a sidekick blackberry just to use ping.
Those were better days financially.
BBM was the jam back in the days before iPhone. If you wanted to be in on the group chats you needed a blackberry. In the last little bit they opened it up to more devices but the gig was up.
I still miss their icons.
They were never popular over here outside of business users, I always liked the tiny red LED. Sure, I can make the flag on my iPhone blink on new messages, but it’s not the same
Yes had a business owner come in and demand all employee phones be iPhone or get out. Jobs was his personal hero and thought Apple could do no wrong. The issue was the company he bought was run on software made for Windows. A lot of extra effort went into making it work on macbooks he insisted we all use.
In the end he believed he was as great as Jobs. Not sure that’s a great role model across the board for those that know more than just the apple procducts. The family values and toxic *work practices were not for everyone.
I was glad to get out of that company and back to my android phone and now Linux computing.
I will say the 3 good things about my iPhone was the camera, the full resolution media sharing with other iPhone users via iMessage, and the gallery uploading to other iOS devices.
The latter two are still a weakness with Google. At least they are addressing it with RCS but its still going to take time. Google photos has cloud back up but I’ve not really looked into how seamless the media backup to all android devices has been.
Apparently it breaks group chats, notwithstanding that it’s an Apple problem, Signal exists and doesn’t feature any of this nonsense.
It’s because it breaks all the nice extra functionality of iMessage. iMessage is closer to Discord chats; You can do things like react to messages, send live emojis, spoiler/emphasize text, edit/delete sent messages, see when someone is typing, see read receipts, automatically send check-ins when you arrive at a destination, draw doodles, send full quality media, share galleries natively, etc… But as soon as someone with an android joins the group chat, all of that goes out the window and you’re stuck with boring old SMS.
Is it intentionally hostile on Apple’s part to bar androids from joining? Yes. But the reactions from Apple users aren’t entirely unjustified, because they’re left with a noticeably reduced feature set as soon as someone forces them to use green bubbles.
Is it intentionally hostile on Apple’s part to bar androids from joining? Yes. But the reactions from Apple users aren’t entirely unjustified
The reaction from Apple users is to blame Android users - which is entirely unjustified.
But of course, post purchase rationalization and brand loyalty play a big part in why people want to externalize blame rather than questioning their own decision or blaming their favorite company for providing a shitty cross-platform messaging experience.
So why not use something like WhatsApp or Signal instead then? Sounds like a terrible user experience to me. Nobody I know uses iMessage, everybody uses WhatsApp instead, which is platform agnostic.
But I’m European, so the iPhone penetration is lower iirc and they can’t stay in their bubble as much.
Because Whatsapp users are just as big “twats” as you call it. Try functioning without Whatsapp in Europe, you can’t, and no amount of excuses will get you out of it.
Any messaging network starts acting like peer pressure once enough people around you are using it
Beeper is more than that. Beeper MINI is about that. But I’ve been using Beeper on my PC for the past year because I am so tired of picking up my phone a million times a day just to send someone a message. I’d say probably 90% of the people I know use iPhone/iMessage so having the ability to message them on desktop was a lifesaver for me. Really bummed it’s not working anymore.
I don’t know what may have changed as I am an iPhone user, but about 10 years ago I worked in a small security role for a fairly large company, and the communications company we were using was more than happy to hand over sms logs as plain text. I would personally never send messages to anyone I was sure wasn’t encrypted and I can tell that by the blue bubble. I just don’t know when it is green.
I don’t know what has changed as I don’t keep up with it, but I am still dubious about messaging outside the Apple ecosystem, which is ok for me as I live in a country where most people use iOS
Uh. It’s not that. Along w that is videos w potato quality, messages that never make it. Of course anyone reading your comment knows you missed the point.
Yeah.
Because Apple has a proprietary messaging format. They won’t adopt the standard the rest of the world uses or open theirs up for others to use.
It’s definitely the blue vs green bubbles. Your average user doesn’t even know iMessage is E2EE. They also don’t care.
