Since this is a technical community, and you're a technical person who presumably knows how iMessage / Apple's infrastructure works, can you explain if this is correct:
- I'm an iPhone user with phone number N. In Apple's system, I'm flagged as supporting the iMessage protocol. Presumably Apple has some gateway that routes messages, and this sends me down the iMessage route.
- I swap phones. I now own an Android device. I have the same phone number N.
- Apple's system is slow to update, and its gateway still sees me as an iPhone user supporting the iMessage protocol.
- All messages from other iPhone users to my phone number are routed incorrectly and I don't receive them until Apple updates its gateway to use SMS for my phone number.
If the above is correct, what would you call that? People who want to contact me have no idea what a protocol is, but Apple has impacted their ability to communicate with me. They think all text messages are the same, but this layer Apple has built isn't open or interoperable, and is additional friction for anyone wanting to switch off their platform.
It's very hard to excuse this behavior.
On the contrary, Messages is routing messages to Messages IDs, and it's kinda on you whether you use an ID string that looks suspiciously similar to your number.
This is incredibly easy to turn on and off:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201349
To be clear, you can have an iphone with an SMS phone number and Messages, and not ever mingle the two. Further, you can have a SMS phone get your SMS messages, while Apple users with your number reach, say, your iPad. That's a valid use case.
In the situation you lay out above, where you forgot you didn't want to use that as your Messages ID any more, you can "de-register" if you forgot to remove it:
If only if it worked as advertised. I can turn it off as to messages directed only to me. But if a group text was on iMessage and I'm the only one who bounces off to Android, new messages to that thread will exclude me, EVEN IF I'VE DEREGISTERED MY NUMBER. I've tried this repeatedly. The only way to begin receiving messages from that group is if EVERYONE on the thread deletes the old thread and begins a new one in green bubbles. It ENRAGES me, and it's been the biggest barrier to me transitioning to a Galaxy phone. When I'm the only one on Android, I just stop receiving the messages to the legacy group threads. And there's no way I make 30 iPhone users all delete those threads. Apple could ask its own servers "have any of these iMessage accounts deregistered their number? If yes, force thread back to SMS/MMS." Apple does not do that, and thereby severely handicaps any effort to move away. I hate it and would happily support a class action to change that practice.
It’s not intuitive of course, but you can totally turn it off and deregister, even if you don’t have your iPhone anymore.
iMessage falls back to SMS within a few minutes if the message can’t be delivered. This often happens if the recipient doesn’t have a data connection.
When I've switched back and forth from Android on a few occasions I've had to have users update that contact card for SMS to work properly. I don't think its necessarily an iMessage issue more iOS, but if anyone is still having issues with the switch after de-registering, check that.
However, they do have UI on all of their iMessage programs, and on the website that you can get to from any web browser (on any brand of device) for your AppleID/iCloud account that can remove your phone number from your AppleID at any time. Then, after some minor propagation time, messages from Apple users to your phone number will no longer be routed to your iMessages account, and will instead be sent as SMSs.
So you have an option to tell Apple at any moment, even after you have switched, that you no longer want that number attached to iMessages. How exactly is that hijacking?
iMessage isn't hijacking anything, as it's _not involved with SMS_. It's an entirely separate system from SMS. If you can't use iMessage, then the client uses plain old, non hijacked, non augmented SMS.
The word "hijacking" is being used because it's an aggressive sounding term that makes Apple sound like a bad guy. It's propaganda.
To me this would be similar to me operating as a browser vendor and having my own CDN that implements a separate protocol from HTTP, provides additional features beyond what HTTP can do, and displays a different color of banner to indicate that the website you are using is coming over my CDN. Then I don't allow arbitrarily anyone to implement my CDN protocol or connect to my CDN, so other browser vendors can't provide a competitive experience. Later when I have built a large marketshare, I decide that I'm good with HTTP 1.1 or whatever version of HTTP at the time and stop upgrading my implementation of that protocol. This is damaging to the other browser vendors and of users of websites that only support HTTP. Obviously this is an imperfect analogy given the client-server nature of HTTP, but I figured this might resonate with this audience.
I don’t know what to make of your analogy, it’s one of those “if facts were different then thing would be different” sorts of things, so just go ahead and read your first sentence.
A literal reading reads as Apple hijacking software they wrote and own the source code to… to support an additional protocol. It’s now been just over 10 years since iMessages was released into the wild as a feature of the Messages app and society has pretty well gotten used to it. Would you be happier if they were two apps, one called Messages and with an inferior communications channel and the other with blue bubbles called iMessages supporting all the iMessage features of today? Android had that feature 10 years ago or more. It sucked before you could change the default SMS messenger to Hangouts or something else, and once you did, Hangouts experientially worked the same as Messages does post-iMessages.
