Apple responds to the Beeper iMessage saga: ‘We took steps to protect our users’
theverge.com
Apple responds to the Beeper iMessage saga: ‘We took steps to protect our users’::Beeper, like Sunbird and Texts, sought to find a way to bring iMessage to Android users. Its app, Beeper Mini, worked well. But a few days after it launched, Apple took steps to shut it down.
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Perhaps I just don’t understand why there is such an allure for Android users to gain iMessage…
The default OS text messaging apps dominate the messaging space in certain markets - most notably the US. Moreover, Apple has over 50% of the smartphone market in the US.
Sending media from Android to iOS looks like flip-phone trash right now. It’s done via MMS. It’s also not secure.
This will change when Apple starts implementing RCS, but Beeper was a way to start having high quality messaging now.
Sending media from Android to iOS only looks like trash on all carriers except Verizon. You can send high quality TO iOS if the network supports it.
You can never send high quality MMS from an iPhone, even on Verizon.
I've tested this many times. I've sent 50mb video from a Verizon Android to a Verizon iPhone, it receives a 50mb video. Send the same video back from the iPhone to Android, and iPhone butchers the quality.
What about the other way around?
Bullying from Apple users
No shit everybody in my group uses Apple phones but me and it's a constant bro just get apple and I have to keep reiterating I have no interest in it
Sounds like your friends are assholes then. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I have literally never as an adult had someone go "ew green bubbles." Now, my teenage nephew? The iCult is STRONG with kids.
This is the real issue.
It’s probably old people and not kids at this point, but easier to blame young people than the old.
Who the fuck buys things, adults, not kids.
The problem is they've ingrained the next generation since youth to buy Apple products.
I’m sure that’s true to a degree. (:
I had women in their 40s express their distaste when I had an Android phone.
Then they're assholes. Seems pretty simple, no?
For someone in their 40s, they're probably stuck in the iPhone=rich/Android=poor dichotomy that Apple curated when the iPhone launched. That makes them vain and materialistic, and thus probably not people you want to be around if it's that important to them.
Now, if you want to get into how Apple has been changing the contrast ratios on the text for blue and green bubbles to make the green messages harder to read, as well as intentionally making the green color unpleasant, there's something there.
They pretty much just both thought that Android was inferior. Kind of unfair from one, who was a photographer, considering I bought a Galaxy thinking it had a better camera than the current iPhones (it didn't, because the processing and camera app were inferior). So she'd be like "I don't know why you bought that thing.". But she was aware it cost as much as an iPhone at the time.
The other gf was a design snob (worked for a major clothing company as a color designer) and just thought that Android was complicated and tacky. Not that she ever really used it.
It’s the same problem with so much of the issues we’re facing in society people don’t know it so it becomes the “other” and therefore bad.
What is your source on the second paragraph?
Don't have the article handy but I believe it was wired that reported on the decreasing contrast between the white text and green background across several iterations of iOS.
Edit: WSJ from 2018. I can't find a way behind the paywall. And Medium. Also from '18
Those articles don’t say what you said though.
I’m asking for a source to your claims
The latter article doesn't cite decreasing contrast ratios, but notes
I saw that, but that doesn’t state what the other person is stating.
We can ascertain no intent but they assert one as malice which is why I pressed their claim.
Do you deduce that Apple did that by accident and never noticed?
With no evidence to tell me they did it deliberately I can’t deduce anything, I could jump to conclusions or make assumptions.
I’m not really in the business of that here though, someone made a claim and said there were articles about it then produced two articles which didn’t support their claims at all.
It’s a lot easier to believe they did something then just didn’t give two fucks about fixing it since the colors had become ubiquitous than to believe they deliberately did it to get back at people with a handicap to drive them to use their phones, especially when iMessage itself doesn’t follow the guideline.
Again, all I really care about in this thread is that someone who made bogus assertions about intent was unable to support it at all.
It's also the fact that there is essentially zero choice when it comes to iPhones. Most people don't care about the tech inside the device, they just want something that works. In the Android world there are so many devices with different specs that it breeds confusion. People buy a cheap Android phone and are like "This thing sucks! Android is terrible!" and go get an iPhone, which works better than the garbage Android device that they used, never trying a top tier Android device like a Pixel or Galaxy.
