Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by altairprime 1404 days ago
Apple could easily charge $1/mo or $10/year for iMessage on secured devices, with automatic refund and prorated cancellation if no secured device is signed in within a given billing period; and then discount $1/mo if one or more Apple devices are signed in and active during a given billing period. They'd make a billion dollars a month off of secured Android users, without exposing themselves to any new spam whatsoever, and showing Android users that Apple users have a better experience. Win-win for platform marketing and cloud services revenue.

iMessage spam isn't non-existent because sometimes someone tries to spam, gets a few messages out, and then their device gets console-banned. The iMessage "unsend" feature doesn't yet exist in any released iOS or macOS, so it can't be used to hide the spam after the fact.

1 comments

Hell, they could charge a token amount for un-secured devices, which I imagine could make things prohibitively expensive for spammers.

I would (grudgingly, because the whole thing is just stupid) pay 3 bucks a month or so to be able to message iPhone users from Android without dealing with unreliable message delivery and ordering, and photos and videos pixelated to hell. I have a ton of barely-recognizable videos of my niece and nephews from my sister because she always forgets that sending me video over MMS is a boatload of fail.

I don’t expect Apple to ever allow unsecured devices into the iMessage network.
iMessage worked fine on Jailbroken iOS devices since.. always.
Jailbreaking iOS doesn’t affect the OS on the Secure Encoave chip. Crypto attestations of device identity can be protected from alteration by jsilbreakers.
> unreliable message delivery and ordering, and photos and videos pixelated to hell.

Unless I've been an edge case, SMS/MMS has been nothing BUT super reliable on my phones in Australia. Can you provide a demo ? I'd like to see what you're talking about since maybe I do have the photos and videos pixelated, I just don't see this.

Because the overlap between spammers and unscrupulous people with credit card numbers is 0?

They're just going to use prepaid cards they scammed from people to buy iMessage and absolutely spam the crap out of that.