[hangonhn]

As an iPhone user, I find it super annoying too. I love my iPhone and Apple products in general but it's not fair to expect all my friends to be the same. One of my friends has an iPhone but turned off iMessage out of an abundance of caution. As a consumer, I would really like it if non-iMessage user can get the same experience as all the iMessage users. We know there is a way. The standard wasn't great when it was new but it has matured a lot. I would really like it if Apple supported it. Its behavior seems needlessly antagonistic.

[jorvi]

> Its behavior seems needlessly antagonistic.

It is just standard fare across the modern bigtech world.

Prior to the iPhone / iOS, Apple would have happily built in support for something like Google Cast, because they operated from the idea that their products should be the most useful for their customer.

These days it’s all about forcing people into your ecosystem for increased lock-in. Thus, no baked in support for Cast (except in the Apple Music app on Android). As far as Apple is concerned, if you are visiting a friend and want to play some music on his Chromecast, the solution is to buy your friend an Apple TV for AirPlay.

[davisr]

Free software (libre -- free as in freedom) is the antidote to this entire mess. We should always choose free software whenever we can, so that we cannot get used by agents of corporate media in their hunt for more loot.

https://fsf.org

https://gnu.org

[cyanydeez]

the problem isn't just producer caused, consumers use Apple products as status systems.

libre software is not going to stop that.

[davisr]

Oh, you're right, let's just not even try and wallow in self-pity while we continue to be slaves to megacorporations. Or...just choose free software yourself, so that _you_ don't get used by these entities who seek to eliminate computer user freedom.

I run Trisquel GNU/Linux-libre on my laptop. It is totally possible to use 100% free/libre software. I use it for professional work. If GNU/Linux ain't your gig, lots of people also run OpenBSD.

[adamomada]

Google chrome cast is a really bad example of something they could add because it is s locked down proprietary technology that you need to have permission from Google to use now and at all times in the future.

The open cast protocol (miracast?) was lacking in some ways or other and therefore they chose to make something that did what they wanted and also could guarantee it would still be working down the road (AirPlay)

What they should have done is open up AirPlay and perhaps turn it into the next standard that everyone expects to be able to use.

[jorvi]

> Google chrome cast is a really bad example of something they could add because it is s locked down proprietary technology that you need to have permission from Google to use now and at all times in the future.

They have added it though, in Apple Music on Android, so they clearly already have both a license and a developed Cast “app” that gets loaded onto the Chromecast.

> The open cast protocol (miracast?)

It was DIAL. Why it died is anyone’s guess. Perhaps Google wanted more control, and Netflix et al didn’t feel like carrying the development burden.

[nox101]

You need permission to use Chrome Cast?

My Hyatt hotel supports Chromecast to the TVs in the rooms in the hotel. At no time did I have to give permission to Google to use it from my iPhone

Or are you meaning some other permission?

[danielheath]

The TV manufacturers obtained permission to ship devices with support for chromecast

[pmarreck]

> Prior to the iPhone / iOS, Apple would have happily built in support for something like Google Cast

I really don't think you can assume this. For example, a long time ago in computer years, Apple rolled out "Yellow Box for Windows" which was a way to get NeXTStep apps running on Windows http://www.shawcomputing.net/resources/apple/os_pictures/ybn... as part of Rhapsody Developer Release 2 (this was a prerelease OS X)... and then promptly ditched it.

Being able to develop once and then deploy to both OS X and Windows sounds great to developers, but think about this: If you had access to Mac apps from a Windows machine, then why would you buy a Mac, when Apple is competing on quality and not price? It'd be a win for app developers but a big "lose" for Apple.

So why would Apple have ever built a way to cast to Google Cast if they already had an AppleTV product that wasn't competing on price with Google Cast? (AppleTV's are great, btw)

[jorvi]

> So why would Apple have ever built a way to cast to Google Cast if they already had an AppleTV product that wasn't competing on price with Google Cast? (AppleTV's are great, btw)

Because it makes iPhone and Mac users their (digital) life better?

Let me give you a different example: you visit a hotel. They have Cast-enabled TV’s, but those do not support AirPlay. Anyone with an iPhone or Mac is SoL. It literally goes against Apple’s old “It Just Works” adage, when they probably would have looked at Cast as just another protocol to support. The only reason to do that is if you think the net decrease in usability will increase the company’s profitability via lock-in.

To be clear, it is not just Apple doing this. A different vector is a product like YouTube: often when I’m scrolling the comments after a video ends, an ad will play that extends down vertically, making me tap it. If I swipe it away, the entire screen shifts again, but now there is an ad strip at the bottom, that I accidentally tap again, taking me out of the app. This is obviously horrid UX, but Google doesn’t care because the only thing Google wants from you is eyes on ads. They don’t have to deliver a good product (users first), they just have to make the product barely not-shitty-enough that you won’t leave.

A great counter-example is 1Password: they support numerous ways to export their own or import other services their vaults. If you have a running subscription with a competitor, they will credit you the remainder of your bill if you switch. If you asks customer support for help if you are switching to, say, Bitwarden, they’ll help you. They believe in their product and that you’ll either come back or stick with them because it is the best on the market. Which frankly, for now, it is. Due to user-first perspective :)

[NickFanion]

You’re making a good point, but I don’t think this is fair to AirPlay. You don’t need an Apple TV to use AirPlay. My LG TV supports AirPlay. I recently stayed at an Airbnb with a TV running Roku OS. It supported AirPlay as well. Sonos and various other speakers and AV equipment support audio-only AirPlay.

When AirPlay launched in 2010, Google Cast didn’t exist. EDIT: TV manufacturers only started adding AirPlay (now “AirPlay 2”) in 2019. Still, I think it’s reasonable to expect a modern device, without extra hardware, to support AirPlay.