Back when my mom needed to upgrade her shitty Sharp Aquous Android phone I told her I would pay for it, since she's frugal, she instinctively pointed out the cheapest one at T-Mobile. I told her that it was going to be garbage and she was going to hate it, but she insisted that she wanted that one and didn't care. I bought her a Galaxy S6 instead, which she used for years. When I bought my Pixel 6 Pro, I gave her my Pixel 2 XL, which was still working perfectly 5 years later. She's still using it two years later and has zero complaints.
They did you a favor by showing who they are.
Uhhh, I say ewww green bubbles all the time, except the rest of that thought is, “damn, they need signal”
Fuck SMS, and fuck Apple for fucking this up and not doig the right thing.
Apple finally supporting RCS should end this unless your “friends” are teenagers.
Because iPhone owners are petty and care about the text bubble color.
Also Apple has intentionally made the Android text bubble less readable, so it has a concrete impact
how is white on green less readable than white on blue? please elaborate.
how is white on green less readable than white on blue? please elaborate.
They've chosen the green so there's a much lower difference in contrast between the white and green when compared to the white and blue
The green is lighter than the blue, meaning lower contrast
There are some people that send a lot of pictures over text messages, who want it for the upgraded image sharing quality. That's a sane enough reason, at least.
On the bright side, the kind of people who judge other people for their text message bubble color are not the kind of people I want in my life. So at least it's another asshole filter.
Unless you're sending RAW pictures, it shouldn't matter. I've never had a problem with image quality over SMS. Videos are a different story, they're compressed to death and end up looking like watching a video over dial-up in the late 90s.
Especially with RCS coming to iMessage, rich media features will no longer be gatekept by blue bubbles.
Kids will still also bully other kids for having androids even if they downloaded an app to make their bubbles blue.
Hahaha
RCS is not even in the same century as iMessage or other modern messengers. It's still tied to your SIM card. No SIM, no RCS. Why would I want to go back to the 80's for a messenging app, when I already have one in SMS?
You won't get a blue bubble still. It'll still lack encryption. You'll still cause a downgrade of iMessage groups to RCS if one person doesn't have iMessage, AND you still have the same downgrade issue to SMS if one person doesn't have RCS. I don't use iMessage much but I'm sure there are other things that won't be anywhere as good.
Besides RCS sucks. It's no more reliable than SMS (I'd say worse because it often doesn't notify you when a message fails, which for something supposedly modern is a sign of a major flaw - at least SMS has the excuse of being built on top of cell management, as a best-effort mechanism).
Metadata isn't protected like other messengers (Signal, Briar, SimpleX, etc). Even iMessage protects Metadata better.
RCS is something that cell vendors and Google, etc are doing just to prevent losing control over messaging and the data gathering it offers.
I will never use RCS. If people tell me that's all they'll use, oh well.
Lol, what?
Most of this isn't true, at least not for Google's implementation of RCS which has e2e encryption, delivery and read receipts, the ability to send messages from the Web app ect. Maybe you need a SIM card, I don't know.
you're right, RCS sucks. But just like WhatsApp or iMessage suck.
I’d like to use it on desktop. I have to use windows for work but I have an iPhone. People send me messages on my phone and I have to email pics to myself or use Google drive, and it’s a pain in the ass. Using a Mac shows how much more convenient it is to just have it in a desktop app.
I think the phone link app in windows does integrate iphone messages now too
Huh, you’re right. That’s interesting. Looks I can’t use it currently though (windows 11 only, and my PC doesn’t have Bluetooth).
I like how signal is multiplatform and actually encrypted.
i just want to talk to my family on a single non meta owned platform... the only ones to join me on on signal are my dad and my wife, the majority have iphones.
what makes you think that Apple is any better than Meta? their "privacy" marketing? I wouldn't believe a single word of it.
Both iMessage and WhatsApp are trash. At least WhatsApp is cross platform.
Common advice is if its free then you are the product and the apple does not do free. They dont need to sell data to data companies to turn a profit, which meta and google very much do.
That doesn’t say apple is secure or private. Personally i don’t trust any that ain’t self hosted but i do have a personal ranking, worst to best for tech companies
Meta - Amazon - google - Microsoft- apple
How about "why not?"
I can use many other messenger apps on multiple OS's.