Very simple.
Video conferencing software has an anti-network effect:
If just one person in a group cannot use a particular app, nobody in the group can.
Video conferencing has no ubiquitous fallback.
This isn't a clean fallback option.
You can use FaceTime without a phone number. Just create an Apple account, then give your contact your AppleID associated email address to add to their contact card for you and you have a working FaceTime destination.
You cannot create an Apple account without providing a phone number.
Point is to limit false account (and I guess also having some clues about real identity in case of abuse).
I also have been embarrassed trying to teach Google's solutions and then Google messing with them over and over, so I won't ever try to introduce a Google service again.
I miss what for the same reason
One complaint I have about them is that shuffle is broken. Completely broken. And I know they explained multiple times that it's not, that people are imagining things, but I just don't believe that - it's impossible that in a playlist with 300 songs I keep hearing the same 5 songs over and over and over again!
Surely being paid to use Spotify would represent even better value.
Google rebrands or changes entire apps at a whim. I’m shocked they haven’t ruined Google Apps (Workspace) with their changes.
What is this certainty based on? Google's history shows the exact opposite likelihood.
I think it's actually a bit nicer than FaceTime.
Even Hangouts which is abandonware is better promoted than Duo and takes a prominent place in the Gmail UI along with Meet.
You say this like Google doesn't have a history of product ADHD where they create new products and cancel them within months. On top of that, they create multiple products for the same functions which means that people get confused about what's appropriate for a situation and what's not. At one point, Google had 3 different video solutions all active at the same time and none of them worked with the others.
There's also WhatsApp video which is pretty poor quality, imo. Duo is much clearer and higher quality.
When Inbox came out I thought “huh this is great. I’d better not get used to it or I’ll be sad when it inevitably gets shut down in a few years”. And sure enough. I dread the family conversations in a few years of “wait where did the icon go?”
"In August 2020, it was reported that Google was planning to eventually replace Google Duo with Google Meet, but would continue to support Duo and "invest in building new features" in the long term"
https://9to5google.com/2020/08/14/sources-google-meet-replac...
As with all Apple products "it just works". I wonder if that may change when it goes to the web.
LINE which I use more often is far better quality than WA.
We switched to WhatsApp and video quality is noticeably more reliable. It does a better job when - for example - someone is outside and the WiFi isn't 100%.
A fun way to test is counting to 10 by having one person say 1 and the other say 2 as soon as they hear the 1 and so on. You'd be surprised how long it can take to count to 10 on some apps
No links to send (Zoom), no ever-changing products and menus (Google anything), and as few taps as possible/low friction to turn on (Whatsapp is comparable).
The audio and video quality is also pretty damn good.
The left hand side of the window in Mac always displays recently called. No idea how to access contacts in the Mac app.
The video quality is all right.
In the app itself AFAIK your only option is to type into the search box at the top of the missed calls list, and it will search contacts.
Otherwise you can load the contacts app and look there, and then click the facetime icon for the contact you want to connect with.
Works worse than WhatsApp and Google Meet. Way worse than Duo.
Functionality wise worse than Zoom but UI is maybe better than Zoom. But wait, FaceTime has essentially no UI.
Works a lot better than Signal. But Signal’s audio video and their UI around it sucks, so that’s nothing FaceTime ought to be proud of.
It’s just Apple doing Apple things and fans going bonkers over it.
> Non-Apple users can join a one-on-one FaceTime call or a Group FaceTime call, effectively making FaceTime a more platform-agnostic video service that is no longer just limited to iOS users. You do, however, need an iOS user to start a FaceTime call and send a link.
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/07/facetime-pc-android-use...
From the article.
I spend a lot of time on my PC for streams/gaming, and I put up with music.apple.com because I'm normally a happy subscriber using my iPhone.
But the website is just terrible.
- I get logged out if I don't visit for a day which requires a whole 2FA dance. Why not just leave me logged in?
- If I am still "logged in" after some hours, all songs become "previews" and I can't actually listen to anything. The fix is to log out and log back in, and it's a dice roll whether I'll get to do the 2FA dance again
- Songs routinely just don't play when I click them. Only fix seems to be leaving the album that I'm looking at and then returning to the same page
- Navigating away from albums occasionally makes Chrome pop up a "you have unsaved changes" warning. Why?
Perhaps noticing that everyone was using Zoom during the pandemic?