Def agree that the vast majority don’t care about E2EE (though that’s probably growing with more news articles like that one where they went after someone for abortion and got their Facebook messages to prove it) I think it’s less about blue/green and more about how shitty the interop is. I don’t know anyone who is like “I won’t talk to green bubbles” but I know plenty who get annoyed when it fucks up the group chat or either side is stuck looking at a postage-stamp sized grainy image (if it even gets delivered.) Really, really blows that the predominate message services in the states are Apple-only iMessage, owned by Facebook, or SMS. I’m over 30, so I am not on Snap and most of my friends aren’t, I refuse to use Facebook products, so we’re stuck with SMS.
Its not absolutely ridiculous and you sound like an idiot who thinks that everyone lives in the same little bubble as you.
You sure it’s about that? What I heard is that being outside of “trusted” zone means less features such as media and encryption. Also the person in this article says apple users are basically forced to use sms to send messages to Android users. I too would not want to resort to plain paid messages if my partner doesn’t have the right app.
IPhone users have access to WhatsApp, Signal, and other apps android users use to communicate without sms
The problem is that, in the US and Canada, android users don’t tend to use those apps en masse. The vast majority use SMS.
Yeah, but iphone users are different as they already have some default app that they could use instead of installing other apps. Wouldn’t they want to use that default app as often as possible if their partners have the same ability from their pov? I mean it’s not about the color as the original comment thinks, but about the stuff that the different color implies. Not the thing that is nice to the eyes, but the actual convenience and price.
I worked in the cellular space for about 20 years off and on before moving to other pastures. I guarantee you that maybe one in a thousand think like you.
BY FAR the average buyer that Apple targets come in two flavors.
First, the “I’m cool and all my friends are doing it” and second is the “I’m the father, I don’t personally give a shit but my daughter/son wants us all to be on iMessage.”
It isn’t “Androids “ anything. It’s a third party app. Way to stir things up.
I didn’t know it was showing that. I’ll check my settings, and adjust. Thank you for letting me know.
Apples was and is still extremely anti-competitive and anti-consumers oriented.
Apple has always been a closed ecosystem, doing things “their way”. When they only sold computers, it was a niche company, with a niche audience. Then they started selling music players and phones, and they became a popular company.
The blue vs green bubble is just an American problem, that still use SMS as their main messaging protocol. The rest of the world use messaging app, like WhatsApp. It’s truly fascinating watching these events from outside the US.
As a German I see more glances of WhatsApp on iPhones than iMessage.
But I have to be honest: The video call is very neat in the Apple ecosystem.
We are lucky the EU is forcing them to adopt standards and not abuse their power. Maybe we’ll see some progress. New iPhones coming with USB-C is a good start and, ironically, I think it will make them sell more phones. But regarding blue vs green bubbles, the massive adoption of WhatsApp in the EU (fuelled by the greed of European Telcos charging per SMS) made us immune to this discussion.
Originally they focused on computers that could do more for less. They encouraged people to open them up and upgrade or mod them.
It wasn’t till the 2000’s that they started locking everything down.
But remember: instead of going with DOS, or a PC compatible system, they developed their own OS. It’s always been closed. And doing things “their way”.
I’ve been a Mac user for more than 30 years, and I’ve always been isolated from the PC ecosystem. No PC Card was ever usable with a Mac, until they changed to Intel processors in 2005, and even then, you didn’t have drivers for those, you have to rely on some outside development. You could barely read PC files, and most PCs couldn’t read Mac files without external software until Apple changed to Mac OS X in 2001. PC peripherals were incompatible (different connectors and electrical requirements) until Apple introduced USB with the iMac in 1998 (and the PC ecosystem caught up with it).
While Macs were (somewhat) upgradeable, you needed to buy Mac specific parts to do it, made by Apple approved vendors.
So, It’s always been a walled garden. I know, I was there before the iPhone, before the iPod. They’re doing nothing different from when they started. The difference is in society: internet appeared, and we now expect everything to work with everything. We expect to be interconnected. But Apple? They always liked to be their own thing, to be different (“think different”, remember?).
So, it’s just normal Apple behaviour. Expecting anything different is not knowing what Apple really is. Fortunately, the EU thinks doing things “the Apple way” is no longer valid, and is forcing them to adopt standards, and don’t abuse their position. But they’re doing it reluctantly, complaining, and putting a fight.
