Why are US users so focused on iMessage? I have seen rejected date memes because the message bubble had the wrong color. There are tons of alternatives out there. Is this a status thing?
This is a long story. But the short version is that we don’t have per-message charges in the US, so most people continue on using SMS for daily conversations.
Unless you’re an Apple user, because then you were only allowed to use 1 SMS app, and if you used with another Apple user, you were automatically upgraded to iMessage, which gave you a better messaging experience. And Apple users are an arrogant bunch so instead of switching to using literally any other chat app to chat with other users, they will just not message you if you don’t have iMessage (green bubble).
I suppose Google is equally to blame because they had several very similar apps that they abandoned over and over again.
Apple also intentionally made the green bubble contrast worse so that iPhone users would have eyestrain when conversing with non-iPhone users.
Oh yay another thing I can add to my list of “ways in which Apple’s marketing is extremely predatory”
I’m just surprised people aren’t fed up with how shit SMS (well, MMS, but I never want to hear about that again) is for anything other than text. It was always a fucking pain and just plain shit even if it weren’t.
It’s still the most reliable method of ensuring your messages are sent. And images are “fine”, so long as there aren’t any iPhones.
Really? Sent but not received, I guess? It seems like near any other method has things to show that you’ve sent it, that the server has received it, that the other user(s) received it, that they read it…
And images are… Well, very limited indeed. And costly, if we’re talking MMS!
To me, it’s definitely not the best choice - but I’m not in the states.
Read receipts are just a way to incite social strife.
You can usually turn those off. Not sure if you can turn them off for SMS, I remember text messages having those
Farthest I’ve seen regular text messages go is received receipts. And that depends on the provider, some of them only return up to “sent”.
Really? Sent but not received, I guess?
Sent and received.
It seems like near any other method has things to show that you’ve sent it, that the server has received it, that the other user(s) received it, that they read it…
Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Also I always disable read receipts anyway.
we don’t have per-message charges in the US, so most people continue on using SMS for daily conversations.
We don’t here in the UK either, but we still use data messaging for the most part. I use WhatsApp for my Android friends, iMessage for my iPhone friends, and it’s never a problem.
We don’t here in the UK either
You don’t now. My understanding is that most of the UK did in the early years of cell phones, so everyone jumped off that bandwagon real fast and found something else collectively. That ended up being WhatsApp, which was unfortunately later acquired and predictably ruined by Facebook.
Oh aye, back in the day we had a text allowance. My first contract allowed me 50 SMS per day, which felt like a lot until you actually started using them. But I’ve had functionally limitless - or actually limitless - SMS for probably twenty years at this point.
I’m lucky if I send five a month, and most of those were intended to be iMessages that failed for whatever reason.
We don’t have per message charge in France either but people still use WhatsApp or Signal because you can’t have groups in SMS.
vast majority of people use the default app their phone choice comes with.
historically eise, the reason EU uses whatsapp was that there was a time period early on where sms costed money, so people used whatsapp to circumvent that. the U.S didnt have that problem as sms was free for the majority of people in that time period.
This seems a bit revisionist. Everyone had an amount of smses per month that were free in their contract.
People switched to whatsapp because it was better than sms.
Not everybody, and not infinitely far back. There was definitely a period where there were no free texts included (although I do think that by the iPhone introduction many did have it, but still not all!)
its good to be clear that we are talking about a time period when people migrated to whatapp, and the reasoning for migrating to whatsapp. and how the ‘text for free’ thing wasn’t a big motivator, (nor was it a new idea)
And also because Whatsapp was available on every platform, from the dominant ones at the time (Nokia and Blackberry) to the newcomers (iOS, Android, even Windows Phone and more obscure ones like Samsung’s whatever it was called).
Samsung had bada os then worked with intel and the tizen foundation on tizen
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wasn’t it the long distance thing? charged for sending SMS outside of your network or something. I recall whatsapp was the way to text your parents from one country in to another, even in the EU.
I know for a fact my fam adopted almost a decade ago, so we can text from USA to EU to SA to Canada. Family all over and it’s free.
