[Larrikin]

Why shouldn't interoperability be free for messages? It is free for email. AIM was free, IRC was free, MSN Messenger was free, Pidgin offered a free product for years that let me talk to everyone.

Then a bunch of assholes hired some awful people to make the world a worse place and constructed barriers to communication, so they could make money.

[mikhailt]

Nothing is for free.

Email is open standard, so it is designed to be interoperable from the start but services offering emails are not free by default. They're free up to a certain point, each email service has restrictions such as certain amount of email per day or size restrictions, or they offer ads (take a look at Outlook for an example).

Back then, Internet was free too, via NetZero with ads.

You get what you pay for.

In this case, Apple customers paid for Messages by buying their devices and/or iCloud plans.

I would prefer Apple to open up and offer Messages for Android/Windows/Linux and the only way to use them is via paid iCloud plans.

[throwup238]

> In this case, Apple customers paid for Messages by buying their devices and/or iCloud plans.

I have an active iCloud subscription and I've spent at least ten grand on Apple products over the years. Why can't I see and send iMessages on my other devices?

[mikhailt]

Because there's no iMessage client for these devices, just as there is no iMessages for Windows or Linux either.

As long as iMessage is not an open standard, your access to your Messages is restricted to the platforms that Apple owns and/or have an app for.

As for iCloud plans, I was referring to the storage for Messages, as you need paid plans to host more than 5gb of content of messages such as all of the photos and videos and so on.

[throwup238]

Right because their anti-competitive practices prevent me from using the services I pay for the way I want to.

[throw0101b]

> Right because their anti-competitive practices prevent me from using the services I pay for the way I want to.

All services you use are subject to terms and conditions: Gmail, Netflix, watching a sports match at your local stadium. Read them before partaking instead of assuming you're entitled to everything just because you cut a cheque.

[throwup238]

Rarely enforceable contracts of adhesion.

[greggsy]

Even SMS is a paid service in many markets. Very expensive too, when you consider the price per byte.

[mikhailt]

Interesting, I didn't know that. Thanks for bringing that up.

[chongli]

It’s really a paid service in all markets. You can’t send SMS for free in any country. You need to at least be a subscriber to a cell network or some SMS only service. Whether individual providers decide to offer unlimited flat rate SMS or not is a pricing decision, but none of them offer free messaging to none-subscribers.

[mikhailt]

There are US services like Google's Voice, TextFree and TextPlus that has unlimited text messages, I used to use it before with friends without having cell networks for a few years.

[mdasen]

I think there are two forms of interoperability that you aren't breaking out.

1. Client to Service

2. Service to Service

With email, service to service is generally free. However, Client to Service (eg. IMAP) hasn't been guaranteed to be free in the same way. Many services offer it today for free, but that's after a sharp decline in desktop mail clients. I remember how hard it was to get free IMAP back in the day. Now that most people use webmail or the company's app, they're offering it without being worried about the few people using it. If 90% of people started using IMAP and bypassing Google/Yahoo/Microsoft's ads, we might see IMAP return to being a paid service.

> AIM was free

AIM was constantly trying to break third party clients. Pidgin was often good at keeping on top of changes AOL was making to break them, but AIM certainly wasn't an open network for third parties.

MSN Messenger originally included access to AIM, but AOL blocked them. I don't think MSN Messenger (and later Windows Live Messenger) ever welcomed third party clients. Microsoft tried various strategies to get MSN Messenger to take off, but none were really open. It's more that the MSNP protocol was relatively easy to reverse engineer and Microsoft didn't go overboard trying to block third parties.

I agree with you that companies are trying to make the world a worse place via barriers to communication so they can make money. However, we didn't have great interoperability in the past. Email was interoperable, but instant messengers weren't. Pidgin was just good at staying on top of things back then and was facing off against less competent foes. If AOL were more competent, they would have been better at keeping Pidgin off their network.

[paulmd]

If google was running a smtp server for google customers use, and you figured out how to spoof like you were a google relay so they’d carry messages for clients who were not customers, and then you tried to open up a service reselling this capability as a commercial offering, you’d absolutely be banned.

That’s what discord and signal and apple and Reddit do too. It’s your service, you are under no obligation to provide it for free to third parties. And this is true even if you are a gatekeeper - google is under no obligation to provide guaranteed open smtp or even open transit into their network (they block a lot of domains etc), even if that is cumbersome for you personally.

Forcing that would be bad for everyone because gmail would immediately devolve into a pit of spam. As would iMessage.

It’s silly to pretend otherwise and would be openly acknowledged as such in any other context other than apple-bashing.