Also WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Telegram, LINE, and a handful of others with more than a half-billion users. Are those heptopolists or septopolists?

The word "monopolist" in 2023 seems to mean "a company whose corporate values are different than my personal ones and/or whose pricing and packaging don't match my consumption function and/or who has a lot of money and of whom I am jealous".

I think you might be mistaking what monopoly/duopoly is being mentioned here. Those companies aren't phone manufacturers and they don't make phone texting apps. The distinction might not matter to you, but it's clearly the meaning of the GP.

You can say iMessage isn't a texting app because iMessage functionally (as in, the technical details) works like a non-texting app, but it is the only texting app on those phones and is the way normal texting is done. Perhaps it would be different if iMessage was just installable from the app store.

You are aware that iPhones have many alternative messaging apps right? The second part of your comment is simply not true.

Texting is a feature of a phone. You cannot, without elaborate workarounds, text from a consumer computer, tablet or other device as if it was a phone. Texting requires a phone number and a phone plan.

I understand that the distinction might seem slight, but in the eyes of most US consumers, texting is distinct from a chat app that you download from an app store even if it uses your phone number.

The absolute one way that everyone with a phone has to send a textual message to another person is to text them with their phone number.

In the US, where adoption of Signal, Whatsapp, Discord, or insert hundreds of other apps is very small, the percentage of your real world contacts using a particular app is also extremely small. Convincing all of them to use Signal would certainly be great, but in reality you will be using all of those apps if you are trying to escape the interoperability nightmare that is currently texting.

Given that everyone has a phone and they are all texting already, it would be awfully nice if we could just use texting without these interoperability problems without having to manage all of the apps, and without having to remember who prefers which one.

Group texting is also hugely popular in the US. If no single third party messaging app covers the set of friends you want to group text, what do you do? You text them. Because everyone has it. Let's say when you started your group everyone was on Whatsapp. Phenomenal! Start the group on Whatsapp. Then you meet Joe, and Joe is very cool and you definitely want him in the group chat. Joe doesn't trust Meta products and doesn't want to use Whatsapp. Should Joe capitulate, install another chat app used only for a single group chat, and grant access to their device to a Meta app? Should a negotiation occur amongst the rest of the group where they select a new common app to run the group on and split the conversation history, while also adding an app that they only use for that group chat?

Let's say they choose to switch to Signal, but Josh keeps forgetting (dammit Josh) and keeps messaging the group on Whatsapp. And instead of yell at Josh that the group is on Signal now, folks reply! Because Josh's joke was super funny. Conversation also continues on Signal. Someone on Signal now does a reference to Josh's joke on Whatsapp. Joe is confused, but everyone else gets the joke. Someone realizes what happens and sends a screenshot of the joke and ensuing replies from within Whatsapp so Joe can catch up, but the messages around the joke are longer than one phone screen so there's a lot more context that he misses. Joe is annoyed but he gets over it.

A few months pass and Sandra seems to have a bug where Signal is chewing through her battery life. Since only one of her group conversations is on Signal (she uses Whatsapp mostly) and she is fine not getting the work related banter that is often the topic of the group chat. But then she finds an article that's super interesting and she wants to share it with the group. She remembers that the group moved to Signal, but who cares, that Whatsapp group still exists and there's only, like, one person that isn't in it. She sends the link in the WhatsApp group instead. This leads organically to the group wanting to get together for a holiday. They plan out that July 12th would be a perfect weekend, and since they want to do a potluck, they all choose what part of the meal they'll bring.

A few days before the potluck, someone mentions on the Signal chat that they are excited to see everyone at the potluck. Joe is very confused and asks what they mean. They realize that this was in the WhatsApp group chat and explain what everyone is bringing. Unfortunately Joe is working that weekend, and can't come.

Should the group chat reschedule?

Just to explain - some people may think different because they have different experience.

Personally, I don't use default texting, like, at all. Except for those notification/2FA SMSes and couple of contacts, I don't ever open it. For me, mentally, chatting with people (with 2 exceptions) is done through different apps, not the built-in one. And this forms a view that default app is just "one rarely used messenger, of many".

But then, even though I'm in the US, most of my chats are international.