But also comparing an apple owned app to a Facebook owned app is hilarious.
Really? Why is that? Why you can’t compare two instant messaging apps? What is so hilarious?
Btw, WhatsApp was made by a different company, and then bought by Meta, when it was already the most used instant messaging app in the EU. And it has a lot of really nice features. There’s a reason so many people use it.
Wouldn’t it be more correct to say that most Americans also use a messaging app (iMessage). The rest are just stuck with SMS to have compatibility with the iPhone users.
As the iPhone was (is?) not as popular in the Europe as it was (is) in the States that might also be one of the reasons why people here ditched SMS so fast once smartphones got popular.
But it’s not “most”, it’s more like half of Americans use iMessage (that’s not an app, it’s a service, the app is called Messages), and the other half uses SMS with different apps.
The factor that moved people away from SMS in the EU was telecom companies charging for it. SMS is virtually free for telecom companies, but European companies got greedy, and people moved to WhatsApp. They tried to block it, but accepted defeat after a while.
In the US, SMS is free with your phone plan, and it became popular with young people until iMessage appeared. Since iPhones are still subsidized by US telcos (afaik, correct me if I’m wrong), a lot of young people have iPhones and use iMessage, that’s far superior to SMS.
Remember this is the same company that has to either comply with the EU bridging regulation between messaging platforms or withdraw from the market.
I think they dodged that as well… https://arstechnica.com/?p=1989111
“Android users’ hopes that Apple’s iMessage would be forced to open up in the European Union have been dashed. Bloomberg reports that iMessage won’t qualify for the EU’s new “Digital Markets Act,” allowing Apple to keep iMessage exclusive to Apple users. …”
Apple fanboys don’t care one bit. As long as they can look cool and feel like part of the cool kids, they’ll buy.
It’s not that they’re apple superfans that makes then like that or course, they’re apple obsessed because they’re fully brought into conspicuous consumerism - they love that apple is over priced and feature limited because it’s a way of demonstrating their excess wealth.
Airlines are big on this with their ‘show the world you’re special by spending more than most people do on their whole holiday just to get a slightly bigger seat and complementary drinks that you could have brought for twenty dollars.’ the same with cars that inexplicably cost the same as a house and why people need to have this year’s overpriced car.
Apple not being laughed out of existence is a symptom of our broken society, and yes I know people are going to tell me that they have some obscene reason for using apple but that’s just the very human trait of posthoc justification and rationalization of a choice made emotionally.
I remember in the ipod days plugging a CD into the aul PC and ripping all the files as aac… A format that would only play in iTunes
I had an arcos jukebox before the first iPod came out, every time they’d release a new version it’s big feature would be something my jukebox had always done. Except it didn’t have an awkward spinning selector wheel or celebrity endorsements.
I could connect it to the cd player and record the whole thing as mp3s, I think it even used to split the tracks automatically but I might be wrong. Plug it into usb and it’s a HDD ready to have anything copied to it without hassle… No need for shitty iTunes, no complaints about wav files and never found an MP3 it couldn’t play.
I remember thinking that surely people will realize over priced and feature limited products are an insult but no, the kids of the future I had so much hope for turned out to be gen z who care more about brand recognition than anyone ever before. I still think the feature rich generics will have their day, maybe generation alpha…
“Awkward spinning selector wheel”
Say what you want, but the iPod click wheel was anything but awkward. It was the most approachable and efficient interface and hardware on the market by miles and miles. Navigating other similar devices without it is an awful experience of buttons and layered menus that feel clunky and slow.
I won’t deny that the Arcos and other jukeboxes were incredible devices, but they lacked accessibility and mass appeal. Their size and expense kept most people from even considering getting one. They were absolutely an enthusiast’s device and nothing more.
The iPod ushered in the boom of portable media players and paved the road for Apple’s performance in the mobile phone space by establishing them as purveyors of a superior form factor and experience when it came to those devices. Apple owes its continued success in its personal computer and tablet product lines to the iPod’s design and their decision to focus on creating a cohesive ecosystem across their products based on those design principles.
