Not simply that a company is dominant; it is more about how and why they are dominant.
Update 2:40 pm ET: After some research, the practices below may capture much (though not necessarily all) of what the Department of Justice views unfavorably:
* horizontal agreements between competitors such as price fixing and market allocation
* vertical agreements between firms at different levels of the supply chain such as resale price maintenance and exclusive dealing
* unilateral exclusionary conduct such as predatory pricing, refusal to deal with competitors, and limiting interoperability
* conditional sales practices such as tying and bundling
* monopoly leveraging where a firm uses its dominance in one market to gain an unfair advantage in another
Any of these behaviors undermines the conditions necessary for a competitive market. I'd be happy to have the list above expanded, contracted, or modified. Let me know.
Have you ever dealt with a big government? Then you can imagine, Apple doesn't have as much weight as typical governments but it is close.
First, look at purchasing power of various governments. See https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/real-gdp-purcha....
> Real GDP (purchasing power parity): GDP (purchasing power parity) compares the gross domestic product (GDP) or value of all final goods and services produced within a nation in a given year. A nation's GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates is the sum value of all goods and services produced in the country valued at prices prevailing in the United States.
Second, look at COGS for Apple: "Apple annual cost of goods sold for 2021 was $212.981B" according to https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/cost-go.... COGS is arguably "close enough" to a nation-state's GDP to make for a useful comparison.
Given the above two, if Apple were a country with a GDP matching its COGS, it would rank about 66th, using a mix of 2022/2021 numbers from the sources above:
1 China $24,861B
2 United States $21,132B
3 India $9,279B
4 Japan $5,126B
5 Germany $4,523B
6 Russia $4,027B
7 Indonesia $3,246B
8 United Kingdom $3,136B
9 Brazil $3,128B
10 France $3,048B
11 Turkey $2,817B
12 Italy $2,478B
13 Mexico $2,418B
14 South Korea $2,289B
15 Canada $1,832B
...
36 Switzerland $618B
37 Belgium $600B
38 Sweden $580B
39 Singapore $578B
40 Ireland $516B
...
63 Kenya $251B
64 New Zealand $220B
65 Burma $217B
66 Dominican Republic $207B
67 Angola $204B
68 Kuwait $192B
69 Ecuador $190B
70 Belarus $184B
...
150 Namibia $23.1B
151 Kosovo $21.2B
152 South Sudan $20.0B
153 Iceland $20.0B
154 Somalia $19.4B
...
220 Palau $248M
221 Falkland Islands $206M
222 Anguilla $175M
223 Montserrat $167M
224 Nauru $149M
225 Wallis and Futuna $60M
226 Tuvalu $55.2M
227 Saint Helena... $31.1M
228 Niue $18.7M
229 Tokelau $7.7M
Unless you're the people I've worked for, you would drop everything for the chance to impress Apple.
But my comment did have the false assumption that the contract size would be large.
The reality is (IMHO) running a small contract and running a big one requires different skills sets, procedures in place, etc. Doing well at one will not guarantee doing well at another, and I think they know it.
For millions of people, it's their main/sole computing and internet access device so should be a neutral platform - with clear evidence as cited that Apple has not maintained its neutrality. As a neutral platform, customers should have the freedom to use their devices without undue interference or restrictions from Apple.
These are similar arguments made in the Microsoft vs. Netscape case. The lone example of being unable to install non-App Store apps is enough to justify the DOJ's case. Question is what would the verdict be? Similar to the EU's DMA rules would be a likely starting point.
Extremely authoritarian / communist take.
A $1000 luxury phone is not a "public good" just because many have FOMO and feel like they need one. There are many cheap alternative Androids that are just as good with virtually identical features. Nor is it a device that is absolutely necessary to function in society, like say other real public goods like running water or electricity.
Like it or not, there are different rules for the biggest players who wield market power. If you want an iPhone, then Android is not an alternative option. DOJ's argument is that Apple has added artificial disincentives to enable switching to a non-iPhone and also favor its own apps/services.
This is verbatim the argument against Microsoft and how it was wielding its Windows monopoly to stifle competition like Netscape. Easy to forget that Microsoft had closed APIs for 3rd parties and dictated how OEMs installed its OS before the US government judgement. You could've made the same counterpoint at the time that there's theoretical alternative OSes like Linux and Unix.
that's how you know he's right
What's authoritarian is Apple's lockdown of the iPhone. I should be able to run whatever application I want on my own device. Not the governement telling Apple, "Hey, people should be able to run what they want on their own device".
“Authoritarianism is a _political_ system characterized by the rejection of democracy and political plurality.” - Wikipedia
When a company _sells_ you a device (that you choose to buy or not), it is _not_ about political freedom.
There are countries that are actually authoritarian. Let’s not blur the lines between that and a corporation. I can appreciate the free software movement as well as the right to repair and so on, but let’s keep things in perspective here. There are governments that jail people for dissent.