39 cents/SMS. I remember this time. This does not explain why it has to be that specific protocol, though.
because people were already uaing sms when it was paid beforehand before smartphones were a thing. people just used to whatever the default was, especially since its not like everyone switched to a smart phone immediately after the iphone 3gs’ relase. sms was the default method to talk to people who were still using "dumbphones
Also, at the time, WhatsApp was pretty much the only option. Nowadays, there are a lot of other options.
A part of it was that they put in the effort to support featurephones. People with smartphones always had other options.
It was the other way around, the feature phones were funny at the time so not supporting them would have made no sense. And iPhones and Androids had just been launched at the time so there weren’t actually lots of options for them.
WhatsApp was available for Blackberry, Symbian, and Nokia Series 40, and I’ve seen device support cited as an important part of its early success. It actually looks like Skype, AIM, and ICQ had pretty good support for various devices in the early 2010s too so I’m not sure that claim holds up.
Yes it’s a status thing and I’m aware of people who have been rejected on dates for having an Android.
Sounds like they are better off that way. Anyone who thinks that is important is probably not worth it.
I’ll bet that most of them never happened. But they do make great memes!
The average American is not tech savvy.
(Which is surprising, given that the US has arguably the strongest software development industry in the world.)
Most Americans just use the default apps installed on their phones. Facebook Messenger is really the only non-default messaging app with mass market penetration, and that’s because most Americans already have Facebook accounts.
Americans just don’t want to sign up for new accounts or learn new apps. Therefore, iMessage won by default.
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Yep
This also extends to other products. Don’t use your personal Gmail to do ‘TOS violating’ things. Better yet, separate it as much a possible with different devices, VPNs, etc.
Losing your primary email will SUCK
(Also make backups)
I don’t think it’s fair to lay blame on the consumers here, this is big tech acting as monopolies and should be prosecuted as such.
yet whenever the EU smacks down on Apple for being monopolistic assholes the fanbois come crawling out of their holes and start crying about how they liked their shitty walled garden and that now everything will go to hell because someone is forcing Apple to do reasonable things. (See USB C mandate, see DMA discussion about the AppStore)
I don’t think anyone here is blaming the users, the comments are saying they shouldn’t be surprised.
Users blatantly violate TOS > company bans account > shocked Pikachu face
I agree with the above commenter that they should have expected this. I remember watching SnazzyLabs video about Beeper when it was about to come out, and the video essentially said ‘people have been doing this for awhile, I don’t think Apple will care about Beeper’ and I thought oh yes they will.
Do I think Apple is in the right here? No. Am I surprised they’re taking this action? Also no.
i dunno why not create a new colour for rcs
Buy your own domain and point it to an email provider. You’ll essentiolly never lose your address
Violating the iMessage/iCloud user agreement can, yes, result in getting booted from the platform. It’s in the terms of service. It was a risk everyone took when using beeper. 
“How dare they access their own messages!”
I too like to champion a trillion dollar company over what’s morally right!
ah, yes, pointing out a simple fact = “championing” / taking a moral stance
if i point out that it happens to be raining outside today, am i also “championing” the rain, claiming rain to be morally right?
lol
Stop. Fucking. Raindancing.
My shoes are WET. You did this.
How do you know it’s against TOS or EULA to use your own credentials on your own Mac to send messages with your own apple ID in a secure way.
i know it’s against the iMessage TOS to use the service in a way it’s not intended to be used or in a way of which Apple disapproves, as beeper does.
Probably because they, unlike you, read the TOS and/or EULA
Did YOU read it? using beeper cloud is not against eula
No because I don’t use Beeper or have a iPhone or care about this really I just wanted to make annoying remarks in the comments and see if anyone dislikes the name “Beeper” as much as I do
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rude ._.
What was the relevance of this “simple fact” if not to excuse the behavior?
getting through life must be difficult for you
It really is. Thank you for the reminder.
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No one gives a flying fuck about Apple’s TOS.
tell that to those who got booted from iMessage
They don’t give a shit either. Hence why they tried to bypass shitty iMessenger.
if it’s so shitty, why are they so obsessed with using the platform?
the only thing they’re trying to bypass is owning an apple device to get onto iMessage.
