Apple's problem is that they are selling less to me than they could and risk losing me as a hardware customer as well.
Now, I totally get their strategy. It's a bet that net net they are locking more people in than they are locking out. It's hard to tell whether or not this is paying off for them. Not even Apple can know the counterfactuals.
The ball is in the court of Google et al. to make messaging and video chats less frustrating.
iCloud Photos is E2EE if you turn on iCloud’s “Advanced Data Protection”. That migrates the vast majority of your iCloud data into E2EE storage.
What Beeper set out to do was to solve the opposite problem, people who don't have Apple devices, but want to use iMessage.
And the poster above did have an Apple device, and wanted to use iMessage, but didn't seem to realise that iMessage works on Macs too.
The issue is that I as an Apple user want to be able to use iMessage to communicate with Android users.
You're entitled to use or not use iMessage per your preference. You are not entitled to use of iMessage on a platform of your choosing. Where do we stop this? Is Apple then required to create iMessage clients for Windows Phone as well? Perhaps a Blackberry client too? Maybe a website?
If you want to share an iMessage account and all the rest of the ecosystem benefits Apple provides, then get an iPhone. That's how you do that. And you can still absolutely talk to Android users once you have an iPhone, because the iPhone provides the essential middle-agent between iMessage and SMS that enables you to do that. Apple has done this forever and has designed Messages to degrade gracefully: you are not barred from texting anyone who doesn't have an iPhone, instead your message is converted to SMS completely seamlessly and sent from your phone even if you actually sent it from a Mac or iPad.
The endless moaning and whining from people not in their ecosystem about iMessage is so, so fucking tired at this point: from the accusations of platform lockout to the bitching about the fact that SMS messages are green instead of blue, on and on. If you guys are SO HARD UP for that iMessage goodness then just pony up for an iPhone, holy shit. Or at the very least, go bitch up Google's tree so they'll develop a decent messaging client that won't be abandonware within 6 months.
"I own a Mac an iPhone and an iPad but iMessage and FaceTime are entirely useless to me because no one I communicate with on a regular basis uses Apple devices"
and
"The issue is that I as an Apple user want to be able to use iMessage to communicate with Android users."
To sum it up for you as succinctly as I can: I am an Apple customer expressing unhappiness about some aspects of the product and the product strategy.
Welcome! Pixel is all you need.
I use a Mac but an Android phone. Android because I require the ability to install apps from arbitrary sources, including piracy. Mac because modern Windows is so contemptuous towards its users, and desktop Linux falls apart unless you know the intricacies of its internals.
Anyway, transferring files between the two was a pain in the butt that eventually grew so immense I reverse engineered Google's Nearby Share and made this: https://github.com/grishka/NearDrop
Though yes, I'm not North American so iMessage is just a non-issue to me. I don't know anyone who uses it. No one uses SMS for actual messaging between people, everyone's SMS inbox is 99% OTP codes and various other automatic notifications. Literally everyone who I communicate with is reachable through Telegram.
No one "requires" access to theft.
Unless my eyes are just completely missing it, I didn't see anywhere that they said or implied that they weren't using macOS or iOS on their Apple devices.
People often say they are happy to pay a premium for Apple because of the software. So, for someone who doesn't use the unique features of a particular OS+apps bundle maybe they could use another ... which reminded me of the lawsuits that resulted in Microsoft [partners?] having to refund the OS portion of the sale price for those who chose not to use Windows.
It was a leap, but not a huge one IMO.
I know a lot of people who have MacBooks of various types who use Chrome as their browser (and only access their mail through the Gmail web interface), MS Office, etc, rarely using a single one of the Apple bundled apps (save perhaps the very basic ones, like Preview)...and yet, they would never give them up for a Windows computer, because so much of the OS is very fundamentally different to interact with.
For what?
I own a Mac an iPhone and an iPad but iMessage and FaceTime are entirely useless to me because no one I communicate with on a regular basis uses Apple devices. Same thing with various iCloud sharing features. Not using the family sharing offers is entirely uneconomical as well.
So what happens is that I gravitate to other ecosystems. I use WhatsApp. I upload all my photos to Google Photos. I mirror my iCloud Drive to Google Drive to share and collaborate with people on various things.
I have enabled Apple’s advanced data protection for end to end encryption but it’s entirely farcical as my stuff is all over the place anyway.
Almost everything Apple does in terms of software and services is useless to me. They are not locking me in. They are locking me out.
I’m paying for their excellent hardware, the m-series CPUs in particular, but I’m using my “spare” Pixel phone more often because the software suits me better.
I appreciate a lot of things that Apple does but it’s only a question of time until some other ARM based hardware catches up enough for me to stop overpaying Apple for software I can’t use anyway.