> You cannot, without elaborate workarounds, text from a consumer computer, tablet or other device as if it was a phone. Texting requires a phone number and a phone plan.

Nitpick, but I can text from my Mac laptop using the messages app. I haven't looked into exactly how exactly it works but I think it's somehow proxying/mirroring the messages through my iPhone. It's very smooth and "just works" though.

> interoperability nightmare that is currently texting.

How about calling it an open competitive market? Centralizing everything on a single format would be a bad thing for the industry and for consumers. Having separate independent networks with drastically different feature sets is a good thing. Trying to find the intersection feature set of Discord, LINE and Signal would result in three applications drastically hampered in their features. LINE for example has an extensive independent industry of artists selling "stamps" that you can buy.

> Nitpick, but I can text from my Mac laptop using the messages app. I haven't looked into exactly how exactly it works but I think it's somehow proxying/mirroring the messages through my iPhone. It's very smooth and "just works" though.

Yes, SMS from iMessage on your non-iPhone (Mac, iPad) proxy through your iPhone. iMessages do not require your phone to be on, since Apple can deliver it directly without using SMS.

However, without a phone you cannot send an SMS message, and most people use phone numbers as contacts in iMessage, which requires an SMS based registration done transparently by your phone.

But all of this is just the technicals of how it works, to the end users it is just texting. The only reason non-technical users are even aware of, or care about, the distinction is because of how iMessage breaks group texting as soon as there's a non-iMessage user involved.

> > You cannot, without elaborate workarounds, text from a consumer computer, tablet or other device as if it was a phone. Texting requires a phone number and a phone plan.

> Nitpick, but I can text from my Mac laptop using the messages app. I haven't looked into exactly how exactly it works but I think it's somehow proxying/mirroring the messages through my iPhone. It's very smooth and "just works" though.

Correct. I think the GP’s remark meant to say “…as if it was a phone, without a phone as well”.

If you’re sending or receiving an SMS from your Mac through the messages app, it absolutely depends on your phone being powered up and online, to route the message through.

> in the eyes of most US consumers, texting is distinct from a chat app that you download from an app store even if it uses your phone number. (...) In the US, where adoption of Signal, Whatsapp, Discord, or insert hundreds of other apps is very small

But do we know why that is? In Europe everyone's on WhatsApp, and while I'm not especially fan of it, the one feature that I like is that it can be used from any browser on any device, including desktops, including a work laptop where one doesn't have admin rights to install anything, etc.

I can leave my phone away in my pocket all day and still message anyone I please. I would hate it any other way. Why don't people in the US want that?

> In Europe everyone's on WhatsApp

Or FB messenger, or actually mainly use SMS/iMessage. Europe is not as homogeneous as some people here might be implying. WhatsApp is not even the most popular messaging app in quite a few countries (Messenger is).

Also in Scandinavia, Britain and Switzerland iOS is about as popular as in the US while in some other countries it’s closer to 10%.

I'm in France with friends in the UK and Germany, and have never been asked to join a group on anything else other than WhatsApp. Not once.

(Well, at some point a year or two ago there was some controversy around WhatsApp, and some groups tried to migrate to Signal, but that all died out within a month -- never quite started, actually).

Believe it or not, I had almost never heard about iMessage and its specific quirks before the Beeper story (and still don't understand why the colors of the messages in green or blue matter).

Well.. I’m further north east and my experience is somewhat different. My only point was that Europe is not as homogenous as some people keep implying (most people still primarily communicate in their native language which creates a lot of more or less isolated bubbles)

> and still don't understand why the colors of the messages in green or blue matter

Because it indicates a fallback to standard SMS/text messaging which means all the more advanced features (which everyone expect messaging apps to have these days) stop working if you get a text from an Android device.

Thanks for this- perhaps it's all too easy for both sides of the pond to look across and generalize that the other's problems aren't happening in their backyard. Because what you describe sounds quite complicated. Wouldn't everyone just prefer a secure, modern texting app that could message literally anyone with a phone number? Without having them download a specific app? Then we could all text together without the headaches.

> Wouldn't everyone just prefer..

Sure, but I don’t think personal preferences matter that much in this case, most people just end up using what everyone else is whether they like it or not, which makes perfect sense.