I’m calling it shitty. What are you even arguing? Forget it, I don’t give a fuck.
if you don’t give a fuck, why are you even here?
Tell that to the humancentipad! You clicked on agree TWICE!
I’m not convinced. Sounds more like people having issues with iMessage are now correlating them with their recent Beeper use.
There seems to be no evidence other than that one Reddit post linked in the article with 30 upvotes and like 5 people complaining about being banned from iMessage for spamming after having used Beeper at some point. If this was actually a coordinated banning effort from Apple, I’d expect to see thousands of reports describing the same problem instead.
Update: it was Beeper specific
the users are holding their wallet the wrong way, probably
Welp, yep, get on the wrong side of a company and they can take everything you enjoyed from their “integrated” ecosystem away from you. That’s why we need to remove these types of walled garden monopolies.
well the mobile phone market is almost fully a duoapoli
kai os is pretty much the olny other choice
I think the bigger news here is that Pebble Founder Eric Migicovsky has once again bitten off more than he can chew.
I personally was already skeptical of Beeper based on Migicovsky’s terrible treatment of the Pebble devs on the way out (they were supposed to be sold with the company, that ended up not being the case and they were left jobless), and personal experiences when on the original Beeper waitlist (was not notified our onboarding session would be recorded until joining the session, follow up questions ignored), but this really seems to reveal that he never had a real solid plan to deal with this potential outcome (that most saw coming from a mile away).
Beeper was originally supposed to be a “universal chat app” in the vein of classic apps like Trillian, Adium or Pidgin, but they paid particular attention to trying to get iMessage into the game from early on. It’s genuinely odd to think that they’ve been persuing iMessage compatability for this long to not have considered this as an outcome, especially after the release of Beeper Cloud, which was an actual reverse engineer of the iMessage protocol.
The classic Beeper app (I forget the name for it now) could have kept flying under the radar and being ignored by Apple, despite the fact that it required an intermediary iOS device to be able to work as it was. They originally were going to send out refurbished iPhone 4s to customers, but as iOS updates quickly made the iPhone 4 too far behind to still be functional in this way, they rolled out their own fleet of macOS servers as an intermediary.
It really seems like an ill-considered plan, and it really makes me glad I never dumped any money into the product, because this has kind of become a complete shitshow. We shouldn’t be celebrating Apple’s decision to do this, but Migicovsky never even had more than a few moves planned before he gave up on Beeper cloud, so it’s not like we can count on him to be the one trying to mount a legal battle to change things and allow others access to iMessage through a legal framework.
Migicovsky bailed on Pebble pretty quickly when it became unprofitable. Will he do the same again? Seems likely to me, imho.
Anyway, TL;DR: I don’t think this guy actually has a real business plan with any of this and I’m kind of surprised no devs involved had brought it up, considering it’s been being developed for three years now.
While not related from a legal standpoint, the use of iPhones and intermediate devices reminds me of a supreme Court case that I wrote a brief about. The crux of it was a steaming service that operated large arrays of micro antenna to pick up over the air content and offer it as streaming services to customers. They uniquely associated individual customers with streams from individual antenna so they could argue that they were not copying the material but merely transmitting it.
I forget the details, but ultimately I believe they lost. It was an interesting case.
And SCOTUS did so by introducing a rule it never explained and which has no support in prior law (they’re only supposed to rule on ambiguity in law, not to create new rules, that’s up to congress instead)
Thanks for the article, it was a fun read. I’ll have to go back and re-read the majority opinion because I do remember some interesting analysis on it even if I disagree with the outcome.
Sounds like the WeWork of messaging apps TBH.
One point: don’t you mean Beeper Mini was using reverse-engineered iMessage code?
Another episode of “trying to contact people behind some big company app because they haven’t heard what an Internet is”.
Can I just say that Beeper is the worst message app name I’ve ever heard? It fills me with inexplainable rage.
Beeper, Telegram, Signal, Pidgeon, Wire, Session… Every word related to sending a message.