I’m curious what market opportunities the Apple suit could open up.
- Xbox cloud game streaming
- WeChat like super apps w e-commerce (X wanted to do this play but more likely Facebook Messenger and the like)
- iMessage on android
- a receipt tracking app or something directly tied into Apple Pay tapping
Part of the IBM settlement required them to document interoperability. That was used by the DoJ to force Microsoft to document their CIFS (distributed storage) and Active Directory (naming/policy) protocols.
The latter might be particularly instructive as my experience with CIFS when I worked at NetApp was the different ways that Microsoft worked to be "precisely" within the lines but to work against the intent. Documentation like "this bit of this word must always be '1'" Which as any engineer knows, if it really was always '1' then that bit didn't have to be in the protocol, so what did it do when it wasn't '1'?
As someone who makes apps in the health space, I couldn’t care less if other tracker data was integrated into HealthKit. HealthKit honestly sucks - it's some bastard of objc naming schemes and methods jammed into Swift. The async is horrible to debug, too. No one has a good time in HK.
The issue with other trackers is that they are more locked down than Apple. You can't just get HR from Oura for instance - and that's not a health kit issue either.
Many years ago I knew an ex-microsoft engineer. Microsoft had poor interoperability with something, and I speculated that engineers in microsoft didn't know what 3rd parties were doing and accidentally broke things.
He told me, "don't be naive - microsoft would have meetings saying 'how can we own this?'"
As an example, this was the era of the J2EE App Server. Almost none of the people I worked with knew what an App Server was, despite the #1 database in use by App Server customers being MSFT SQL Server.
Message buses were generally in memory or in process streaming brokers. Most of these have moved externally today via Kafka, RabbitMQ or cloud proprietary versions like SQS. Some people may lean on ZeroMQ to build similar behaviors when doing multiprocessing and some people may even do it in process if they like the api. Definitely very much part of large scale application development today although the terms of art have changed.
Dependency injection is just a fancy name for polymorphism via fields in your struct, although if you have too much exposure to spring you will associate it with that plus an inversion of control on the actual injection part: that is, you will associate it with heavy use of annotations. If you have polymorphism with a switch (or chained ifs) on a parameter, you don't have dependency injection but if you have polymorphism by having different inplementations of a field of your struct then you are doing dependency injection. Very much part of good software design today, the annotation driven wiring possibly not so common outside of Java + Spring.
Sure. I have worked on JVMs before, but not server side, and I never had to touch anything sold by IBM.
> Arguably, CGI servers for php/python etc. were also a type of app server, although I rarely heard them referred to as such.
No, I think there's a difference. The deployment story for PHP was that you copied it to the web server and that was that. The mandatory part was a webserver you had anyway. There is FastCGI, but in PHP's case it can be thought of as purely a cache and is not necessary.
> App servers standardize what it means to start an application which makes operating many applications much easier.
A PHP web app does have some moving parts like needing to start nginx/fastcgi/mysql, so in that sense it still needs a container.
But the difference between the PHP source itself and Java is that PHP is 1. stateless and 2. doesn't take nearly as long to start up.
The first one is the big one and means you don't need to restart anything to update the app. This part of PHP is so well designed it practically makes up for how bad the rest of it is.
The second one was more of a Java flaw; the runtime is undercooked (which is why it had all that other super complex stuff on top of it) and everything has to go on the heap, instead of having more of a concept of constant data that could just be mapped in from the binary/jar file. That's what they got for not adding value types I guess.
Maybe it was a deprecated part of the protocol, and setting it would cause an error or do nothing.
I also recommend a second field called protocol ID which is set to a known random value (your wife's birthday) so that if someone gets an unknown message if they see that value they can guess what the protocol is.
When I gave this talk in late 2016
https://www.slideshare.net/paulahoule/chatbots-in-2017-ithac...
there was huge interest in messaging-centric apps as this runs around the boondoggle of having even the tiniest patch to your app get reviewed.
I don't think that's enough to make them competitive though. For instance, a scandal in one feature of the app (or Facebook being considered lame by kids) will hurt the rest of it.
Forcing Apple to allow third party payments without Apple's cut would improve market opportunities for many businesses. Facebook could have its marketplace conduct peer to peer transactions. Amazon could allow the purchase of digital goods (books, movies, etc.) and put it on more equal footing with Apple itself. While big businesses are best positioned to take advantage today, the effects directly trickle down to small startup businesses.
While I personally don't care for it, cryptocurrency use would have more potential. Apple blocked apps for NFT features in the past because they couldn't get their 30%.
Having third party marketplaces might make it so that there is some actual curation at the App Store.
John Sircacusa (from ATP.fm) pointed out years ago that the heart of Apple's biggest issues is business relationship management. This was when Apple only had a handful of issues with a few companies and made some poorly received statements about developers. Their ability to build mutually agreeable relations has only gotten worse in recent years.
