How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?

Their shotgun approach works financially, but it means that only a few of their projects really stick (win). The rest just trundle along until they get discontinued.

The hypocricy is tiresome. When there's a regulation that threatens them, they make a lot of noise about "free market", and "let the market decide". But when the market decides against them, they want some government intervention.

I personally think the current situation with iMessage is garbage. Even if Apple doesn't care about Android users, they are hurting their own users: every time an iPhone user has to send a text to an Android user, they degrade the security and privacy of their own users.

(It's telling to see where Apple draws the line: being anti-competitive around messaging is more important to them than their customers' privacy and security.)

Even if Google had their shit together when it comes to messaging, there's always the "default install" problem: iMessage is on every iPhone, from the factory. That creates a barrier for any competitor to gain market share with an alternative messenger. Sure, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. have been pretty successful, but they're not the default install. (Remember when Microsoft got in trouble in the 90s for bundling IE, at the expense of Netscape?)

As an Android user, all I really want is a secure way to communicate with others by default, without having to figure out which secure messaging app I have in common with each of my peers. Apple has made that impossible, and should be required to allow Google to integrate iMessage support into the stock Android Messages app. Or they should be required to support RCS (with E2E encryption compatible with Google's extension) on iPhones. I'll accept either option, though I'd probably prefer RCS rather than an Apple-proprietary protocol.

> "Even if Google could magically roll out RCS everywhere, it's a poor standard to build a messaging platform on because it is dependent on a carrier phone bill. It's anti-Internet and can't natively work on webpages, PCs, smartwatches, and tablets, because those things don't have SIM cards. The carriers designed RCS, so RCS puts your carrier bill at the center of your online identity, even when free identification methods like email exist and work on more devices. Google is just promoting carrier lock-in as a solution to Apple lock-in."

But, there is no "carrier lock-in" (at least not in the USA). In the USA, carriers are legally required to allow users to port numbers to and from any carrier thus creating competition rather than lock-in.

There's no carrier required at all with iMessage. With RCS you HAVE to have a carrier.

On the flip side, most people using RCS would otherwise be using an @gmail.com address as their identity if that was how it worked. I'd say that's probably better than the carrier owning the identity, but it's still not ideal.

There is a publicly-facing Google site to enter an RCS enabled cellphone number, in order to disable Chat features… including end-to-end encryption.[0] This feature should only be configurable on-device, ideally, or at least be behind a login and 2fa. It’s just there on a public site. This is basically asking for sim-swapping attacks. And you’d never notice, only wonder why your RCS e2e keeps turning itself off. I wonder which individuals and agencies may benefit from that…

Even with the Chat features enabled, RCS doesn’t not support e2e on group texts[1], unlike iMessage, which does[2]. Google is just playing dirty pool and calling Apple users bullies by proxy, and I’m calling them on it.

Edit: Apple has a similar site to disable iMessage. This setting should only be available on-device, or if it has to have an online workaround, behind a login with 2fa. If you no longer have access to your phone, you should have to contact Apple support or go to an Apple store. The status quo benefits bad actors and intelligence agencies more than it improves the experience for end users IMO.

[0] https://messages.google.com/disable-chat

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202724

[2] https://support.google.com/messages/answer/10262381?hl=en

You copied this one 4 times—that's egregious! No more, please.

This is _really_ misleadingly worded. The website asks for a confirmation code, which you presumably need access to the device in order to obtain, right?

Requiring users to visit an Apple store to leave Apple's messaging ecosystem doesn't seem like an ideal solution, to put it lightly.

I think the status quo is actually not terrible, and with a simple modification (making any externally-triggered deactivation very visible on the logged-out device) it could be secure as well as being usable.

Regardless, I don't see this as a big deal. The site will send a verification code to the phone before allowing anyone to disable it. If someone has cloned/swapped/stolen my SIM card and can intercept and use that verification code, then I have many many many more things to worry about before I worry about someone disabling RCS for my number.

But, as you point out in your edit, iMessage has the same issue. Potato, potahto.

I would guess that your devices will notify you if someone maliciously disables iMessage for you phone#, and maybe google does the same?

It's interesting that both sites are very similar. Maybe Google copied Apple's site.

So for me it seems like a far worse solution than the status quo.

Any other features that are missing or sub-par in the RCS vs. iMessage equation is IMO trivial compared to the harm we have now of the lack of interoperability.

That is by every definition worse than what we have today.

Look, I'm not asking for the perfect messaging system here. Because we're never going to get that. I just want something secure and private, and that works by default. Agreed that other client implementors don't have to support E2EE, but Google does, and Apple certainly would, and that covers enough cases right now to make me happy.

I'd grudgingly accept an iMessage app for Android, or (better) iMessage integration with the stock Android app. But I'd much prefer a standard that isn't controlled by a single company's goodwill... goodwill that they have already shown is in short supply.

And you want instead to move the world towards a single, insecure standard, dictated by carriers who have decades long history of (a) supplying data to governments, (b) selling data to random third parties, (c) intercepting messages for their own nefarious purposes e.g. advertising and (d) doing very little to secure and protect their platforms from abuse.

No thanks.

There already is a standard, one which Apple falls-back to when messaging Android: SMS.

