Completely agreed about the nonsensical first claim. We have many third-party clients for other messaging platforms where privacy and security are a primary feature. It's completely tenable, especially for a player like Apple.

Or put another way: If the privacy and security of imessage is compromised by someone building another client, I'd argue that you never had either to begin with.

> Completely agreed about the nonsensical first claim. We have many third-party clients for other messaging platforms where privacy and security are a primary feature.

I can't think of an any with independent implementations.

For instance, have a few third party Signal clients, which work by using the official libSignal . These are not third party clients, but third party GUIs. Use of libSignal on the official Signal network is also not supported or recommended.

Likewise, all the third-party Telegram clients I know of are forks using Telegram source.

This makes sense, because neither of these are stable systems. A third party has to stay up-to-date with features and changes made to the official servers and clients.

Do you know of a security and privacy focused messaging platform which is both:

1. documented

2. has multiple independent implementations of the networking and security protocols?

Does Matrix not qualify?

I suppose it is determined by where you set the bar, even more so with privacy which still varies person-to-person and can sometimes take a qualitative feel.

Security wise, there is interesting work adopting MLS (and I believe key transparency) under Matrix, see https://arewemlsyet.com for example.

> If the privacy and security of imessage is compromised by someone building another client, I'd argue that you never had either to begin with

That's like saying the internet protocol is neither private and secure because people willingly use random public Wi-Fi

Because there are people that buys iphone just to get a blue bubble, why would Apple want to stop that?

you’re talking to a forum that is probably 50% iPhone and has very good technical reasons to do so, this is insulting and it’s absurd that it’s so casually normalized to directly insult people in this fashion

How did you manage to take this as a personal insult? Some people buy an iPhone for the blue bubble, some have what they believe to be good technical reasons to buy one, some people like the aesthetics, some people buy one out of habit. Stating that each category exists is not an insult to those who fall outside it.

> How did you manage to take this as a personal insult?

years and years of "apple sheeple" variants tend to take their toll, you're just the latest in an endless parade of microaggressions even if you don't think your particular case was notable.

why is it so important for you to push on the idea apple users being thoughtless trend-followers? just don't do that, be better. you can do it. the next time you feel like posting that, simply take a deep breath and don't post it.

there is just no reason to go around posting that "[device that 50% of people own] users are all doing it for [trite/dismissive reason]" in the first place, let alone on a tech forum where everyone has very specific reasons for their tech purchases. and it's so completely normalized, android users do it so routinely and don't even think that what they are saying is offensive. it's literally the classic microaggression problem.

Do Apple devices not have a shift key?

he didn't say that though???

You need to read the message again, they said nothing like that.

> on a tech forum where everyone has very specific reasons for their tech purchases

Thats a very funny statement. From my experience tech people in general are the ones falling for vanity, fashion, dogmas etc. most often while claiming some "practical" reasons

It's a socioeconomic indicator for high status, and it would be foolish to ignore that as part of Apple's strategy.

Android doesn't suffer from that kind of complaint because it's often perceived as the opposite: a socioeconomic indicator for low status. It's socially acceptable to mock people for choosing high socioeconomic indicators, but not low socioeconomic indicators.

"You only bought that because you're rich" has a very different ring than "you only bought that because you're poor".

That perception of low vs high indicators is somewhat wrong (high-end Android phones cost more than the latest iPhone, used iPhones are pretty affordable) but it is the perception.

That’s a small subset of their customers in a single country. I don’t think they really care either way.

the american consumer punches far above its weight. apple cares and goes to great lengths to wall imessage. See the article linked in this post for instance

Look no further than blackberry... Their days were always numbered as the only reason to keep it is the messaging (and a bit the keyboard).

Another theme here is BBM (Bloomberg Messaging). People/Companies pay BB five figures per year just to get BBM. Why would they ever release a messaging app outside of the terminal. They will die before this happens.

> It's strange Apple doesn't sell an iMessage Android app

Apple doesn’t sell apps they sell hardware and services. There’s no incentive for them to provide a free iMessage app for android, and I doubt many people would pay for one.

> I doubt many people would pay for one.

Enough people paid for one. Enough to make Apple scared and use engineer time to ban/block people anyway.

Do we know that and that it wasn’t e.g. a massive influx of messages coming from a single hardware ID triggering an anti-spam system.

Since we're not Apple, we don't know. But if we take their word [0] for it.

> We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage.

> We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users.

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/08/apple-cuts-off-beeper-mini...