Sony and Microsoft have kept their relations with third parties tough but ultimately agreeable. They promote practically all of their third parties (unlike the App Store which has so many apps that its like winning the lottery to be promoted). Consoles have stores which are probably more curated but which third party publishers/developers actually like.
IMO, DoJ, EU, etc. are acting primarily because they have received so many complaints from Spotify, Microsoft, Epic Games, Google, Meta, Tile, etc. Governments don't take action for the "public" interest on its own.
It would, but that is how Apple collects their commission. Where regulations where Apple has been forced to provide this separation (such as the US), they have split 3% to cover payment fees out of the commission, and put additional considerations for when leaving the app to make a payment would result in a commission and that Apple may audit that you are properly reporting commissions.
The DMA mandated that Apple decouple their commission structure from a single App Store in favor of multiple marketplaces, and they put in a 50 Eurocent core technology fee per user per year (after a margin of free installs).
> Amazon could allow the purchase of digital goods (books, movies, etc.) and put it on more equal footing with Apple itself.
Amazon does have digital purchasing of Video. Amazon added the ability to subscribe to a limited video version of Prime using in-app purchasing, and that kind of account will bill purchases using in-app purchasing.
They likely have razor thin margins for anyone who chooses to do this, but expect customers to either have existing Prime accounts or to want to upgrade from Video to the full Prime account for the other services. I suspect they did the math and think their margins on Kindle wouldn't support this.
Sorry, I do not parse this. What did they add?
Later, as Amazon acquired more popular content and then created an in-house production studio, they added the ability to rent or "purchase" (rent) streaming video content on a per-episode/season/film basis without requiring the full Prime subscription service.
This was designed to address Amazon customers who were primarily (pun intended) interested in the video content, not the physical goods.
The idea that Apple is compliant with the DMA has yet to be tested. There are many direct statements by the enforcing commissioner and complaints from third parties that I think only a direct ruling will settle things.
I forgot about Prime Video purchases having a special back door deal for some of their purchases. I wasn’t referring to the subscription service but the purchase of digital books/movies. My point stands though. Digital goods could be sold and bought without special exceptions or loopholes from the 30% fee. That alone is a huge market opportunity.
And yea, Gamepass was an immediate thought of something a company wanted to ship but Apple blocked. Between that and the Epic Games store it looks like there's gonna be a lot more options to game on IOS by the turn of the decade.
Honestly we should just sunset MMS entirely. It's like using 56k dialup.
it is in fact a technical limitation.
I suspect the people whining the most are communicating with folks that have "Low Quality Image Mode" enabled on their iPhone.
If you're unable to send files that large from an iPhone there's a carrier issue in play.
How does Apple get around that MMS limitation?
How does Apple get around that MMS limitation?
Since you’ve never used an iPhone, let me explain the experience. When you type in a random new number it starts off green. If the user uses iMessage, once you finish typing it magically turns blue. Apple doesn’t care about whether the other number is an Android phone per se, although if it’s not using iMessage then it’s almost certain that the number routes to an android phone.
because they were sending to an iPhone
I really love how folks are frothing at the mouth over things they don't understand.
Are you sending that to another iPhone?
It's completely broken.
Apple wants to force Android users into iPhones so that their tect messages stop sucking, as if it's and Android issue.
> Repeat after me: Poor MMS implementations are not Apple limitations.
Except that some of my family cannot send me a text on my Android phone because iOS absolutely refuses to treat it as anything other than an iMessage. Their contact for me does not have my iMessage/iCloud email. My iMessage/iCloud account has had my phone number deregistered from it. However, their iPhones cannot send me a text. It always sends it as an iMessage, even on threads where I send a text from my Android phone. Any reply just goes straight back to iMessage.
There are plenty of instances where Apple just does not care about text messages and protocols and will refuse to treat them properly. It is absolutely anti-competitive. They have been taken to court over this, which is why there is even a website that allows you to deregister your number. You used to have to use your iPhone to do it, which isn't exactly convenient if you lose or steal it. If you switched to Android, there was no way to get a text message from an iOS device while your number was registered with iMessage.
Now try sending to an at&t iPhone.
By your experience it seems that Apple is limiting iOS-iOS image size, to promote iMessage
If you sent an h.264 for instance, many flip phones would be unable to play it. So I think the MMS standard itself is holding us back.
I still blame Apple. If they prioritized the experience of their own customers above the value of the blue bubble in getting teens to bully Android users they could have obviously been the ones pushing a good RCS implementation with carriers by threatening credibly to drop MMS support. Instead they left it to carriers and Google who each screwed things up pretty well.
if apple didn't do it's shenanigans, RCS or something similar with a
different name would've have replaced MMS by now.
Hell, if you've a rooted Android you can't access Google RCS and any RCS messages sent your way will disappear into the ether.