The would-be-dystopia you describe well in your second paragraph is not a hypothetical: that is the world as it is today with SMS; Apple could change that by switching to RCS + encryption extension and protect their users' privacy, but they won't because they view it as a competitive wedge (we know this due to the Epic lawsuit, as mentioned in TFA)

This is a pretty literal description of how iMessage interfaces with non-iPhones today though, so not worse.

iMessage is tied to your Apple ID, not your phone number or IMEI.

https://messages.google.com/disable-chat

Group RCS isn’t e2e, unlike iMessage. That’s the main point.

But security is besides the point: Google doesn't want RCS support for security, it wants people not to know they're communicating with a non-apple device because they're afraid of the peer pressure.

Given that android has a huge marketshare lead, and google definitely knows how to make chat apps, they just never made one and stuck with it. Instead they kept continuously shipping new, incompatible, disconnected, chat apps and services. Because of that no one really trusts Google when it says "use this chat app, this time we'll keep it around". Meanwhile a person with a first gen iPhone or iPad (or a Mac from that era) can still use iMessage to talk to someone using the latest generation software. I would guess there's a loss of feature set, but it should theoretically still work.

https://twitter.com/lockheimer/status/1480663656463437824

Google could have avoided this by not continuously releasing and killing chat services. If they’d stuck to one they would have a much bigger number of users - people complain about iOS, but lets be real: android is a much bigger market. Google allowing both the hardware and software to fragment in basic functionality is a questionable decision.

And now we are back to Google Chat again!

What you want is for everyone to support whatever messaging protocol Google is pushing today. There have been a lot over the years and it seems like RCS won’t be the last (it has its flaws — serious, fatal ones, IMO).

Nearly a decade and a dozen failed messaging products later, now they are shaming others for not being interoperable with their preferred spec?

I don't think that's the way the world is.

I'd prefer the opposite: an OS with _no_ messaging app, and let users pick their own (both for Android and iOS). Expecting OS vendors to ship one out of the box is asking for a new IE-like scenario where whatever big tech companies pick becomes the standard, no matter how good or bad it may be.

I'm not suggesting another competing platform. I'm suggesting an already-widely-deployed platform (RCS) that is standardized, has been around since 2008 or so (older than iMessage!), and is the actual real elevation of SMS, not an Apple-proprietary protocol.

> If iMessage was cross platform

It's not, and that's the problem! Making it cross-platform would at least partially solve the problem, though it does mean Yet Another Messaging App I have to install.

> If you want secure cross platform messaging, use any of the other platforms built around that feature.

That's a huge pain in the ass. Not all of my friends have Signal, and I'm tired of evangelizing. Not all of my friends have WhatsApp, and I'm not interested in evangelizing a Facebook property. I don't use Telegram, and very few of my friends do, and I'm also wary of evangelizing a messenger that is not secure by default, and that has what is IMO a sketchy, secretive history around its cryptography.

Looking through my Messages history, there are 27 people I communicated with over unencrypted SMS/MMS over the past month. Only one of those people has Signal (not sure why they SMS'd me, but that just further illustrates the problem of how it's difficult to remember to contact people using the "correct" means), and maybe 6 or 8 of them have WhatsApp (for whatever reason, they/I don't really use WhatsApp often).

Why is this so hard? Apple! If Apple supported RCS (with the E2EE extension), literally every single one of those 27 conversations would have been encrypted, without me (or, critically, the other party, whom I have no control over) having to do anything special. As much as I love blaming Google for many things, they cannot solve this, because iMessage is a closed protocol that they are not permitted to implement, and the messenger app that is in the default install (the iMessage-supporting Messages app on iOS, and the RCS-supporting Messages app on Android) has a huge easy-adoption advantage that third-party messengers will never be able to match.

You can argue a bunch of "shoulds" here, but I'm talking about what the reality actually is.

The RCS Universal Profile is the first standardized version by the GSMA and came out in late 2016.

Google's RCS usage has primarily been via Google's own hosted implementations because of poor carrier adoption. Verizon AFAIK is planning to have RCS deployed this year.

Also AFAICT the e2e extension is not a standard but is Google-specific and currently exclusive to their Messages app. It also has several inferior technological, privacy, and UX impacts to other systems (such as only working for 1-to-1 chat, or requiring out-of-band verification code comparisons to guarantee the encryption isn't compromised).

It also is not a protocol evolution of SMS - its similarity is mostly that it like SMS was standardized through the GSMA. I also do not believe that the GSMA mandates its usage "instead of" SMS - it is meant to sit alongside SMS.

> That's a huge pain in the ass. Not all of my friends have Signal, and I'm tired of evangelizing. Not all of my friends have WhatsApp, and I'm not interested in evangelizing a Facebook property.

There's zero chance that RCS will replace Signal or WhatsApp or Telegram. It also won't replace SMS, at least this decade. It's just going to be Yet Another Option.

They are likely using an Apple device, so they can't use Signal as the default SMS/messenger app and have to remember to use it for the right contracts.

Android allows you to choose the default messenger app, and setting up Signal this way gives you an experience very similar to the iMessage one on Apple devices - messages to non-Signal-using contacts go over SMS/MMS, messages to contacts with Signal go over the Signal protocol.

Signal supports SMS on Android because Android has API for apps to actually interact with the underlying phone SMS capability (because Android is a platform customized by OEMs).

Apple does not have public API to interact with the hardware to send/receive SMS, although there's no limitation on using SMS in other apps.