[jorvi]

Ideally of course Apple would bake in Cast and Google would bake in AirPlay 2. Best case for users, worst case for them.

Much more tangential but AirPlay (even AirPlay 2) is hot garbage for music due to the gigantic audio buffers. When I press “play/pause/next”, I want my command to process immediately, not after 2-3 seconds.

[soperj]

> Because it makes iPhone and Mac users their (digital) life better?

They have never cared about this.

[jorvi]

You should really watch a bunch of the old Jobs videos.

A prime example is price. Jobs’ was asked why they didn’t make a competing MacBook at the $600 Windows laptop price point (I think this was the mid 2000s?). He said that it might have sold really well but that they would have to severely degrade the user experience to hit that price point, and he refused to do that because he wanted to make great devices.

Back in those days you could plug any non-exotic device into a Mac, and it would mostly just work instantly, which was paradise compared to XP and 7’s driver and .dll hell. These days, I’d expect Apple to do stuff like patch the AirPods Max firmware to break the Android apps that enable all the cool non-basic features.

[pmarreck]

That's literally bullshit. They literally wrote the book on human interface guidelines

https://andymatuschak.org/files/papers/Apple%20Human%20Inter...

[bloppe]

Google can and has done the same thing. They stopped supporting YouTube on FireTV because Amazon refused to sell ChromeCast devices on their website. All these competitors have options to force you to buy their hardware just to use their services and vice versa. Google could start slowly degrading all their services for users without Chromebooks. Microsoft could force you to buy a Windows phone just to use ChatGPT.

Clearly, all of this is bad for users across the board. Apple is by far the most aggressive when it comes to this kind of anticompetitive bundling. You can't just say "of course they want to be anticompetitive, that's just business!". You're supposed to not let them pull this shit.

[lamontcg]

> As far as Apple is concerned, if you are visiting a friend and want to play some music on his Chromecast, the solution is to buy your friend an Apple TV for AirPlay.

airplay works fine on my roku, OTOH my chromecast is becoming useless because i don't use chrome as a browser.

[cyanydeez]

the lockin isn't just producer side, many consumers love ve the conspicuous consumption and exclusivity this create a toxic capitalism and antisocial behavior the clearly mimics the current American class struggle.

[pmarreck]

> One of my friends has an iPhone but turned off iMessage out of an abundance of caution

In my experience, iMessages have far greater delivery reliability than SMS text messages.

I've actually gotten into inadvertent fights with people over undelivered SMS text messages.

[AnthonyMouse]

The issue isn't that Apple should be using SMS in particular -- SMS sucks. But they should either use some standardized protocol, or publish a protocol standard for iMessage.

Someone willing to do the work should be capable of producing an interoperable implementation.

[Jtsummers]

You'll get your wish later this year with iOS support for RCS.

[AnthonyMouse]

Not exactly.

It's a step in the right direction but it's the same problem as iMessage supporting SMS in addition to its own protocol. If the proprietary protocol supports something the open protocol doesn't, or that Apple doesn't implement for the open protocol, a competing implementation can't do it. And if it doesn't do that then why does the proprietary protocol exist?

If you're going to make your own protocol, publish a spec.

[peyton]

Isn’t iMessage a service, not a protocol? Should I be able to operate a business that sends bulk advertisements to iMessage users?

[AnthonyMouse]

> Isn’t iMessage a service, not a protocol?

It's a service and a protocol and a client application.

But it should be possible for a third party to make an interoperating client application using the same protocol, and then it could connect to any service implementing that protocol.

Obviously if you want to be selective in who can use your service then you should create a protocol that supports some kind of federation so that each user's service can forward messages to another service if the two endpoints don't use the same one. Email works like this, for example.

> Should I be able to operate a business that sends bulk advertisements to iMessage users?

Can you do this now by using a Mac with iMessage?

[naravara]

The touchy part is the end-to-end encryption. The whole point is that Apple is the trusted party there. As an iMessage user I don’t want my messages passing through who knows which other parties’ servers when I send messages to others.

The point of the blue bubble is to ensure the encryption is there.

[Sabinus]

If you're an iMessage user, don't you want your messages to non apple users to be encrypted?

Kicking them out of the system makes your messages less secure, not more secure.

[naravara]

Who verifies that the client on the other end of your line isn’t intercepting the messages after they’re decrypted?

[AnthonyMouse]

End-to-end encryption is where the client device encrypts the message and then the other end's client device decrypts the message. It doesn't matter how many servers it goes through, none of them can read it, that's the entire point of end-to-end encryption.

The hard part is associating some identity with the user's keys, but when the ID is your phone number or email address, the entity doing that is inherently your phone company or email provider. You can standardize a way to do that, i.e. to sign up you get an SMS or email with a code and have to enter the code. The client can automate that if it has access to read your SMS or email, or otherwise you enter it manually.

[naravara]

If the person on the other end is using a non-Apple client you cannot verify independently that their client isn’t peeping. It’s the client, not the servers.

But also when it comes to managing the keys and syncing across devices it’s also the servers.

[crazygringo]

> I've actually gotten into inadvertent fights with people over undelivered SMS text messages.

Oh, man.

Thankfully I haven't had an undelivered text in over a decade.

But back in the early-to-mid 2000s, it was maybe a 5% failure rate in the country I was living in then? With no indication.

And yes it really did cause arguments with romantic partners. There were times I had to pull out my phone and prove I'd asked/invited/told them whatever. But it's not like that ever really fixes the situation either.

But if you asked anyone to confirm they'd gotten your message you seemed paranoid or needy.

You just couldn't win. So much friction.