If you want to interact with the RCS world as a non-wireless carrier, expect to pay upwards of 10 cents a message and have a minimum revenue commit of thousands of dollars a month. Carriers also don't get paid for inbound texts on RCS, creating a huge new cost center instead of symmetrical texting volume resulting in minimal costs like the current SMS/MMS ecosystem.
The main reason people still use it is despite the issues with MMS (and SMS in general) the reality is that every vendor wants to own the messaging stack to build or strengthen moat, and the regulators who are in a position to enforce standard protocols have incentives in many or all countries to weaken the security of messaging protocols to meet surveillance objectives (whether those objectives are well scrutinized methods with judicial oversight, or blanket surveillance requirements).
Blaming the user as lazy or incompetent completely overlooks the significant financial incentives that platform owners and network providers have to maintain the status quo, or force the new status quo to strengthen their moats.
I'm curious where y'all's confidence comes from in user hostility or not and what indicators you have to tip your hand one way or the other. That might result in more elucidating conversation too.
All along the way people routinely attack users for making poor decisions when they are simply using defaults, or the easiest to use and most compatible technologies.
* Pffft... Of course they got hacked, they used IE * Of course they got hacked, they opened an email attachment * Of course they got hacked, they clicked that homoglyph
In this particular case, SMS and MMS are baked into the phone, and delivered by the wireless provider, and for better or worse on the UX front, work with just a phone number and across all mobile OS. For anything other than that, if users have peers using other device or services, the alternative is to use multiple services to communicate with different groups based on which services they use. That means repeating messages across multiple providers, and/or missing folks because all the platform services have actively silo'd their platforms to prevent interoperability.
Yeah, SMS and MMS suck, but they suck less for the simple use case of messaging folks with cell phones, because the barrier to messaging those folks is having their phone number.
It's lazy and incompetent to attack users when users actually have very little control over the actual security or usability of the services and systems they use, especially as everything is hosted in cloud platforms.
Start with brownouts, make them more frequent, and in a few months we could all be off that whole mess. There'd be some chaos for a bit, but future generations would look back and wonder why we clung to this antiquated pile of wires for so long.
It's way better than being on Whatsapp or iMessage or Slack or Teams or whatever you're proposing to replace it because I have a lot of control over who can contact me and nobody is using my presence on the phone network as a means to drag all of my friends over to the same phone network.
If we invented the legacy phone system today, it would be illegal to operate because it's so insecure. We certainly wouldn't dream of forcing everyone to use it.
You can already see this type of fraudulent traffic occur on Telegram with the constant crypto bots and on Signal with the romance scams.
A PSTN sunset would force this fraudulent traffic to migrate to the over the top communications platforms, eliminate many people's ability to access emergency services reliably, destroy reliable voice quality on cellular networks as there's no consistent way to prioritize third party voice and video traffic.
We've had SSL on the web for 30 years now. We don't visit our bank's web site and wonder if we're really talking to our bank, but we casually accept that of course someone calling from our bank's phone number could be a fraudster. There might be some fraud that is able to migrate, but it wouldn't be the smorgasbord for fraudsters that the legacy phone system has created.
> eliminate many people's ability to access emergency services reliably
This is like saying that we can't put out the dumpster fire because it provides some people with warmth. The 911 system (at least in the US) is already a travesty. Caller locations are a crapshoot for wireless calls. Call centers aren't centralized, standardized, or coordinated, and they're overloaded. The technology is outdated. Moving it off the phone network and onto a centralized digital platform would be a massive improvement.
What TLS does do is ensure that when I communicate with a third party on the internet, that communication can't be intercepted by any intervening switches or routers. TLS per se does not have any other properties. However, we've constructed a system of chains of trust using TLS certificates and trusted third parties. That system is not a technical system and TLS does not have the innate property of enabling you to trust or not to trust someone.
It's an important distinction because the PSTN and our system of TLS Certificate Authorities is a social solution to a social problem. And so suggesting that TLS somehow magically has a property that it prevents fraud is hard for me to follow, because fraud is also a social problem and you can't use technology to solve social problems. Technology can be used to lubricate, to bring people together, and to ensure that conventions are followed and that peoples' solutions can interoperate. But the real innovation in TLS from a fraud perspective is actually the network of companies, nonprofits, third parties, and government agencies who have collectively established root Certificate Authorities and who have ensured that those CAs control who you trust. None of that is specified in any RFC. It's entirely something we humans made up after someone created an enabling technology.
As for problems with PSTN, there are similar technical solutions, but largely PSTN fraud and spam are a social problem and require social interventions. This is why we have the FCC in the US, for example, because when the scope of an intervention becomes large enough it has to be administered by someone. When you say PSTN doesn't work because of fraud and spam, in my mind what you're saying is that the FCC does not do enough to prevent fraud and spam.