There are two messaging limitations in the platform:

1. The sms: url scheme can only go to the built-in app. Since this does not let you pre-compose messages, I've actually never seen it used in production.

2. The MFMessageComposeViewController is used to overlay iMessage with your application to send a chat message. Generally I've only seen this used in lousy applications (admittedly including Twitter and various Google applications in that list) - the modern approach is to use the Share and Action sheet functionality, which presents first and third party apps via equal heuristics.

I love how it's such an anti-competitive market that in many countries Apple isn't even close to being a popular service. WhatsApp, WeChat, Kakao, Line etc dominate in non-Western countries.

Messaging is easily a more competitive market than search.

About 20: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...

Is it still a powerhouse if no one uses it?

The 'internet chat' they introduced a different service called 'Chat' which runs in some consumer version of Google Workspaces.

I also really hate XML based chat, but the OG standard failed because the federated clients had a poor required minimum standard for interoperability and other stacks E.G. Microsoft's whatever version of it ... I actually forget offhand but it was something anti-competitive that also broke how useful it was outside of their particular implementation.

We were also supposed to get chat with Google Allo but they practically killed it before launch.

> Before launch, Google touted strong privacy in the app, with particular emphasis on messages stored "transiently and in non-identifiable form". However, at launch, privacy was significantly rolled back, with Google keeping logs of messages indefinitely (or until the user deletes messages) in an effort to improve the app's "smart reply" feature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Allo

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29901707

I remember my Nexus 5 came with at least two Google messaging apps at the same time.

The problem isn't just churn, it's lack of focus. I wonder how many different teams have been tasked with solving messaging, some at the same time, over the years.

One of the apps they broke off, Allo, literally used phone numbers as IM identifiers but didn't support Google Voice integration and they simultaneously launched a second app, Duo, for video calls instead of just putting it in Allo. How could someone higher up not say "this is the dumbest thing ever, merge the teams or reassign one to something else"???

I was farther in the future of converged communication in 2015 than now.

I still have a soft spot for Google Talk, that was such a simple name.

Which is pretty ironic now that I think about it because were talking about apps they likely used internally for COMMUNICATION

Seriously! Executives at Google surely must be aware of the memes by now. Are they so delusional they don't believe them? They don't care? When they chat with each other, which app do they use? Steve Yegg's platform rant still rings true: Google's dogfood is all snouts and hooves.

They tried that. The person who was put in charge of the merged teams picked one and killed off all the other services without a migration path.

I'm pretty sure this is taught as a 200-level concept in business administration right?

Only after you manage to recite "short-term profit over long-term success" 500 times in an hour.

Consider Peter Thiel. Musk. Bezos. These people think honesty is a weakness.

In academia, you get kudos for starting something, while there are zero incentives for maintaining something - same at Google with just a tiny bit less hyperbole.

At a large company, you can coast like that playing politics for many years — in Google's case that's especially easy because Ad Words means they have little fear of running out of money and Gmail was big enough to ensure that any new messaging service which integrated with it would immediately “have” millions of users even if many of them had been trained not to use it by that point.

My previous employer was UPS, a top to bottom Microsoft shop, and they were in the process of switching from Skype for Business (Lync) to Microsoft Teams when I left. Even Microsoft has done a better job with their messaging option.

Around 2008, Microsoft had a huge advantage in messaging compared to whoever came next. MSN was widely used in much of the world, on every continent, and the product was far ahead of its time. Maybe not as dominant in the US, but the US has always been weird about messaging and still is. Video calls, group chats, chatbots for companies, they had everything. They were set up for success.

> In June 2009, Microsoft reported the service attracted over 330 million active users each month, placing it among the most widely used instant-messaging clients in the world

330 million, now that was a big number in 2009. Competition? Blackberry Messenger for a while, but that was never going to last with the lock-in. Facebook Messaging was getting popular but that too was (and is) very barebones.

What do they do with this golden egg? They kill it and force people over to.. Skype, an (especially at the time) poor piece of software with maybe 10% of the functionality that MSN had (which did audio/video calls just fine) and they wasted billions on acquiring. If they'd have kept developing it and made quality messaging apps for all mobile platforms, I don't see how Whatsapp would've stood a chance.

Google at least never was in that position. They were late to the game, only needing to start caring about messaging after buying Android and it becoming a success. Microsoft had 330 million people actively messaging in 2009! Did Hangouts even have 330 million active(!) users in 2020?

Teams is still stunningly poor. We use it at work and the Windows (hah, how's that for integration) version is so poor that a lot of us run it in the browser, where it runs marginally better. Images not loading, pasting a file or image not properly working, slow as molasses, far too limited settings to filter notifications.

I don’t have a choice anyway since my company disables IMAP/Exchange for security reasons.

Google Talk

Google Voice

Google Wave

Google Buzz

Google Hangouts

Allo / Duo

Hangouts Meet / Hangouts Chat

Google Meet / Google Chat

  +----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+
  |          | Audio Calls | Messaging              | Video Calls |
  +----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+
  | Consumer | Duo         | Messages (SMS/RCS),    | Duo         |
  |          |             | Hangouts               |             |
  +----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+
  | Business | Voice       | Chat (Formerly         | Meet        |
  |          |             | Hangouts Chat), Voice  |             |
  +----------+-------------+------------------------+-------------+

Hangouts is almost gone, starting a video call just makes a Meet and sends the link as a message, the messaging still works but has been folded into Chat (They interop for now at least.) so there's no reason to keep Hangouts on anymore really. Meet is for larger meetings, Duo is mostly for one-on-one calls but has group support now too. Chat is basically a Slack clone. Messages is Google's SMS/MMS/RCS app for Android and it requires an Android phone with an active phone plan but it has a web interface for composing messages on your computer. Voice does phone calls, voicemail, and SMS and MMS with a number from Google, and is separate from Messages. I don't think Voice can do RCS which is odd considering how their pushing it on Android.