You could say that things have changed as users have become more aware of the difference over the years, but honestly, if your initial expectation was the default message application on my phone does what I have known as texting (which is/was SMS/MMS) which is a part of my phone plan that I pay my provider for and then you start doing something wholly different with that communication, I would consider that some sort of hijacking. You have seized my action and intention and redirected it to serve your own purpose.
Optimally? Switch over to an RCS implementation. If existing rollouts of RCS don't support enough of a feature set to please you (looking at E2EE), push to get that done. Don't go the Google route and end up choosing "collaborating is hard, so let's just not do it".
If Apple won't do that, drop SMS from iMessages and open the protocol or at least force users to choose or acknowledge the choice. Auto-negotiating a protocol choice makes sense when you are going from one open standards-based protocol that any vendor could and should implement to a newer version of that protocol with the same expectation of general availability (think the path through the versions of SSL and TLS). It's disingenuous to automatically shift traffic and offer enhanced features through a proprietary protocol when communicating with clients that only implement and can only implement the open protocol. It makes it seem like the other clients are intentionally inferior or otherwise making user-hostile choices. It's good for business though.
With respect to Android, that's its own slew of problems and mistakes that shouldn't be the bar Apple needs to clear. iMessage and Facetime are easily better than any communications implementation Google has produced in the last 10 years. Hangouts and its various precursors were better when they were based on XMPP or had functioning XMPP gateways. XMPP wasn't an standard intended to replace or progress SMS, so that doesn't really meet my criteria either. RCS is the way forward, but there's little demand for it or business reason for it in the Apple camp. Maybe if carriers declared that they are going to start taking RCS seriously and start removing SMS from plans and charging more for it.
It’s a common pattern for people to state that if X was different in some way, then there would have been a different story to tell. Something else would have changed if only X was different, so yeah; if facts were different, then thing would be different. If that car were red instead of blue, it would be a red car, which is true, but useless, because it’s not a red car, it’s a blue car.
You opted for an analogy that involved HTTP versions, including a hypothetical one, and a hypothetical CDN. The 30ish year history of web browsers is already littered with examples of browsers that did everything you were describing and some things that you didn’t. IE6 was famous for its stagnation because Microsoft dissolved the IE team to try and accomplish what you said, and you know what happened? The market reacted, forcing Microsoft to put the band back together, who then spent years trying to play catch up before eventually abandoning both IE and then it’s replacement in order to build a Chromium shim. Now I have government websites complaining that my browser isn’t Chrome rather than my browser isn’t IE. Y’know, the more things change, the more they stay the same and all that, but at least the banks don’t demand I have a browser with ActiveX controls so there’s been some progress.
So to bring this conversation back on track:
> You could say that things have changed as users have become more aware of the difference over the years, but honestly, if your initial expectation was the default message application on my phone does what I have known as texting (which is/was SMS/MMS) which is a part of my phone plan that I pay my provider for and then you start doing something wholly different with that communication, I would consider that some sort of hijacking.
So keeping in mind what I said about this being one of those “if facts were different thing would be different” things, who is complaining that Apple is offering them an improved messaging experience?
1. iPhones already offer the means to disable iMessage. At any point, you can disassociate your phone number or email address with the iMessage service.
2. It is part of the on-boarding process to opt into associating your phone number with iMessage, and if you don’t, then you will be sending and receiving SMS/MMS messages through the Messages app.
3. Despite having to opt-in to iMessages, and despite having the ability to disable iMessages at any time, iMessages is a popular service, at least in the US, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s better than SMS, it’s better than MMS, and when the other person also has iMessage enabled, you don’t have to worry about character limits (which are really byte limits, try sending an SMS with anything except ASCII characters), and you can send that 4K video or the last 20 pictures you took or whatever because it is a quality of life improvement that doesn’t require you to seek out an alternative.
You can still seek out alternatives. Literally billions of people use message protocols that are not iMessage, even on iMessage-capable platforms, so your conjecture that Apple hijacked SMS is an academic point at best, but honestly it’s just a dead end. Apple could not remove SMS/MMS even for just pragmatic reasons, and probably contractual and legal ones too. Neither of those are solid reasons to not develop a new message protocol as a feature for their phones because they are in the business of selling more of their phones.
So they evaluated their options, made a business decision, and accepted the trade offs by delivering a QoL improvement to their paying customers without disabling their ability to send text messages to other phone numbers that did not have iMessage installed, and created a visual distinction between the two types of message formats so people could come to recognize using basic human pattern matching when and how they can take advantage of the improved message format.