This is actually a bug, not a feature, as it enables all kind of robocalls and sms spam. That's why I love the iPhone feature that allows me to block all the calls from numbers not in my contact list. It does not allow this for SMS though...
https://www.guidingtech.com/how-to-block-text-messages-from-...
Even if it couldn't do this, that would just bolster the case that Apple is making SMS worse than it has to be on their platform to promote iMessage and its network effects.
EDIT: I booted up my iPhone 14 on the latest iOS and I guess this has changed? There isn't a "SMS Filtering" option near the Filter Unknown Senders option which has moved to the top level Messages settings page versus when the guide was written.
I'm not sure if that means it always filters SMS or it never does, but again if it doesn't filter SMS at all that's an Apple choice, it doesn't mean you can't do it on SMS.
In general, solve problems in the same way that email does but add protocol support for realtime direct communications and end-to-end encryption.
Or you could have thousands of medium-sized companies that each operate nodes that interoperate with each other even though none of them is the size of Google or Meta, and users could choose one based on whether they want to see ads or pay a few bucks a year, or run their own if they're into that sort of thing.
> It just so happens that you need a certain amount of infrastructure to implement it, which is true of everything, even email.
The infrastructure you need for email is any functioning general purpose computer, including ones you can find in the trash, and a domain name, which you can also get for free if you really want to and in practice costs around $15/year to do it properly. Anyone with the inclination can do this and many solitary individuals actually do.
The infrastructure you would need for this thing would be even less, because the premise is that you already have an email address/provider, so all you'd really need is the ability to map a port so you can make a direct connection to the other endpoint -- or IPv6.
Whereas the infrastructure you need to participate in the PSTN... I think you're required to be a CLEC to even have a block of numbers assigned. If all you had to do was install Asterisk on the trash PC it would be something else entirely, but the telcos do a lot of regulatory gatekeeping, which is another reason the legacy phone network should be decommissioned and replaced by a modern IETF protocol.
Currently the only similar thing I'm aware of is https://delta.chat/en/, though I believe it does all of its networking over email, rather than only using it as a fallback.
I wonder what the pitfalls of using email this way are; it seems like a great way to get a free backend and growth-hack a chat app, so there must be some reason it's not more common.
It's the sort of thing you get when somebody builds it as a hobby project, or a skunkworks project escapes from a large corporation and is already open source by the time the MBAs get their hands on it. Or, in the old days, DARPA funding.
Point me to the existing IETF RFC for e.g. mapping email addresses as identifiers for use in a standard communications protocol for voice and video calls.
Not any more, at least for any semi-popular chat. The throwaway and no-names? Yeah you can, well until IF they get big. And well, they won't.
This might be the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s literally legal in my country to spam me on my phone number and there is ZERO I can do to change that. Ergo I have fuck all control over who can contact me.
Where we're all captive subjects of some cloud asshole spoon-feeding us bits of infrastructure we used to be able to run ourselves
Only android people fuss with third party apps because their phones can’t reasonably send messages by default.
IOW, SMS is cross-platform. Whats the issue?
Unlike modern messaging platforms, SMS has no:
- guaranteed delivery
- read receipts
- proper support for group chats (MMS adds this, but the implementation is poor compared to modern platforms)
- support for multimedia (again, MMS added this, but support is poor)
- support for replies
- support for reactions
- support for any kind of encryption
- support for typing indicators
- ability to work independently of an active cellular connection
If SMS works for your needs, and you have no issues with it, that’s great. Ultimately, SMS does work, but many users rightfully expect more of a messaging platform at this point. There are real benefits to users from upgrading to a more modern system.
I am fine with using SMS, and it has always served me well.
But that didn't address GP's comment. Apple states that green bubbles are pariahs because messages can't be sent to androids so it breaks the system, or something like that [BS]
Iphone users think that green bubbles are pariahs because they aren't part of their exclusive group, and because green bubbles turn chat groups into rubbish, because yada yada not iphone. (spoiler alert, apple does it on purpose)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/android-users-stig...
For laughs: Tim Cook telling someone he has to buy her mom an iphone (1hr 0mins 17secs)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=3615&v=sdvzYtgmIjs&feature=you...
This is a dumb complaint honestly. The carriers and Qualcomm closely control the standards bodies and could address this problem. Instead they focused on the bag-of-garbage that is RCS, which Apple has finally said they will support. But because RCS is a bag-of-garbage, Apple plans to support a different flavor (the basic standard) from Google's. $0.50 says Google will magically start supporting the basic standard too once Apple ships it.
So I'm guessing you're a very young person based on how little MMS you claim to have received. Which is fine, it's fair to point out that technologies us old folk use may differ slightly from what the whippersnappers are doing. And there are no wrong answers there, except that it's also fair to point out that when you purchase a cell phone, before you install any apps, you have some ingrained cell phone messaging features. One of which is a messenger app built on top of SMS and MMS.