As suggested by this crazy headline, a lot.

“Google to simplify messaging strategy, will support only five messaging apps”

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/google-promises-to-s...

The problem is that open standards just can't compete with closed ones when it comes to giving users what they want (for a nice discussion of this, see the classic https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/)

True though that open standards are slower and harder to work with because they involve too many people and too much discussion. Apple is almost exactly the opposite example of this, and clearly their approach works quite well most of the time.

The article answers that:

"Google's messaging history is one of constant product startups and shutdowns. Thanks to a lack of product focus or any kind of top-down mandate from Google's CEO, no division is really "in charge" of messaging. As a consequence, the company has released 13 half-hearted messaging products since iMessage launched in 2011."

I'll hazard a guess that most of those products were left to wither and die due to an inability to significantly advance Google's "eyeballs monetisation" strategy.

However, at some point there are executives deciding strategy, and almost by definition they are out of touch. From my observation, the most reliable strategy is to let a start-up with passion build something great that people want, and then buy that start-up. This is what companies older than Google have been doing for decades. (Google does it too, but they were more in-house-first in the past.)

Apple tends to have user data encrypted in their cloud and to encourage more on-device processing. They are more likely to support data sharing between people via exchanged cryptographic keys than have access within their cloud. Unfortunately, user-initiated sharing delegated access out is not a flow OAuth really supports.

Google's previous social network aspirations caused them to chain access to lots of data through user authorization to APIs. They use API access as one of the attractions to sites supporting "Sign in with Google". AFAIK even API which do not necessarily need any user delegated authorization (such as reading a publicly accessible google doc via API) still require a user authorization.

Apple's APIs typically are not about delegated access to user data, but about access to user's application data (e.g. CloudKit app data access via REST api).

Apple does have a OpenID Connect implementation for Sign In with Apple and have left the option open for it to also be used for OAuth delegated access. So far, there aren't any access token scopes or API publicly documented.

RCS isn't a replacement for Signal or iMessage, not really, but it's a hell of a lot better than the current least-common-denominator, cross-platform approach of SMS/MMS.

Apple, with its desire for vendor lock-in, has every incentive to keep the "least-common-denominator" messaging standard as crappy as possible, to make iMessage's own experience between Apple users more compelling. They have no incentive to improve this and of course will drag their feet as long as possible.

Whatever you think of Google, and whatever you think of Apple, I hope you can agree that the carriers dragging their feet on RCS does nobody any good. There's no reason that RCS cannot co-exist with iMessage on IOS, except that Apple wants you in its walled garden.

Especially being Apple, they would not pick an external pre-standard and run with it when they built their success on in-house design and control. It would also be a huge gamble to build around someone else's young standard.

Do you remember phones in 2011? The Android-based phones were wildly different from each other (often flawed in unique ways). There were still popular Nokia based phones. Apple almost certainly did not target "lock in" as their priority when building their phone software. They targeted "stuff we can control which won't blow up in ways we cannot understand or prevent".

(I do admit their focus shifted after Steve Jobs died, but that was later.)

But also realize the carriers were in heavy competition for decades. I've worked with/for telecom companies off and on for a very long time, and the only coordination really happens when one big company buys another and has to try to integrate things.

Messaging services are sticky and have network effect so there will typically be clear winners - within a particular geographic area or demographic. Other areas/demographics will have other winners.

So perhaps a huge number of American teens use iMessage, while people 30+ use Facebook Messenger. Perhaps a huge number of people in China use WeChat, while Japanese people use Line.

Google is really complaining that very few demographics, not even the masochists, are using Google's chat offerings anymore.

There is no lock-in for the consumer on Google products. If you have a Google device you can use whatever apps you want. If you use Google services you can use whatever apps or OS you want.

The problem is that Google has been too open. They could have made a Google messenging app the default a decade ago and forced all SMS on Android to go through that.

As it stands now, any messenging app can be the default on Android. Some OEMs roll their own, FB Messenger can be turned into default SMS app, etc...

At rough count, around a dozen in ~15 years.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo...

many, but also, Gmail

Similarly, Microsoft would likely be a dominant player in the chat space today if they hadn't rebranded and renamed MSN Messenger several times and then abandoned it altogether.

MSN Messenger was frickin awesome. You could draw pictures into the chat window. You could play a game of checkers while you chatted. It had a thriving ecosystem of apps and plugins. Everyone I knew used MSN Messenger... and then one day, Microsoft just said screw it, everyone can move to slow and clunky Skype... and that was the end of it.

Hell, ICQ might still be around if AOL had put more development resources into it.

The chat space is so bloody fragmented now, but it has nothing to do with Apple. Any one of the above mentioned companies could be killing it in this space if they hadn't pissed away what they had.