But yeah, I think in most of Europe (not all, they were free/almost free since the late 2000s where I am) this started because SMS messages very relatively very expensive back when smartphones were becoming widespread.

Now WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, Viber and whatever else there is are quite entrenched so even if Apple and Google get serious about properly supporting RCS it might get tricky to get users to switch back to the default client

Popular non open-source 3rd party messaging apps don’t really have much interest in supporting interoperability due to obvious reasons.

> ..modern texting app that could message literally anyone with a phone number? Without having them download a specific app?

Well on this thread it seems that WhatsApp might be exactly that from the perspective of some people (to the extent that they don’t even believe that anyone in Europe could be using anything else)

All this is fair and your accounting of the reasons for the situation around Europe match my research so far.

I do want to say I've seen some others in this HN story contradict that Europe is as homogenous as your representing here though.

Still though, I looked at Germany's Whatsapp numbers and it's like 68% of the population, ignoring the fact that 1 account is not necessarily 1 person.

That's super dominant compared to the US which is somewhere around 22% with the same account assumption.

> That's super dominant

True. But it’s hard to say to what extent. Many/most people probably have multiple apps installed and use them somewhat regularly in addition to texting/iMessages.

I like the separation that different messaging platforms offer.

> Wouldn't everyone just prefer a secure, modern texting app that could message literally anyone with a phone number? Without having them download a specific app? Then we could all text together without the headaches.

https://m.xkcd.com/927/

I’m not sure what messaging standard you propose gets adopted, because the flavour du jour of most non-iMessage users is RCS, which as an open standard, is unencrypted and insecure.

> I can leave my phone away in my pocket all day and still message anyone I please. I would hate it any other way. Why don't people in the US want that?

I have that already via Google Messages, and iMessage already has that as well.

In the case of Google Messages, it's just a web app, you don't need to install it. You visit messages.google.com and scan a QR code from your phone and the devices are linked.

So adding another protocol into the mix solves, what? Answer: nothing, it solves nothing.

Bob has a hardon for mastadon so then another subgroup is created. Joan finds out that her Google Fi service is incompatible with RCS so she decides to create an email list. Joe finds a bug with Beeper and then decides that really everyone needs to move to ICQ. Marley decides maybe everyone should just try MMS again except that nobody can fall back on that because everyone except Joan has opted into RCS.

Apple's not going to solve your social problems (nor will any other company).

> So adding another protocol into the mix solves, what? Answer: nothing, it solves nothing.

Another protocol like RCS? RCS simply solves the problems of SMS/MMS. It doesn't add another protocol, it ultimately replaces two of them.

> Bob has a hardon for mastadon so then another subgroup is created.

Good for Bob. I don't think Mastodon supports group chatting and its DM support is super nascent, its weird choice but I wish him the best.

> Joan finds out that her Google Fi service is incompatible with RCS

Even though Google Fi is definitely compatible with RCS, we can assume it isn't supported for the scenario.

> so she decides to create an email list.

Joan doesn't know what RCS is and doesn't care. Joan makes a group of people on Messages. It works fine, as it falls back to MMS automatically.

> Joe finds a bug with Beeper and then decides that really everyone needs to move to ICQ.

Wait why is anyone using Beeper here. So the user used a unifying client and ran into a bug and blamed something about the underlying messaging system?

> Marley decides maybe everyone should just try MMS again except that nobody can fall back on that because everyone except Joan has opted into RCS.

Everyone on RCS can fall back to MMS just fine, just like iMessage can. The only difference is one of these is a standard that Apple can implement and the other is a proprietary protocol that Google cannot.

If this is true:

  It doesn't add another protocol, it ultimately replaces two of them.

How does this work (assuming your carrier supports MMS, and not all do):

  Everyone on RCS can fall back to MMS just fine

As for this:

  Even though Google Fi is definitely compatible with RCS

https://old.reddit.com/r/GoogleFi/comments/l1czwh/google_fi_...

More recently it looks like Google added some half assed support for RCS and broke other stuff in the process:

https://old.reddit.com/r/GoogleFi/comments/12b8k2p/reminder_...