I've probably sent and received thousands of MMS messages over the years, because it was the primary method for a cell phone user to send a picture to your friends and family. Back in the day, at least, and still today for some. It was also the way that us old folk were able to send group texts at a time.
MMS was indeed order of magnitude more expensive than SMS and several orders of magnitude less used.
Reasoning for such high prices was more about mobile internet/data back then being really expensive "1G" - and MMS was (still is I guess) using mobile data to send/receive "multimedia messages".
At this point I expect that cost of MMS is more about maintaining legacy systems/servers for that.
Although in something like 2008/2009 integrating through legacy SMS protocols (those previously used by beepers/pagers) was cheaper than through modern protocols. Some operators had hardware boxes supporting those that were already paid off long time ago.
Thanks for teaching me a new thing about life outside of the US. Out here, cell data plans (which is the budget that sending/receiving MMS would eat into) were relatively affordable (even for my somewhat modest household) through the latter half of the 2000s and early 2010s. And now it's basically assumed that most people have "unlimited" data. So I guess MMS was a regional phenomena based on prices.
You didn't miss out on much, not that you probably thought you may have. MMS was a useful tool for sharing pictures digitally, but it was somewhat poor user experience waiting for it to reach the other person. Sometimes waiting for a reaction for an hour because the person on the receiving end wasn't near enough to a cell tower owned by their provider. Less of an issue with all the cell towers around now, but there are better mediums than MMS now.
I’m around 30, I grew up with a dad who was a fan of modern phones and technologies (first camera phones, Windows smartphones, PDAs) so I always had fancy phones, and I’ve received < 20 MMS in my whole life.
The newer RCS standard would be better, but Apple has already announced they're going to support it this year (after dragging their heels for a few years).
That is, indeed, a technical limitation of MMS.
The last time folks got worked into a frenzy over RCS I ended up looking at the MMS specs. If memory serves 3GPP recommended an upper bound of at least 5 megabytes. American carriers typically limit attachments to like 3 megabytes or less and they mandate ancient video codecs.
I think Apple has enough pull with carriers to tell them whatever configuration parameters for MMS they want.
MMS being basically SMS with a link/url to where the phone fetches multimedia part from - it could also be sent via older EMI-UCP (that was originally used for pagers).
At some point pre 2010 (when I worked in Routo Messaging - now called Telesign) we also got an SS7 connection - so we could finally start doing stuff like a real mobile operator/provider.
I realize this isn’t what you are asking for. But it works well and doesn’t depend on Google’s closed version of RCS
thank you for posting!
FYI for those others who don't know: click on a video in your photos app. click share --> "Copy iCloud Link"
EDIT: Tried it on my iPhone and it does not require an Apple account, kudos Apple. It does show my full real name as others have mentioned.
You still cannot send livephotos via Whatsapp/Telegram. They convert to still photos. So you still lose something there.
You can send whatever you want through SMS, as a link.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24050430/apple-app-store-...
What are challenges for implementing such "payment" system on iOS that can transfer, say Monopoly money vs real USD? Aren't those almost entirely legal or compliance matters for very good reasons? The Alaskan 737 MAX 9 landed largely intact thanks to still-working parts of regulations and we all value that.
So why not they just do that? Or CAN'T they?
X, the company formerly known as twitter, fairly explicitly plans to, they are just taking time to pivot, in part because they don’t seem to have any real clear roadmap from where they are to where they want to be.
>don’t seem to have any real clear roadmap
not your fault, but that's pretty funny
Could you expand on that?
Personally, I don’t think Western (or at least American) consumers are all that interested in a super app. Asia has a ton of players in this space like WeChat, QQ, Line and Kaokao but those have never taken off in the West outside of diaspora communities.
Tim Hortons had gift and loyalty cards ("every 7th coffee free"). Then they introduced an app with "rewards" as an alternative to loyalty and gift cards. Then the app turned into a bank. Then they stopped the physical loyalty cards. Now you can't "earn" free coffee without giving them your personal information and signing up for the bank of Tim Hortons. It's ok though. I stopped being a customer because of it.
if I was going to dream big, I would like to point the iCloud hooks to a personal server instead of apple in a meaningful way.
Hopefully you can accomplish all this within the return window of the computer (or purchase a used one). The iCloud subscription fees are non-refundable. You can also just give up, keep the computer, and embrace the Apple ecosystem.
Thank you Tim Apple, very cool!
Sent from my iPhone
And hoping Apple's broken client actually downloads full history or by forcing it to download by scrolling up through years of chat by hand.
And hoping Apple doesn't interpret a read lock on the db as malicious activity and temporary ousting you from iMessage and causing every message you send on unrelated hardware to drop to SMS until you login / logout from every device you "own".
gotta love when someone is so deep into fanboyism that they go through life utterly paralyzed and victimized by the apple that only exists inside their head.
literally, unsarcastically, why do you do this to yourself? it’s a fearsome depth of parasocial attachment in a way that’s incredibly unhealthy and warping. Why do you choose to get this bent out of shape about what phone other peolle buy? it doesn’t matter.