Even people like me that hated MS and AOL had chat clients that could communicate with their networks and Google Talk/Hangouts and MSN Messenger were both great for what they were. At the time I felt like we had lost something important by moving to "push" networks versus e-mail but I'd take those days now in a heartbeat. Maybe by 2030, something like Matrix will have us back to what XMPP was doing and I'll be able to send a message to someone's shitty Teams from whatever Google's fifth chat replacement is by then.

It's even worse when I'm traveling in east Asia and there are like 5 different Korean and several Chinese chat networks in addition to WhatsApp trying to be the next LINE and becoming the one-stop access point for nearly everything. I'm honestly expecting to see a 7-11 integrated messaging network at some point.

There were a few brief wonderful years when I had AIM, FB Messenger, GChat, and a few lesser known protocols all in different tabs in the same window.

It's not like they all needed different interfaces; same data, different wire-noise...

I didnt realize I had trillian setup to log all my conversations to file and I found the logs recently when going through a very, very old harddrive. Middleschool me was cringey as fuck

Upsides: I no longer had to care what messenger my friends used, it was all the same to me. Extensible and theme-able which was just the way I liked my software at the time. Growl integration.

Downsides: I made the mistake of installing and using a FFVII-themed sound pack that invoked a Pavlovian response in me every time I heard certain sound effects from that game. Took the better part of a decade after I stopped using Adium to shake that off.

Despite living in the US, I actually don't know what's dominant here...is it iMessage? WhatsApp?

Korea is dominated by KakaoTalk. I believe Japan is Line. China I believe has their own walled garden app ecosystems (WeChat & co.?)

Judging from what all my European friends use, WhatsApp dominates at least the UK and Western Europe?

I kind of miss XMPP, which seemed like the answer at one point. As it is, I need about six messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Telegram, a Matrix client, Slack, and I'm probably forgetting one) plus SMS/iMessage to keep in touch with everyone.

https://snikket.org/ is worth checking out as a (self-)hosted personal chat system.

WhatsApp seems to dominate in Europe and South America.

I have FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and Discord on my phone...

LINE and Ali/We chat are now more like platforms, for example, LINE has a wallet called LINE Pay that you can use in retail stores that grew out of selling virtual stickers for their chat client. They integrate to transit services and other things too.

Kakao utterly dominates the market for messaging there (as it does amongst the international Korean diaspora). Even government services use it.

Even still most in Asia also use WhatsApp.

Source: me, I've lived on all continents

I didn't use WhatsApp there. I had to SMS / tweet with my satellite device.

“Depending on your settings, you can also periodically back up your WhatsApp chats to Google Drive”

“You can use the export chat feature to export a copy of the chat history from an individual or group chat.”

I haven’t checked the full backup, but exports of individual chats are easily readable (zip with a .txt of all texts in the chat and individual images, IIRC)

The individual exports work fine, but it’s very tedious to go through every conversation individually.

So no, at least SMS is not a social network.

I don't like WhatsApp anymore but it was in its time my favourite social network. I had all my important groups there, used it exclusively to communicate with close friends and family.

It was the place were most images were shared and discussions were held and so on.

Even iMessage seems very much like a 1-1 messaging system.

Slight aside: keeping a TCP connection consomes almost nothing. In fact, that's how push notifications work today on Android: a TCP connection is kept open, and apps' server send a ping to Google to tell the mobile to wake up.

What prevents power-saving is if every app keeps a different socket open to a different server and pings the servers on different schedules. That forces the mobile to wake up constantly.

It would be interesting to see whether Facebook/WhatsApp and iMessage have made them desperate enough to reverse course on XMPP but I'm skeptical that they'd be trusted enough to be successful.

¹ https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/00... and then https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-May/001680....

Of course I'm talking about the QQ variant, which is probably so far from the original ICQ that I have no leg to stand on making the above claim. Still, a very interesting story to follow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent_QQ

Acquired did a fantastic episode on Tencent (owner of QQ/WeChat)

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/season-3-episode-10-tencent

[1] https://icq.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal

Firms that make messaging products say they need to control the system for quality, innovation, spam control, etc. Yet, nobody questions that a Verizon customer can call a T-Mobile customer and vice versa. If all chat clients interoperated than there would be real competition to create the best client. As it is we have the pernicious pseudo-competition of two-sided markets where you install client X not because you want it or because it is good but because the person you want to talk to insists you install client X.

If the European Union wanted to make the internet better they should mandate that chat clients be interoperable the same way that telephone services are interoperable.

Perhaps some of the things like Slack that make money at the enterprise level can afford to keep free around and working well enough to function for longer.

One of the subtle problems with offering a traditional IM service is that there are some scaling aspects that are super-linear with the number of users. For instance, as the average number of users on your subscription list increases, more of them have status changes per unit time, and each of those status changes must also go out to more users on average. The scaling issues aren't necessarily a full O(n^2) but they're often larger than simply O(n log n). Even after a many-times-over drop in the price of computing power it's still pretty expensive to offer something like that for free.

If you look around, you can see how current solutions often work around that. For instance, Slack shards everyone simply by the nature of how it works, there isn't just a "Slack handle" that anyone can ping me at. We're not all in one big namespace. There's many fewer status updates it does, too, it's a lot more selective about what statuses you get.

Another solution is Matrix; with how cheap computing power is, if a few hundred people bring their own to the party it's no big deal anymore to run a server like that, and no one person necessarily has to bring the big bucks. But if one entity tried to run the whole network, they'd certainly notice the bill.