> Everyone on RCS can fall back to MMS just fine

My cell carrier provides SMS for free, both sending and receiving. My cell carrier charges for MMS, both sending and receiving, so I have MMS disabled. My cell carrier doesn’t support RCS, and would probably charge if it did.

Thankfully, nobody I know tries to send me pictures using SMS/MMS/RCS, and uses WhatsApp / Signal / iMessage instead.

> Another protocol like RCS? RCS simply solves the problems of SMS/MMS. It doesn't add another protocol, it ultimately replaces two of them.

Experience tells me this is false, and that nothing ever dies, nothing ever gets replaced, and augmentation always happens, in IT.

Yet you cannot set a new default messaging app...

"Default messaging app" is a creation of Android, necessitated because every cell phone manufacturer wanted its own messaging app. It somehow later became a feature people needed because those pre-installed apps were often dreadful adware junk. This was never a problem on iPhones. No one wants to set a "default messaging app". It mixes up where messages go. I want my Signal messages in the Signal app. I want my LINE messages in the LINE app. Putting them in random different places doesn't make sense and confuses where they're coming from. I don't want my contacts showing up half a dozen times repeatedly for every messaging app they're using.

I don't see anyone on Android wanting to put their SMS messages in the Discord app.

On Android there is no such thing as a default messaging app. There is such a thing as a default SMS app, but my point is that messaging and texting represent two different things (texting is a subset of messaging) which has an extremely material impact on the dynamics of what is happening in the US, and why iMessage, RCS, and interoperability is a very big deal to users who use a texting app.

Weird take. Default apps for certain file types and links (email, video, etc) are a precedent across multiple operatings systems.

> No one wants

Quite the assumption. I had Google Hangouts set as my default SMS app for a time.. this seems quite similar to your Discord example?

It hurts nobody to have the _choice_. If you don't want to change the default that's totally OK.

Do you mean a default "carrier SMS service" app?

In everyday iPhone usage, you would either run an app directly, use sharing intents, or use a messaging service specific identifier (eg custom URI scheme) to converse with someone. The social graph is either in the messaging app itself or in individual contact entries. There's no expectation of a Trillian/Adium style app that consolidates all information and messaging options.

The confusion is that there is only one texting app on iPhone. Chat apps are done "over the top" and can be whatever you want. You or I can make one. There is only one texting app on iOS and most users in the US only use their phone's texting app. This is why Apple's iMessage is genius, insidious, and diabolical- because they took SMS which had universal adoption in the US and had it invisibly and transparently extended into a component of their walled garden. They didn't need to convince everyone to move from SMS to their own messaging app, because if you used SMS on an iPhone, iMessage just happened.

The point is, if someone has an iPhone and I have an iPhone, I simply cannot send them a text. For anyone who has moved from iPhone can attest to, it is quite effing annoying, especially if your workplace gives you a Mac that you are logged into.

There’s no choice not to use iMessage or their iMessage app to send a text, except if the other person is registered to iMessage, it will use that instead.

It’s really annoying. They either need to disable iMessage or open it up as a separate app you get from the App Store.

In my experience, incoming SMS are mostly spam, and other low trust notifications, while incoming iMessages, even if unknown to me, are likely to be real people. Buying an Apple device is an expensive signal, and Apple will quickly shut down abusers, maintaining that relatively high bar.

Letting (actual) Android users use iMessage probably wouldn’t affect that, but the open source hack/reversing of it opened the door to iMessage spam that Apple, for the sake of reputation, and customer satisfaction, is obliged to close.

Anyway, I guess my point is that there are some “burdens” that are less obvious than others.

Huh, I used to receive spam on iMessage with blue bubbles. In fact the only blue bubbles I receive are spam.

If you're going to lie about this, it would help to actually be familiar with the application you're lying about. For starters, received messages in iMessage are always gray, regardless of the recipient. It's the outgoing messages that are blue or not blue.

I’m not lying. Also not sure why I’m downvoted. I occasionally receive spam messages from iMessage users, not conventional SMS. I do not know how these spammers manage to send them, but the senders are always identified with an email in the app, that’s how I could tell it apart from conventional SMS.

