> Messages App is the default chat app for all iPhone customers. Not only is it the default, iOS makes it impossible to change the default chat app. In the US, where the majority of people have iPhones, this means that the easiest way to chat is by tapping on your friend’s name in your contact list and hitting the ‘message’ button.
This is not true. On iOS - iOS has APIs for third party messaging and voip apps to intergrates natively into the system where they are presented as equal peers to iMessage and default phone app.
When I view contacts in the first party Contacts app, it presents message & call as the top options for my contacts. The first time per-contact it'll prompt you which you want to use, with third party options getting equal billing compared to first-party, but after that it'll remember.
Default option is still usual phone call/iMessage in a lot of places - in some you can long press and select another option, but not all.
Also, merely opening a separate app doesn't really help. How about instead of having 5 different apps (that the system one sometimes generously allows you to open), you had one app that can seamlessly speak all protocols?
You can add multiple e-mail or contacts accounts (even from different providers) and it'll seamlessly merge them in the system Mail/Contacts apps - why can't we have the same for messages?
> You can add multiple e-mail or contacts accounts (even from different providers) and it'll seamlessly merge them in the system Mail/Contacts apps - why can't we have the same for messages?
And on top of this, other voice apps are merged with the list of incoming calls, e.g. discord calls show up in the same list as phone calls.
This really highlights the intentional degradation of chat behavior. From a pure user experience standpoint, Apple’s own product does not meet their own philosophy and guidelines applied to other categories of app.
> You can add multiple e-mail or contacts accounts (even from different providers) and it'll seamlessly merge them in the system Mail/Contacts apps - why can't we have the same for messages?
Because there are standards there - SMTP and MIME and HTML for email, vCard for contacts.
For the contacts app, whatever fun graph or RDF or whatever format you use for contacts, your extension has to provide contacts via the surface of the SDK, which luckily had vCard to influence it. That may mean that the contacts app cannot support round-trip edits of those contacts, and you need to go back to whatever source to change things.
Same with calendar events - applications can expose a calendar, but this is typically not editable and you need to go back into the application to change things (e.g. to remove a session from your calendar, go into the conference app and say you no longer intend to attend it).
The message apps typically have none of this. They don't have commonalities in terms of identifiers (and may all claim authoritative use of say a phone number, with no approval of the carrier). They have no consistency in formatting. They have a varying set of additional features, none of which are designed to be compatible (e.g. person-to-person payments in Facebook Messenger vs in iMessage). They may also support extensions by third parties, business accounts with custom routing and workflow, etc.
XMPP and later Matrix tried to create standards around this, and for XMPP there was a brief time we thought there'd be buy in by larger parties like Google and Facebook. I'm very curious to see if we see uptake in ActivityPub, or if the same product/market forces make its popularity transient as well.
Or just one app that spoke a single protocol that all phones implement, like SMS used to be. That way you wouldn't have to install and juggle 20 apps to cover all of your friend's preferences, and manage which type of messenger they prefer over time.
Internet Explorer introduced a lot of new capabilities to the web platform. Those features were highly innovative and we take them for granted today. But for many of those features they did not do the work to get them standardized, or under-standardized them. They did not work with other vendors to get them implemented. Apple's automatic replacement of SMS is similar and had the same result: vendor lock in.
Also it's worth noting that RCS originally launched in 2008, a year after the iPhone and iMessage launched in 2011. Many features we expect from both iMessage and RCS today were not present at the time, but a next-generation messaging spec was there- Apple chose not to engage with it- which is too bad because at the time Apple could have helped to defragment the implementations and make it a better specification. The carriers fumbled pretty hard on compatibility, also probably because they saw it as a way to produce vendor lock in for their customer base.
FWIW, my understanding was that Apple did try to engage with carriers, but there was't interest in turning RCS into what Apple wanted (for instance, adding E2EE).
AFAIK 15 years later, RCS still hasn't started to define E2EE.
Interesting, I tried to find a reference to this online but was unable. If you can find a link to such a statement let me know.
What's kind of interesting about this to me is that Google was able to add encrypted messaging on top of RCS without the help of carriers (and it's not just because they develop/host Jibe, the most common RCS server side implementation-- E2EE messages can be sent over any RCS server/relay from what I understand). They just use a special mimetype and some base64 encoding and a custom identity server for exchanging keys. All things Apple could have done with RCS back in 2011.