Remember originally Steve Jobs promised that FaceTime would be an "open standard." For some reason Apple backed off on that.
it was literally an email that surface on the Epic store litigation, where one Apple exec says (quote from memory) "We can't have facetime for android because that will remove the barrier for families to buy Android phones for their kids"
So it will be crappy and have TONS of limitations (wouldn't be surprised it it only work with one apple device hosting) because it is only for legal excuse reasons.
I might be missing something... Is there something in this that is illegal?
besides being immoral and a literal F-U to your consumers, it can bring anti trust cases when you are as big as Apple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in
But other than that, well, just go celebrate your $2 gain on your APPL stocks despite the fact you were prohibited to call 50% of your friends just so someone couldn't save a few bucks when buying a phone for their teenage kid. Go you!
They have no moral obligation at all to extend their own first party services to Android, that's an absurd idea.
Of course they prefer people to buy iPhones for their kids, there is nothing wrong with that, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with not actively working to make the experience of mixed Android-iPhone families slightly better.
There are literally dozens of cross platform messaging and video calling apps. Banning these would have been wrong, and possibly illegal, but they are not doing that.
This is such a great rubric!
Anticompetitive behavior is illegal for companies with a monopoly, and based on the leaked emails, it seems Apple's intentions were clear. The "monopoly" bit is still up in the air, but it's becoming increasingly clear the "anticompetitive behavior" bit is not.
This FaceTime news shows that Apple's lawyers are probably worried.
They also don't have any kind of monopoly on TV or music streaming, so there would be nothing wrong (and certainly nothing illegal) with keeping Apple Music and Apple TV exclusive to their platforms, so clearly they believe they will make more money by making them cross platform. Presumably it's the same with Facetime.
I think it's funny because Apple left a decade-long opening for Google to build equally good Android alternatives to iMessage and FaceTime and dominate in cross-platform communication. Instead, twelve chat platforms later, I'm not entirely sure if Google has finally released something that won't be superseded next year.
Before you say, "just don't use it", here are some examples. My kids parents/school group uses WhatsApp, same as my kids sports club to organize matches/training. I'm a volunteer for a local association -- WhatsApp group. I really have little choice in using it.
I don't get the impression that Android users are angry at all. It's me as an iPhone user who is pissed about never being able to use any of these supposedly fantastic services.
I have never used FaceTime and probably never will if it is true that Android/Linux/Windows users cannot initiate FaceTime calls on this new FaceTime web app.
> because Apple left a decade-long opening for Google to build equally good Android alternatives to iMessage
is simply not true. No one but Apple can integrate SMS and messaging on iOS as Apple can; others do not have entitlements for that. You could do it on Android (and Google did for a brief period with Hangouts, and so did Signal), but you can't do it on iOS.
i think it is a closed solution that sucks just like all the others.
i think every single one of those lock-in-for-profit platform only attract idiots (in the original greek work meaning of the word) and makes true open solutions that will ultimately help everyone slower to show up. Because eventually they will.
Why? As an iPhone user, I am the one who paid for the development of FaceTime, but I can't use it because communications tools require network effects that FaceTime doesn't have. I can't even use it with my wife.
I'm not saying it's somehow illegitimate or even illegal for Apple to do this, but what it tells me is that Apple cares more about hurting competitors than about providing a useful service to its own paying customers.
But it's still a shitty thing to do. I have a tremendous amount of respect for companies that do things that are contrary to business objectives because they're the right thing to do. In this case, Apple chose to do the shitty thing.
You can't easily record a call (unless I am unaware) it's hard to take screenshots, and you can't take a shot of just the other party, it always will have your personal view in a corner.
The call logs suck.
And obviously the walked garden.
I'm typing this on android, but I also have an iPhone on me that's wifi only such that I can facetime and imessages.
However imessage is broken as well: I can text people but some people can't text me back.
I also have a google voice account and somehow these three platforms have confused the system, as messages constantly get lost ,,,
I also wonder if someone could build a Matrix bridge if it is available via web, that would be fairly cool.
Some questions:
- Is it phone-number based IDs? Or can I pick a username or get a random ID?
- Is spam going to be a problem? Previous Apple had the advantage that you had to buy a multi-hundred dollar advice to call someone. Will they need to implement new spam measures (or will you simply have to add a contact first)?