Conversations
It’s fine, apple users are not really people !
The rest of the world has moved to data messaging platforms while the US still sticks to SMS.
The rest is unfortunetly still using SMS for notifications or to text people not using the same app proprietary app or not using standard Internet messaging.
Meanwhile the Beeper app won’t even open on my computer.
Crapple at it again. (Gonna make this a thing.)
At risk of sounding like a pretentious fuck, I do actually lose a tiny amount of respect for someone when I learn they have an iphone. It’s like baby’s first smartphone, great for elders and children.
That IS pretentious as fuck. How shallow do you have to be to judge people based on what electronics they own?
I mean, that is a bit pretentious, TBF.
I used to look down on people who got iPhones, but I realised it’s not their fault, there isn’t much choice when it comes to good, dependable, usable smartphones that have years of updates. I’m a Pixel owner, and it’s basically the same thing from the other side. Backed by one of the richest companies. The same goes with Samsung, although I personally find their phone software to be really mid.
I upgraded my iPhone XR to a 13 mini last year. I was close to choosing something running Android, but ultimately I just don’t want to jump that far in with Google. And really, there’s not much of an alternative out there.
Oof. In my experience, Android phones are always better on paper when it comes to technical specs, but never when it comes to the user experience. I like technology, but mostly I need my phone to get out of my way and Apple just does it better.
I’m not blind, I know the downsides of Apple products, but I couldn’t go back to either Windows or Android after about 5 years in the Apple ecosystem.
When I found I could speed up every single transition animation and functionally halve the time it took me to do anything, I lost all patience for that walled garden. It’s literally just a single box in dev settings, I can also turn off any flashy bullshit that only serves to waste my battery.
Also when something doesn’t work on android, I actually have some recourse beyond waiting for apple to fix it for me.
The reason why you dug your own hole of pretentiousness is because you’re assuming there’s a right way of owning a phone.
There’s not.
For me, everything works just fine on iOs. Maybe if I was working in a tech-oriented field and I needed my phone to be very customizable and be able to run whatever I like, then I would not be happy with Apple. As an artist though I find the experience of Apple very pleasing. And this is how I have viewed the Android vs. Apple discussion for years now. Android is for techies and normies like your aunt, mom, etc. and Apple is for artists and normies who want a status symbol. Both are valid since you’re getting spied on anyway unless you’re wearing 5 layers of condoms before touching your phone.
I’ve enjoyed fucking with Android’s customizability a lot, but at the end of the day it has always gotten boring to me, the UX has sucked even when I set all the UI elements to my liking and the build quality of the phones has never felt good.
And I’m perfectly fine with that being my opinion because it’s based on my experience and it can change. I haven’t touched a Pixel phones which, I hear, are the best when it comes to Android, I’m sure there would be much to love, but if I have to pick a corpo’s dick to ride, I’m gonna jump on Apple’s instead of Google’s any day.
Maybe someday I will switch from macOs and iOs to Linux and [blank], but that day is not yet here because I don’t feel like jumping through hoops to get stuff working and then fixing it whenever it inevitably brakes. Apple…just works. And I know that’s the most banal, cliche thing to say about it, but in my experience, it does. For the most part at least. There are a few things that annoy me.
you’re assuming there’s a right way of owning a phone.
Except I’m literally not. I have a hard opinion about which is better, and sometimes I’m judgey.
Lotta people got a lotta piss in their cornflakes over something that, in my experience, more apple users do anyway. After all, it’s a well known phenomenon to get ghosted over wrong colored message bubbles. I don’t plan to cut contact with anyone over their phone preference, but I will make a couple inferences about their priorities when I see they’ve got the new $1200 iphone that just came out last month.
Doubly so when they also complain about how expensive something is. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Ye I never knew about the phenomenon. As other posters have pointed out - must be an American phenomenon. I don’t even use SMS.
and i’ll be the last person to argue for SMS. media messages are a fucking MESS, it’s a terrible standard in 2024
As opposed to what? What’s a big boy phone?
Big boy phone:
Nice! I need to get me one of these.