What was also really revealing is Signal’s operational cost breakdown. Their biggest cost is activation texts, because providers have lost consumer SMS as a milk cow, so they’ve now started to charge insane rates for business texts.
With RCS or iMessage they cannot justify charging for these.
Well that's their own fault for requiring a phone number. They could just support creating accounts with username and password and they would never have to send texts. It would be way better for user privacy too.
RCS existed as a concept, but was extremely flawed and underfunded. Carriers had zero interest in changing from SMS at the time. Apple tried, and gave up, instead choosing to build iMessage. You may recall that when it was announced, it was actually touted by Steve Jobs as an open protocol; that never materialized, largely because Apple realized how massive of a lead they had on every other handset maker because they weren't beholden to the whims of the carriers, who had decided not to move on RCS for many years.
I don't believe Apple ever said iMessage would be an open protocol. It was Facetime that Jobs announced as an open protocol (as a surprise to everyone else inside of Apple), and supposedly that never materialised due to patent BS.
Those are just a bunch of unproven claims. An alternative theory is that Apple rejected RCS in favor of iMessage because vendor lock-in boosts their US profits.
I was alive and recall the reporting at the time? I don’t have the energy to find sources right now but my memory, while not perfect, is pretty certain this isn’t the Mandela effect.
I also worked at Apple in 2008, and recall the discussions then too.
You wonder how anyone survives in all of the world where nobody uses iMessage (which is everywhere except the US). How do people even manage to open WhatsApp? How do people survive this horror!
I have an iPhone (and macbook if that matters) and have no idea what all the rage is about.
Is iMessage the default sms client? It's just called Messages on my phone. What does it offer? Mine looks like the stock android one. I see virtually zero options to do anything else than to send a message. Is it US only thing?
Messages sends SMS/MMS (on a Phone or configured Mac/iPad/Watch), but will transparently upgrade to the iMessage protocol when talking to another Apple user. This has substantially better features over SMS, including network access and the ability to send higher quality multimedia.
If you don't ever want to fall back to SMS, you pick some other app (WhatsApp, Signal, etc).
In the US, unlimited texting became a thing much earlier than in the EU, partly because the carrier and network relationship is structured differently. So SMS is bad but free, and thus a bit more tolerable.
A higher percentage of iPhone users means that more often than not, you'll find your text is using the much better protocol. As a result, many in the US never had to pick a third party to be "winner" via network effects (like say LINE in certain asian countries).
This puts things into a weird state, where SMS and iMessage sort of act like a single pseudo-"product" in the US available to both iPhone and Android users, but where Android users get a way worse experience and where iPhone users get a worse experience when talking with Android users.
Which is where I get to personal opinion, and say this is mostly Google's fault. https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo... . As owner of the other major platform and with the ability to release a compatible chat app for iPhone, they've had and squandered every opportunity to own the space.
Your summary is right but is missing one key detail. In the period since iMessage was developed, every single direct messaging and group messaging app that got to scale has been x-platform across Android and iOS, and many of them have even been x-platform to web/browser clients and/or desktop apps across Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Namely: Telegram, Signal, LINE, WhatsApp, Discord, among others.
That is, all except one.
The one exception is, of course, Apple's iMessage.
Thanks for the details and background. If I recall correctly, back when I had an Android, every app (Signal, Telegram, Messwnger I think) wanted to become my default messaging app. I'm assuming to do basically do what you are describing. Google had like 20 messaging apps over the years, but they never combined ot or I guess other vendors went with stock sms-only one instead?
Android has a concept of a default SMS client, but not one of a default messaging app that isn't an SMS client. Signal, for example used to include an SMS client but no longer does.
If you only have friends that also have iOS devices, you can create an iMessage group and send messages in it. I don’t know how that works in the US but apparently it’s really popular.
This is not true. On iOS - iOS has APIs for third party messaging and voip apps to intergrates natively into the system where they are presented as equal peers to iMessage and default phone app.
When I view contacts in the first party Contacts app, it presents message & call as the top options for my contacts. The first time per-contact it'll prompt you which you want to use, with third party options getting equal billing compared to first-party, but after that it'll remember.