[quantumsequoia]

I had to purchase an iPhone solely to use iMessage. Believe me, I would have loved to use any other internet-based chat app. But I just can't move my entire social circle to a different app. The network effects and friction are too high.

The only thing end users really have control over is their own client. I don't know if they'll succeed in the long run, but I'm really rooting for beeper

[krick]

Are you saying everyone in your social circle willingly vendor-locks themselves by using an app that is available only on a specific device? That sounds just comically bad. Where is that? USA? I just checked, the iPhone market share appears to be around 57% in the USA, which is sure a lot, but still it means that every second person does not have the ability to use this app. So how comes it ends up being inconvenient for normal people, and not for iPhone users? Weird.

Seriously, I'm struggling to imagine that. It suddenly reminds me of when Microsoft had to offer users to choose something other than IE because of anti-monopoly legislation. What you are telling me about iPhones sounds way, way worse than that. After all, it's not like people had to use IE before that, they just didn't know better. There was no network effect and vendor-lock with IE.

Also, what's even so special about this app? I maybe could understand that, if it was unique. But come one, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, plain old SMS after all… And I'm not even talking about older VoIP/messengers (Skype, Jabber), community-centered apps (Discord, Slack, MS Teams) or some fringe messengers nobody uses even though they are clearly better than everything else (Matrix). By no means there is a shortage of messaging apps and protocols…

[tenacious_tuna]

> Are you saying everyone in your social circle willingly vendor-locks themselves by using an app that is available only on a specific device?

The problem is this isn't how a non-technical audience views the problem. To them, they get a fully featured chat (rich media, reactions, hi def photos, etc) with most of their social circle. They don't have to install anything, they don't have to sign up for anything, they don't even have to remember different credentials, it just works. Best of all, it just works across their ipads and macs, too.

Sure, it doesn't work for a portion of their friends, but from their perspective, their friends are the weird ones: why wouldn't you switch to a phone that has a "better" experience like this?

> By no means there is a shortage of messaging apps and protocols

This is a bug, not a feature, in a world where there's no common clients that work across all those ecosystems. You go back to 2008ish and you have half a dozen clients that speak Jabber or XMPP. You can sign into GTalk or Facebook Messenger or (gods forbid) Yahoo Messenger all from the same application, and it all mostly works. Now you have a zillion apps and a zillion logins and some of them have nice features and some don't, but without interop, there's an upper limit to the number of chat apps people are willing to maintain to just talk to other people.

Especially when, for Apple users, the best one is already on their device.

[s3p]

Do you hear yourself? Using using an iPhone for communication is perfectly normal. I’m at a top 10 (biggest in terms of number of students) university in the US and I can confidently tell you the overwhelming majority of people carries iPhones. The 57% statistic use site probably skewed toward the older demographic, where older people are more likely to use flip phones and androids. I would if I knew that strange if I wasn’t a part of group chat just because I have an android. Technical users like the increased privacy and security, while more regular users like the extra features. They’re just isn’t an argument to be made for having androids in group chats. And no, nobody is using signal or telegram or WhatsApp in college

[whyoh]

Honest question, does anybody ever consider that excluding non-iPhone users from a group chat is a dick move?

How hard it is to install a cross-platform app? Some of these apps also work in a web browser on any OS, which is a nice advantage over iMessage.

[hug]

I will place a bet with you, if you like, that will be very easy for you to win if you're correct in your comment.

The bet goes something like this: Pick a group chat you're in of 10 or more real-life acquaintances who all currently only use a single messaging platform, and convince them all to move the group chat entirely to a different messaging platform, and delete the old group chat.

It doesn't matter which messaging platform you're moving to, any will do, and as you mention there's many to pick from -- some of which are probably better and more feature complete than the one your group chat is currently using.

[stillwithit]

But those effects are not universal.

Not everyone is locked into iMessage.

Of course you’ve hardly been forced into hard labor in the gulag.

Can we use government for something more universal than saving you from your social groups choices?