For some reason, Slack got this right, and then Discord did it wrong anyway.

Microsoft just kept making it slower, buggier, easier to eavesdrop on, and kept "refreshing" the UI over and over again until it became unbearable.

Same happened with Skype after it was bought by Microsoft, and I seem to recall this is relatively recent. There were (are?) two Skype clients - one for 'personal' (the original Skype) and another for 'enterprise' (rebranded Windows Live for Enterprise possibly?) and not compatible. Again, I recall trying to help confused Windows users figure out why the (incorrect) client wouldn't log-in with certain credentials.

Teams is supposed to completely replace Skype for Business

What are you saying? ICQ is still around.

iMessage is incredibly popular with certain demographics in the United States -- it's an in-group signifier the way teens have always had in-group signifiers (when I was in high school, it was AIM, a Nokia, and wearing Abercrombie) and that isn't about bullying. If Google had its way, its products would be used as the ways to "bully" the out-group. So this is much ado about nothing.

It is notable that iMessage has persisted with its popularity in the US for as long as it has. And it is true that iMessage is definitely an ecosystem carrot, again, in the US. But in countries that didn't adopt SMS/MMS the same way we did in the US (b/c of cost/international variance/etc), the in-group messaging app is something else. It's always fascinating for me to go to other countries and see a ton of iPhone users not using iMessage but something else because that app has become the in-group signifier.

And every teen I know uses Discord more than they use almost anything else. The ranking typically goes Discord, IG, iMessage.

Having said all of that -- even if you took away iMessage, the iPhone would still be a status symbol/in-group signifier for a lot of people, especially young adults in the US. Samsung has had the best track record with some of its devices with approaching similar brand loyalty/"it" factor, but even if Apple adopted RCS -- it's not like the phone all the influencers and cool teens would be using would be Pixels. It would still be the iPhone for a host of reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with technology. White earbuds have been a fashion marker for 20 years now and that's what this comes down to. It isn't about lock-in or regulation or technology. It's about fashion.

Exactly this, Google was happy to be against open communication platforms when it felt it was in their interest but as soon as it goes the other way "Oh we should all be using RCS"

Reap what you sow

I'm honestly surprised more people don't complain about it...and given Google is really the only other big phone software maker now, it is their role to try to say something imo. "You reap what you sow" (as this article says) honestly sounds ignorant (or just pro-Apple) and really ignores the major problem here. Google has been bad at messaging apps, that doesn't mean this concern isn't real or a fairly big problem. Especially when the stats show that this is creating a hardware monopoly for Apple (look at the stats for young people,) in 10-15 years this creates a much bigger hardware market share for Apple. That is not a desirable outcome.

This is supposed to be a technical community so can we stop with this lazy abuse of terminology.

Apple has not hijacked the SMS protocol in any way, shape or form.

They've simply created an app that supports two protocols: SMS and iMessage with a UI that abstracts the difference.

Since this is a technical community, and you're a technical person who presumably knows how iMessage / Apple's infrastructure works, can you explain if this is correct:

- I'm an iPhone user with phone number N. In Apple's system, I'm flagged as supporting the iMessage protocol. Presumably Apple has some gateway that routes messages, and this sends me down the iMessage route.

- I swap phones. I now own an Android device. I have the same phone number N.

- Apple's system is slow to update, and its gateway still sees me as an iPhone user supporting the iMessage protocol.

- All messages from other iPhone users to my phone number are routed incorrectly and I don't receive them until Apple updates its gateway to use SMS for my phone number.

If the above is correct, what would you call that? People who want to contact me have no idea what a protocol is, but Apple has impacted their ability to communicate with me. They think all text messages are the same, but this layer Apple has built isn't open or interoperable, and is additional friction for anyone wanting to switch off their platform.

It's very hard to excuse this behavior.

On the contrary, Messages is routing messages to Messages IDs, and it's kinda on you whether you use an ID string that looks suspiciously similar to your number.

This is incredibly easy to turn on and off:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201349

To be clear, you can have an iphone with an SMS phone number and Messages, and not ever mingle the two. Further, you can have a SMS phone get your SMS messages, while Apple users with your number reach, say, your iPad. That's a valid use case.

In the situation you lay out above, where you forgot you didn't want to use that as your Messages ID any more, you can "de-register" if you forgot to remove it:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203042

https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/

If only if it worked as advertised. I can turn it off as to messages directed only to me. But if a group text was on iMessage and I'm the only one who bounces off to Android, new messages to that thread will exclude me, EVEN IF I'VE DEREGISTERED MY NUMBER. I've tried this repeatedly. The only way to begin receiving messages from that group is if EVERYONE on the thread deletes the old thread and begins a new one in green bubbles. It ENRAGES me, and it's been the biggest barrier to me transitioning to a Galaxy phone. When I'm the only one on Android, I just stop receiving the messages to the legacy group threads. And there's no way I make 30 iPhone users all delete those threads. Apple could ask its own servers "have any of these iMessage accounts deregistered their number? If yes, force thread back to SMS/MMS." Apple does not do that, and thereby severely handicaps any effort to move away. I hate it and would happily support a class action to change that practice.

It’s not intuitive of course, but you can totally turn it off and deregister, even if you don’t have your iPhone anymore.

iMessage falls back to SMS within a few minutes if the message can’t be delivered. This often happens if the recipient doesn’t have a data connection.