I guess (based on the skeptical reactions) your experience is atypical now-a-days, but based on your comment, I did find a 2014 wired article saying that while previously unheard of, iMessage now [then] accounted for 30% of spam, from email addresses like you described. I had no idea. Somehow I avoided that. I didn’t find anything more recent, though, so maybe it’s less of a problem now?

https://www.wired.com/2014/08/apples-imessage-is-being-taken...

I do know first hand that Apple will turn off (starting at several days) an Apple user’s ability to use iMessage if they get even several reports, though.

The GP is using a euphemism popular in the US. Indeed, the sent messages are colored not the received ones, but the euphemism labels the cause of the color, not the person receiving the text. If you are not from the US I'm sure this is weird.

Wait, what? Android user here so I might just be confused, but my impression always was that it's the received messages that are different, hence the whole blue/green bubble debacle, and Android users being bullied for having green bubble texts.

See my sibling comment for an explanation.

Received messages are always grey. It's sent messgaes that change colors. So a message from an Android, iPhone, windows phone, feature phone, etc. will always appear with a grey bubble. A sent imessage message to an iPhone user will be blue. A sent SMS text message to a iphone, android phone, feature phone, etc. will be in a green bubble.

Why lie?

This isn't a useful comment, you're just assuming your experience is valid and others who disagree aren't, and using it to sling accusations of dishonesty.

If spam is really the problem Apple is worried about, then isn't it conceivable that it happens and that Apple has to work to keep spam low so you have a good experience? Such work is ongoing and sometimes spam gets through anyway. I don't think we should assume Apple's protections on occasional spam are perfect.

Who is talking about SMS? Not I.

I mention SMS as a natural contrast to iMessage and to illustrate the annoyances which may burden iMessage if opened up blindly to any bot — a different variety of burdensome.

Apple's statement: "At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading privacy and security technologies designed to give users control of their data and keep personal information safe. We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage. These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users."

Yearly reminder that a long time ago, chat services used XMPP and we were on the verge of having GChat interoperability with FB messages and I think Yahoo or something similar at the time. None of them really wanted to do it for business reasons, so they could “add value” (and charge for it)….same reason RSS has fallen out of favor (no good way to inject ads and tracking). IRC and Matrix still exist.

On the Google side the XMPP federation got killed when Google Hangouts and Google+ became the core strategy. The company wanted to focus on "social" (but their own social network) and didn't care about other chat. Back then I worked on the App Engine team which had a XMPP Chat API. When GChat killed XMPP Federation that API lost the majority of target users as a result. I tried to make the case for maintaining XMPP support - taking it up with some VP of Engineering. Alas, nobody cared about the opinion of this random guy in developer support (~2012, early days of Google Cloud)

You forget that Google was worried about other XMPP services stealing user data. If I remember right, some services (maybe it was FB) was not sending out all data to Google in the federation system (I forget if it was names or friends lists or something). So it would allow other services to ingest data Google was sharing, but the sharing wasn't reciprocal.

Can we make XMPP popular again? We really could need an universal internet standard for IM.

There is hope. The European Union's Digital Markets Act allows new messaging platforms to demand interoperability with the existing walled gardens. All it takes is for other jurisdictions to follow suit.

You can't use regulations to change physics, and (demands or no) it is unclear what sort of interoperability is really possible.

What will really happen is that there will be some subpar common denominator. An existing "walled garden" (WeChat?) would add support for this as well.

But this would wind up being rather insecure, because messaging services tend to use email addresses they don't control or phone numbers they don't control as identifiers. We'd have to wait for carriers and email providers to be regulated with the burden of solving this mess (for markets they aren't in).

Yeah and how did that work out for google? Hangouts was their most popular product and most of my friends were using it. Incredibly stupid management decisions right there.

The EU will soon require interoperability between messaging apps! Real Freedom!

(for the users, not for the companies)

iMessage seemingly was found exempt because too few Europeans use iMessage for business.

Although to be fair, I have a hard time imagining a world where this ever happens. So large companies have to proactively share information on all their users with all the other large companies, and vice versa? Or do I become skygazer@iMessage and everyone on instagram has to know that? This just seems like an absurd thing to mandate.