[peyton]

I’ve dealt with enshittification by buying Apple products. Enshittification is a property of two-sided marketplaces. Meanwhile, Apple mostly just sells to customers. Thus my phones and laptops have gotten better over the years. I’m perfectly fine with them not selling services and exporting my data to other messaging providers.

[zug_zug]

I'm not.

It's anti-consumer that I don't have free access to all my data in apple. If google wants to make a "migrate all imessages and your cloud to us" service, I think it's textbook anticompetitive behavior that they prevent that.

When companies are forced to compete the consumer wins. Right now, the lazy crappy entrenched entities (google, reddit, X, meta) are getting worse and worse because they have made manipulated the system to prevent you from accessing your own information through alternative clients.

[saurik]

As much as I hate Apple and think they are in the wrong on this Beeper thing, Apple 100% allows you full access to your iMessages data: it isn't canonically stored in their cloud in the first place, and if you merely take a local backup of your phone using iTunes all of your data is trivially accessible (and thereby visible to software you run on your computer that could read the backup and import your message history into something else... though, like, the premise of uploading your message history -- something which should inherently be local and owned by the user -- to Google -- who certainly wouldn't encrypt it -- squicks me).