When I've switched back and forth from Android on a few occasions I've had to have users update that contact card for SMS to work properly. I don't think its necessarily an iMessage issue more iOS, but if anyone is still having issues with the switch after de-registering, check that.

However, they do have UI on all of their iMessage programs, and on the website that you can get to from any web browser (on any brand of device) for your AppleID/iCloud account that can remove your phone number from your AppleID at any time. Then, after some minor propagation time, messages from Apple users to your phone number will no longer be routed to your iMessages account, and will instead be sent as SMSs.

So you have an option to tell Apple at any moment, even after you have switched, that you no longer want that number attached to iMessages. How exactly is that hijacking?

iMessage isn't hijacking anything, as it's _not involved with SMS_. It's an entirely separate system from SMS. If you can't use iMessage, then the client uses plain old, non hijacked, non augmented SMS.

The word "hijacking" is being used because it's an aggressive sounding term that makes Apple sound like a bad guy. It's propaganda.

To me this would be similar to me operating as a browser vendor and having my own CDN that implements a separate protocol from HTTP, provides additional features beyond what HTTP can do, and displays a different color of banner to indicate that the website you are using is coming over my CDN. Then I don't allow arbitrarily anyone to implement my CDN protocol or connect to my CDN, so other browser vendors can't provide a competitive experience. Later when I have built a large marketshare, I decide that I'm good with HTTP 1.1 or whatever version of HTTP at the time and stop upgrading my implementation of that protocol. This is damaging to the other browser vendors and of users of websites that only support HTTP. Obviously this is an imperfect analogy given the client-server nature of HTTP, but I figured this might resonate with this audience.

I don’t know what to make of your analogy, it’s one of those “if facts were different then thing would be different” sorts of things, so just go ahead and read your first sentence.

A literal reading reads as Apple hijacking software they wrote and own the source code to… to support an additional protocol. It’s now been just over 10 years since iMessages was released into the wild as a feature of the Messages app and society has pretty well gotten used to it. Would you be happier if they were two apps, one called Messages and with an inferior communications channel and the other with blue bubbles called iMessages supporting all the iMessage features of today? Android had that feature 10 years ago or more. It sucked before you could change the default SMS messenger to Hangouts or something else, and once you did, Hangouts experientially worked the same as Messages does post-iMessages.

You could say that things have changed as users have become more aware of the difference over the years, but honestly, if your initial expectation was the default message application on my phone does what I have known as texting (which is/was SMS/MMS) which is a part of my phone plan that I pay my provider for and then you start doing something wholly different with that communication, I would consider that some sort of hijacking. You have seized my action and intention and redirected it to serve your own purpose.

Optimally? Switch over to an RCS implementation. If existing rollouts of RCS don't support enough of a feature set to please you (looking at E2EE), push to get that done. Don't go the Google route and end up choosing "collaborating is hard, so let's just not do it".

If Apple won't do that, drop SMS from iMessages and open the protocol or at least force users to choose or acknowledge the choice. Auto-negotiating a protocol choice makes sense when you are going from one open standards-based protocol that any vendor could and should implement to a newer version of that protocol with the same expectation of general availability (think the path through the versions of SSL and TLS). It's disingenuous to automatically shift traffic and offer enhanced features through a proprietary protocol when communicating with clients that only implement and can only implement the open protocol. It makes it seem like the other clients are intentionally inferior or otherwise making user-hostile choices. It's good for business though.

With respect to Android, that's its own slew of problems and mistakes that shouldn't be the bar Apple needs to clear. iMessage and Facetime are easily better than any communications implementation Google has produced in the last 10 years. Hangouts and its various precursors were better when they were based on XMPP or had functioning XMPP gateways. XMPP wasn't an standard intended to replace or progress SMS, so that doesn't really meet my criteria either. RCS is the way forward, but there's little demand for it or business reason for it in the Apple camp. Maybe if carriers declared that they are going to start taking RCS seriously and start removing SMS from plans and charging more for it.

It’s a common pattern for people to state that if X was different in some way, then there would have been a different story to tell. Something else would have changed if only X was different, so yeah; if facts were different, then thing would be different. If that car were red instead of blue, it would be a red car, which is true, but useless, because it’s not a red car, it’s a blue car.

You opted for an analogy that involved HTTP versions, including a hypothetical one, and a hypothetical CDN. The 30ish year history of web browsers is already littered with examples of browsers that did everything you were describing and some things that you didn’t. IE6 was famous for its stagnation because Microsoft dissolved the IE team to try and accomplish what you said, and you know what happened? The market reacted, forcing Microsoft to put the band back together, who then spent years trying to play catch up before eventually abandoning both IE and then it’s replacement in order to build a Chromium shim. Now I have government websites complaining that my browser isn’t Chrome rather than my browser isn’t IE. Y’know, the more things change, the more they stay the same and all that, but at least the banks don’t demand I have a browser with ActiveX controls so there’s been some progress.

So to bring this conversation back on track:

> You could say that things have changed as users have become more aware of the difference over the years, but honestly, if your initial expectation was the default message application on my phone does what I have known as texting (which is/was SMS/MMS) which is a part of my phone plan that I pay my provider for and then you start doing something wholly different with that communication, I would consider that some sort of hijacking.