> Optimally? Switch over to an RCS implementation. If existing rollouts of RCS don't support enough of a feature set to please you (looking at E2EE), push to get that done.
Sure, they could, and there’s a case to be made that maybe they should look at implementing RCS, but why would that be at the expense of iMessage? Apple’s customers like iMessage. RCS looks like it could be a solid replacement for SMS and MMS eventually, but I think it’s really just going to live on phones alongside SMS and MMS for the foreseeable future, so this would be an additional protocol to support rather than a drop-in replacement for anything.
But there doesn’t seem to be a slam dunk case for RCS and the reason for that is that Google seems to be the only one that has a good implementation. If the carriers were clamoring for RCS, and I’ve seen no indication this is a priority for them, that would be a stronger case to support RCS. If Apple’s customers were clamoring for RCS, that would be a stronger case to support RCS.
But cross-platform rich communication with push notifications is already a solved problem, it’s just not solved by iMessage.
I still wish Apple would have pushed to develop an open standard as the path to improved user experience and messaging rather than making the progressive enhancement path go from an open network to a proprietary one. On the other hand, walled gardens have always been a productive pursuit for them, so why change?
The protocol support in iChat went from OSCAR (AIM & ICQ, .Mac) to SIP to Bonjour to XMPP (functionally Google Talk for most people, although I did experiment with Gizmo Project and the Facebook Messenger XMPP bridge) to Yahoo Messenger. Messages wasn’t their first multi-protocol chat client, but it does work fundamentally differently as I think you well know.
SMS and MMS might have been open at the time, and I appreciated the capability of point to point messaging someone that didn’t have to be signed in and in front of their computer to read it, but absolutely sucked compared to the plethora of proprietary push notification messengers that existed or were coming into existence circa 2011. They still suck, and that’s the best argument for additionally supporting RCS (and while I’m still trying to form an intelligent opinion around RCS specifically, it looks like a mixed bag at best but maybe still also a QoL improvement from where I sit now).
I agree with you that there should be a decent interoperable standard between iPhones and Androids, even if that’s functionally just between iPhones and Google’s Android, and maybe that will be RCS. I mean we have no evidence that Apple is not working on adding RCS to the list of protocols Messages supports, but as someone who has migrated across too many messaging clients and servers that all pretty much serve the same purpose, I also don’t want it to come at the expense of something I have already that works and works reliably just to chase the open standards dream. There’s too many cross platform options today for me to be invested in having one more.
Because all of the reports over the many years show that users know that a blue bubble indicates that this message is only going to be readable by other iPhones. And that a green bubble indicates it has fallen back to SMS and will incur a cost.
This whole blue message bullying narrative is because users very much are knowledgable into what is happening at a technical level.
Ask a few kids and then come back.
I think there's a lot of truth to the word "hijacking" here.
At least as recently as last year, I've discovered instances where iPhone users will not have received a message/image (both from me and others in group chat) seemingly randomly.
I really don't like that Apple has managed to sell a prevailing narrative that it's somehow the fault of users who don't buy their expensive hardware that is necessary to use their software that impinges on an open protocol.
I don't think it's so irritating. When you set up your phone you are prompted to allow iMessage to use the number. If you allow it you'll have to remove it again after you decide to not use it again. Just like you have to cancel a subscription if you don't want to use it any more.
I think that's why GGP's comment ("Apple's approach is they have essentially hijacked the SMS protocol") is justified. If you want to use any iMessage functionality, you surrender your ability to send SMS to iOS users.
It surely doesn't warrant a per-message-toggle and a global setting seems reasonable in my opinion.
At the time I send a message to an iOS user (who has iMessage enabled), there's no way (AFAICT) for me to choose whether that message is sent via SMS or via iMessage.
(Perhaps if I turn off my data connections, iOS will eventually send the message via SMS?)
My wife and I use Signal to message each other and we have Signal as sms handler on our android phones. For some reason, she had to use a dumb phone with no Signal app for a couple of weeks. After a few days, she was suspicious that she is not getting some sms'es. I wanted to test if this was true, but I couldn't. Any message I sent to her number through Signal would be sent as a Signal message which wouldn't be delivered and I couldn't figure out how to send as sms. I had to change my sms app to another app, and then send using that app. Now, the new sms app couldn't read all older sms because Signal removes all sms from android sms database into Signal. So, now I use separate apps for Signal and sms.
On Android you can set Signal as your SMS handler and use it as a similar dual client. I miss that feature when using iOS.
This is supposed to be a technical community so can we stop with this lazy abuse of terminology.
Apple has not hijacked the SMS protocol in any way, shape or form.
They've simply created an app that supports two protocols: SMS and iMessage with a UI that abstracts the difference.