Re:Show HN: iMessage Wrapped – your year in texts
by oarsinsync on Saturday January 02, 2021 @02:26AM
(#25611070)
> Apple killed internet chat by effectively disallowing community maintained clients on the app store.
Can you elaborate on this please? Is this a reference to the GPL being incompatible with proprietary appstores, or something else?
Re:Show HN: iMessage Wrapped – your year in texts
by swiley on Saturday January 02, 2021 @12:39PM
(#25614534)
No.
The publisher of the app is the only one allowed to run push notification servers. The privilege of doing this costs $100/year and you're not allowed to sign other people's keys to allow them to do it. Since most chat apps were maintained by volunteers they're unlikely to have the time to dedicate to running a service like this which means that pretty much have to be paying someone in order to have usable chat apps.
So your choices are convince all your friends to use a proprietary app/service (with all the downsides) or put up with mms group chats which are free in the US anyway and don't require setting up accounts. I've struggled with this for years and until apple un___ks iOS I think it's going to stay the same.