So keeping in mind what I said about this being one of those “if facts were different thing would be different” things, who is complaining that Apple is offering them an improved messaging experience?

1. iPhones already offer the means to disable iMessage. At any point, you can disassociate your phone number or email address with the iMessage service.

2. It is part of the on-boarding process to opt into associating your phone number with iMessage, and if you don’t, then you will be sending and receiving SMS/MMS messages through the Messages app.

3. Despite having to opt-in to iMessages, and despite having the ability to disable iMessages at any time, iMessages is a popular service, at least in the US, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s better than SMS, it’s better than MMS, and when the other person also has iMessage enabled, you don’t have to worry about character limits (which are really byte limits, try sending an SMS with anything except ASCII characters), and you can send that 4K video or the last 20 pictures you took or whatever because it is a quality of life improvement that doesn’t require you to seek out an alternative.

You can still seek out alternatives. Literally billions of people use message protocols that are not iMessage, even on iMessage-capable platforms, so your conjecture that Apple hijacked SMS is an academic point at best, but honestly it’s just a dead end. Apple could not remove SMS/MMS even for just pragmatic reasons, and probably contractual and legal ones too. Neither of those are solid reasons to not develop a new message protocol as a feature for their phones because they are in the business of selling more of their phones.

So they evaluated their options, made a business decision, and accepted the trade offs by delivering a QoL improvement to their paying customers without disabling their ability to send text messages to other phone numbers that did not have iMessage installed, and created a visual distinction between the two types of message formats so people could come to recognize using basic human pattern matching when and how they can take advantage of the improved message format.

> Optimally? Switch over to an RCS implementation. If existing rollouts of RCS don't support enough of a feature set to please you (looking at E2EE), push to get that done.

Sure, they could, and there’s a case to be made that maybe they should look at implementing RCS, but why would that be at the expense of iMessage? Apple’s customers like iMessage. RCS looks like it could be a solid replacement for SMS and MMS eventually, but I think it’s really just going to live on phones alongside SMS and MMS for the foreseeable future, so this would be an additional protocol to support rather than a drop-in replacement for anything.

But there doesn’t seem to be a slam dunk case for RCS and the reason for that is that Google seems to be the only one that has a good implementation. If the carriers were clamoring for RCS, and I’ve seen no indication this is a priority for them, that would be a stronger case to support RCS. If Apple’s customers were clamoring for RCS, that would be a stronger case to support RCS.

But cross-platform rich communication with push notifications is already a solved problem, it’s just not solved by iMessage.

I still wish Apple would have pushed to develop an open standard as the path to improved user experience and messaging rather than making the progressive enhancement path go from an open network to a proprietary one. On the other hand, walled gardens have always been a productive pursuit for them, so why change?

The protocol support in iChat went from OSCAR (AIM & ICQ, .Mac) to SIP to Bonjour to XMPP (functionally Google Talk for most people, although I did experiment with Gizmo Project and the Facebook Messenger XMPP bridge) to Yahoo Messenger. Messages wasn’t their first multi-protocol chat client, but it does work fundamentally differently as I think you well know.

SMS and MMS might have been open at the time, and I appreciated the capability of point to point messaging someone that didn’t have to be signed in and in front of their computer to read it, but absolutely sucked compared to the plethora of proprietary push notification messengers that existed or were coming into existence circa 2011. They still suck, and that’s the best argument for additionally supporting RCS (and while I’m still trying to form an intelligent opinion around RCS specifically, it looks like a mixed bag at best but maybe still also a QoL improvement from where I sit now).

I agree with you that there should be a decent interoperable standard between iPhones and Androids, even if that’s functionally just between iPhones and Google’s Android, and maybe that will be RCS. I mean we have no evidence that Apple is not working on adding RCS to the list of protocols Messages supports, but as someone who has migrated across too many messaging clients and servers that all pretty much serve the same purpose, I also don’t want it to come at the expense of something I have already that works and works reliably just to chase the open standards dream. There’s too many cross platform options today for me to be invested in having one more.

Because all of the reports over the many years show that users know that a blue bubble indicates that this message is only going to be readable by other iPhones. And that a green bubble indicates it has fallen back to SMS and will incur a cost.

This whole blue message bullying narrative is because users very much are knowledgable into what is happening at a technical level.

Ask a few kids and then come back.

I think there's a lot of truth to the word "hijacking" here.

https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/

At least as recently as last year, I've discovered instances where iPhone users will not have received a message/image (both from me and others in group chat) seemingly randomly.

I really don't like that Apple has managed to sell a prevailing narrative that it's somehow the fault of users who don't buy their expensive hardware that is necessary to use their software that impinges on an open protocol.

I don't think it's so irritating. When you set up your phone you are prompted to allow iMessage to use the number. If you allow it you'll have to remove it again after you decide to not use it again. Just like you have to cancel a subscription if you don't want to use it any more.

I think that's why GGP's comment ("Apple's approach is they have essentially hijacked the SMS protocol") is justified. If you want to use any iMessage functionality, you surrender your ability to send SMS to iOS users.

It surely doesn't warrant a per-message-toggle and a global setting seems reasonable in my opinion.

At the time I send a message to an iOS user (who has iMessage enabled), there's no way (AFAICT) for me to choose whether that message is sent via SMS or via iMessage.

(Perhaps if I turn off my data connections, iOS will eventually send the message via SMS?)