Yes — it's adversarial interoperability, and that is always a good thing because it breaks lock-ins. Though mostly irrelevant to this particular case, adversarial interoperability also forces the service owner to compete with third-party clients which always put the user first; it removes the service owner's of control over the UX and presentation.
I don't know about AIM, but ICQ also used OSCAR protocol. The official ICQ clients were bloated, shitty and full of ads. Not many people used them. Most people used QIP, Miranda, Pidgin, Adium, Jimm, or even NatICQ. No one cared about how ICQ's owner would make money — and, really, no one should care about that, it's their own problem. Maybe if they made a client that's better than third-party offerings, then people would switch to it. But they never did.
Agreed here. But I understand deeply why it's appealing for my fellow android users who are tired of being bullied into buying phones they just don't want by their friends who overwhelmingly drink the Kool aid. it's not great, and in the US the effect is very real.
> I think it'd be a lot more hacker-y to bring something like Signal up to the usability standards of iMessage, Whatsapp, Telegram, etc.,
Good idea... what about an existing open standard that is already adopted by a billion devices and can be implemented by any mobile phone manufacturer and carrier network.
Something that takes what's good about SMS and adds all those nice features. I bet we'd have to work together to make end to end encryption interoperable, and some of the fancier stuff is too new to be in the spec yet, but that's not too hard in the grand scheme of things.
Oh, RCS exists.
As one of the top posts that presumably the GP post is talking about, precisely. Nowhere was I apologizing for Apple, nor did I "crawl out".
When this product was first announced I observed that Apple was going to shut it down, and that they had obvious avenues (both technically given the way messages are attested to, and legally -- this product is the textbook definition of computer misuse! And they're charging for it making it a slam dunk). Loads of people "crawled out" to gloat that this is it, Apple has no avenue to do anything about it. And then Apple did something. Apple did the easiest, lightest option, but they could go full scorched Earth if they wanted to. I don't want them to, and am not celebrating that, but these are basic obvious facts.
To your other point, exactly. The hacker spirit is getting your friends and family on Signal. It isn't cementing iMessages as the foundation.
I'm torn on this. Is it following the hacker spirit to get more people plugged into Apple's closed ecosystem? Maybe? Maybe not? Reverse engineering a proprietary protocol is certainly hacker-y. But building a business around that -- essentially charging people to put more load onto someone else's infrastructure, who have to bear the costs (even a rich behemoth like Apple) -- I'm not sure that qualifies. If we were talking about some open source project that was releasing this app to F-Droid, maybe it'd be more clear?
> The number of Apple apologists that have crawled out to say "see? I told you so!!"
I don't think that's Apple apologism, that's just "duh, obviously Apple is going to try to shut them down, and probably succeed". It's lame. It's just as lame as when AOL kept breaking Gaim/Pidgin's ability to talk AIM's OSCAR protocol. But acknowledging that Apple is going to pull something like that isn't apologism, it's just stating reality.
(As for the AOL/AIM example, I think reverse-engineering OSCAR was actually hacker-spirit-y, as AIM was a free service open to anyone, just they didn't feel like supporting Linux users, as was the SOP of many companies at the time. Linux users were a fairly small percentage of users, so it wasn't a big thing. But there are tons of Android users; more than iOS users, globally, even. That's not really the same, to me.)
In the context of the overwhelmingly saturated messaging space, I think it'd be a lot more hacker-y to bring something like Signal up to the usability standards of iMessage, Whatsapp, Telegram, etc., and evangelize the hell out of it to get people out of closed platforms. Even Signal isn't perfect there, since they refuse to enable federation in the protocol, and only release updates to their server-side software a long time after it's been running in production. But it's certainly better than getting more people hooked in Apple's walled garden.