Interacting with Apple's products as a software developer who cares about open source, data portability, etc. is getting harder and harder to justify. The same goes for Google.
What drew me to Apple initially was that they had an actually-existing polished POSIX-compliant desktop environment that was far more open than anything Windows had (or has, to this day).
What you're seeing here are the lamentations of early adopters witnessing all those great features, and the philosophy behind them, slowly going away.
When Apple Music launched it was around the time that 3rd party apps were allowed to hook into Siri - so you could say "Hey Siri, tell MyToDoApp to remind me to do X in six hours" and MyToDoApp would add the reminder.
But it was only allowed for certain categories of app (strangely enough, categories where Apple didn't have a paid service). It wasn't permitted for music apps until a few years later, by which time Apple Music was established.
Similarly - when I connect my iPhone to my car over Bluetooth or wired connection[1] - with Spotify I get the normal play/pause/skip controls. But I can't see the upcoming play-queue, nor browse my playlists through the car's interface. If I listen through Apple Music, I can see not only my queue, playlists, albums and artists but also podcasts from the totally separate Apple Podcasts app.
Of course, the car interface is shite, but why can Apple's app do this and the third party not? Is it just that Spotify didn't bother implementing the relevant APIs or because those APIs were not available?
As a long-time Apple fan, my distrust of them is so great at the moment, I suspect the latter.
[1] The inbuilt head-unit doesn't do CarPlay, but I have a standalone wireless CarPlay screen. I like to connect the phone through Bluetooth (or wired) so the display unit shows my apps but I can adjust the volume and skip tracks using the steering wheel controls.
My understanding - Siri is at its heart a command and control system. It was able to do Music (and iTunes before) because it knew The Who and The Rolling Stones from the hosted music catalog, even if those weren’t downloaded locally.
Apple needed to provide the localized commands, but also still needed the nouns to go with the verbs.
> Is it just that Spotify didn't bother implementing the relevant APIs or because those APIs were not available?
The former. There are plenty of other CarPlay media apps. They are all limited (first and third party) in that CarPlay is basically like a low bandwidth VNC display.
Maybe they should be. Our societies are ostensibly consumer-centric. It's about time our laws and organisations strongly sided with consumers against any opposition, especially against business.
As a really specific example in the case of Apple, I really hope the DMA causes wider availability of browser choice on iOS so that we as a business that ships a web app can offer our customers features like notifications and other PWA benefits. Our customers are somewhat willing to switch browsers to get the best experience when using our app. But switching to Android? Not a reasonable ask from us.
Most consumers also have jobs right? Making their lives better and easier at work, increasing competition to give their employers more opportunity to thrive, is just as important as making their groceries cheaper.
I can't remember the last time I saw a "this site only works in XYZ" message. Some of that is a lot of modern sites are all built on big frameworks, but some of that is also because only supporting Safari, or only supporting Chrome or only supporting IE is going to lose you huge swaths of customers.
What if I don't want to switch browsers for the "best experience" when using your app? What if I want you to make your app the best experience on my browser of choice?
As always these things are tradeoffs and balances.
What if I cannot do that due to there being no incentive for Apple to support web standards in Safari?
We don't want our users to have to switch browsers, but that leaves us with no ability to use lots of the features that make modern web apps competitive at all with native apps.
Several years ago I wouldn't have even bothered trying to do that on my phone. There is some benefit to Safari being so ubiquitous.
Then all websites would be designed for the one browser!!
After that, Google leverages its other service monopolies, Chrome goes to 95%+ market share, standards fall by the wayside, and nobody has any choice.
I guess the answer to that is antitrust against Google, but I’d rather do that first than go through the Chrome domination phase.
It will be a sad day in the near future when the web becomes “Chrome”, even on mobile, much as it was “IE” not that long ago, alas, we seem to never learn.
Everybody who says “Safari is the new IE” seems to be too young to know what IE and front-end web development were really like during the 00s. I’d take WebKit on iOS over a Blink monoculture any day, and so should any web developer.
I don’t know what the solution would be, not like you can mandate the existence of a web browser engine into existence and making one gets harder for every new thing added.
Google Chrome, Google Search, Google Play, Google Maps, Google Shopping, YouTube, Android, Alphabet's online advertising service.
https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en
And here's what that designation means for them:
https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
If Chrome wins on merit and Chromium remains a viable option to build competing browsers then that is fine.
I don't want Apple to prevent that by forcing an inferior browser down peoples' throats to make sure the web can't win against native apps.
Isn’t chromium still bloated with tracking? Last time I read about it, it was far from a “clean Chrome” at least, now if it was truly open sourced and not mainly controlled by Google I would be much more hopeful.
