I don’t understand why the article writes that iMessage is the only way for encrypted messaging between Android and iOS. I can thing of several off the top of my head:
- Matrix
- Signal
- Facebook Messanger (very soon)
- Threema
- Telegram
- Viber
- Line
- Skype
And there are surly more …
Then why are we shaming Apple and not the iOS users? I think Apple is totally reasonable here.
Apple’s biggest crimes here are creating a proprietary platform with an exclusive protocol and making it the default messaging protocol on their devices. None of this is really new, though. All that shit is common. We need Signal or Matrix to improve in user-friendliness and even do some marketing to the point where they become viable solutions.
telegram is not encrypted by default, and does its best to make you forget to enable it for each individual contact. if you want to do a group chat, you’re out of luck.
Telegram is only (partially) secure for pedantic power users, which most people aren’t.
so, relative to pretty much all other messaging services, it might as well not be.
You’re saying “by default not everyone can read your messages, only you, the recipient, telegram themselves and anyone who they might decide to share them with, with neither your consent, nor knowledge”
When compared to “nobody except you and the recipient” that becomes effectively equivalent to “nothing”.
also, not end-to-end ever when it comes to group chats
Technically, yes, this is a solution.
Socially, no. This is not a solution. People are just too lazy.
I assume that if people are too lazy to switch to a solution which works for every one then they are not very interested in talking to you anyway.
Apple protecting it’s precious garden.
For the greater good
If only there was a secure and open standard that would work on any platform, regardless of ecosystem…
Oh well!
If you are talking about RCS - the encryption aspect is a google proprietary extension
Thought RCS used the Signal Protocol?
Edit for source: Technical paper: Messages end-to-end encryption
It’s not natively supported by the base RCS standard, in the section at the end of the paper in the section titled “Third Party RCS Clients” Google explains that they’ve built the e2ee their Messages app themselves, (on top of standard RCS).
A developer has to use Google’s implementation specifically in order to send and recieve e2ee messages to Google’s Messages app (and Samsung Messages who also implemented this recently)
Although the e2ee implementation is using the Signal protocol under the hood, it’s for message content only - this is what is transmitted in cleartext (taken from the paper)
- Phone numbers of senders and recipients
- Timestamps of the messages
- IP addresses or other connection information
- Sender and recipient’s mobile carriers
- SIP, MSRP, or CPIM headers, such as User-Agent strings which may contain device manufacturers and models
- Whether the message has an attachment
- The URL on content server where the attachment is stored
- Approximated size of messages, or exact size of attachments
Without using this implementation of the Signal protocol on top of RCS, the message will deliver to the contact’s phone, but shows up as unencrypted garbled text
That is a very useful resource though, never knew there was a paper available on the implementation. Saving 😁
our walled garden*
Aside from the obvious reasons of competition, Beeper also used Apples infrastructure, that Beeper was then going to monetize. Not too surprising they shut it down.
No, they were charging money as they had their own APN to BPN bridge. Plus the usual cost of development and more.
To keep Beeper Mini running, Beeper uses a Beeper Push Notification (BPN) service to connect to Apple’s servers and notify you of new messages.
And it uses Apples gateway service for setup.
Apple already knows that iMessage, alone, is a huge selling point for their iPhones. They held out for a few years keeping iTunes away from the rest of us before finally giving in, but I very much doubt that they’re going to open up iMessage any time soon. It’s pretty much the only thing that keeps iPhone users in their ecosystem anymore.
We took steps to protect or users by forcing them to communicate to Android phones using unencrypted channels. After all, those peasants are not iPhone users, they deserve to be spied.