As someone who’s heavily invested in web I don’t see it being a competition with apps at all, different sports altogether, but sure, supporting notifications are nice, allowing websites to scan networks and Bluetooth, not so much.
I don't think Chromium based browsers such as Brave, Vivaldi or Edge have to send data to Google.
Chromium development is highly dependent on Google of course. Google could theoretically do to Chromium what they have done to AOSP, i.e make sure it's not longer a viable platform for competitors. But I think that's exactly what the DMA could prevent.
>As someone who’s heavily invested in web I don’t see it being a competition with apps at all
I think it's an empirical fact that they do compete. Almost all the installed apps I use could be web apps if it wasn't for arbitrary restrictions.
>but sure, supporting notifications are nice, allowing websites to scan networks and Bluetooth, not so much.
How about not randomly deleting or arbitrarily restricting local data?
Chrome is such a complicated piece of software that the “forks” are highly dependent on Google and when Google unilaterally makes decisions they have to follow suit. Brendan Eich explains that Brave will continue to support Manifest V2 as long as Google doesn’t remove the underlying code paths: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1534893414579249152
I think a lot of people don’t appreciate how delicate the balance of web standards is right now. We have it so good (three high-quality implementations of an open spec) and I’m not willing to throw that away just to run Chrome on my iPhone.
Agitation for consumer rights might actually be an easier way to get benefits to small business.
Because when you try to lobby for small business it becomes lobbying for all business and in the end it's the big business that benefits because somewhere in the process they outlobbied every other interested party and the end form of legislation or action benefits them the most.
Like the right to repair. If it was focused on helping small business it would have been defanged way easier.
I've had some great conversations with folks about why this form of "American Capitalism" is the most efficient economic engine with regard to an industrial economy. As a system, this, and a graduated taxation that provides a damping function on "infinite wealth" and feeds it into government services has the potential to create an economy where everyone has a chance to get rich, and everyone's basic needs are met. That combination maximizes participation in the economy and thus GDP.
The macroeconomics class I took spent several weeks on this relationship and the "Great Courses" economics class also talks about it.
The challenge is that rich men (typically its men) don't like being told they can't do something, or told they have to do something which will reduce their total wealth, and they respond by corrupting legislators into changing the rules.
It isn't "good" or "bad" per se, some people always eat all the cookies if they think they can get away with it. As a systems analyst though the system is an excellent study in 'tuning.' In theory, as a government maximizing GDP is a goal because the more GDP the more gets done the happier people are, etc etc. Technology strongly affected the rate of change of wealth, people who were middle class at a startup suddenly being in the top 10% in terms of wealth over the course of a few years, rather than a life time of work and savings. Others leveraging their wealth in technology startups having it rocket them into the 1%.[1] Something that the US system of laws does not do well is respond to changes "quickly" (my lawyer friends tell me that is a design feature not a bug). But as we saw with Microsoft's antitrust case they do respond eventually.
[1] Back in the dot com days there was an article in Wired about the "Billionaire Boys Club" which talked about members of the several VC firms whose net worth had ballooned to over a billion dollars.
I think if the system could limit the ability of rich guys to corrupt legislators, then regulation would just work. I think "Citizen's United VS FEC" kind of broke regulation in that sense. It probable had a positive effect on the economy for some years, but imo it broke American politics. We've even started to see regulators like the EPA and SEC lose high profile court cases.
I'm no lawyer and I think this looks like a great case, but I'm not too confident.
An example being Intel, which is currently getting billions in government subsidies via the CHIPS Act, because their business fell behind because it was impeded by the government suing them for antitrust issues.
While the business in US was content to sit on their throne and milk the consumers, US consumers uplifted the entire country of China. Consumers are way more economically powerful than the business. Seeing economy through business and workers lens is as misguided as it is traditional.
This is the easiest way to tell someone is wrong about politics. This doesn't happen, but everyone who doesn't know how anything works thinks it does. You just can't handle the truth that other voters actually believe different things than you.
> While the business in US was content to sit on their throne and milk the consumers, US consumers uplifted the entire country of China.
Think you forgot every other country exists here.
The alternative is that either supporting largest business is completely accidental or that it's done for the good of the voters.
Both alternatives are completely rudiculous. You can be sure that money is flowing. You can see some of the money flowing in the form of lobbying and cosy retirements if government officials in corporate boards. You can be sure there's more. US is incredibly overtly and covertly corrupt at every level.
> Think you forgot every other country exists here.
All other countries that are running trade deficit for decades without much issue?
When are people going to stop buying Apple?
Just look at how he reacted even back when Woz invented the universal remote.
In the IBM case it opened up an entire industry of third party "compatible" peripherals and saved consumers a ton of money.
[1] I had a summer intern position in Field Engineering Services in 1978 and it was what all the FEs were talking about how it was going to "destroy" IBM's field service organization.