Not surprising considering iMessage is nearly irrelevant outside the US.
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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US is still stuck on SMS, so much that they even made an upgrade to it with RCS.
It felt like an upgrade to the DVD disk when you have the Internet.
IMHO, I’ll gladly take RCS over the world’s most popular messaging clients - Meta products.
I don't know why people have more faith in cellular providers. They have been selling all of your data before Meta was a thing.
Which is why I said RCS and not SMS or MMS.
Once we get that new open end to end encrypted RCS protocol, that’s the thing to migrate to. Fuck SMS, MMS, Meta products, WeChat, etc. One end to end encrypted standard, that can be used by any messaging client, on any mobile OS.
RCS only increased the meta-data the cellular providers and messaging apps is selling on you.
They don't care about the content in your message, so e2ee is useless in this case.
They're selling who you message, when, and where you are when you do it. They collect data on which cellular tower transmitted your message. And now with RCS they also know when you read the message.
Which means RCS is just as useless in terms of privacy. They only enriched the data. So it's probably worse.
Messaging sevices 😅
DVDs are still not bad if someone really wants to buy a movie. Cheaper than BluRay and with much weaker DRM. Video is very low quality in today's standards, but bitrate and autio quality is better than any streaming.
I know a nice comparason, faxes. Imagine a fax 2.0 protocol released just before sending documents by email become normal that do not got adapted, but all of a sudden Google start promoting it as nudging Apple to adapt it. Advertised as a better quality, faster fax, with (yet ro standardize) encryption.
DVDs are still not bad if someone really wants to buy a movie. Cheaper than BluRay and with much weaker DRM. Video is very low quality in today's standards, but bitrate and autio quality is better than any streaming.
DVD bitrate is only 9.8 Mbit and uses this very inefficiently due to the use of MPEG-2 encoding. When DVD was invented we did not have the processing power in affordable hardware for better codecs. Streaming services can do at least twice that bitrate and with much, much better codecs. Audio quality is similar, streaming services actually have higher bitrate audio than most DVDs (AC-3 at 448 kbit on DVD vs ~770 kbit EAC-3 on streaming). DTS could have higher bitrates (it was either 768 kbit or 1.5Mbit) but only supported 5.1 channels.
I get not defending the use of DVD over Blu-Ray at this point, but the downsides of streaming and digital "ownership" have been a sizeable portion of tech news for a while.
And honestly? US/Canada using the standardized protocol and Europe using the walled garden developed by an eviler-than-normal corporation sounds kinda backwards from the cultural differences between US and Europe we usually hear.
iMessage is the same though... It only falls back to sms when required (like everything else) and people hate it when it does.
RCS has with all the major reasons that iMessage became preferred, and Apple is adding RCS support to iOS. It'll take some time, but I do think there'll be a cultural shift.
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It supports encryption and all they had to do was type “y” when setting it up.
There's better standards than rcs? Over here Google's been taking ads out begging apple to switch over
XMPP had more features than RCS even when RCS was being created and was actively developed for all those years unlike RCS. It also much simpler to implement and you don't have to be cellular provider to have a server.
They finally compromised and Apple agreed to jump over if the parts of RCS that Google was gatekeeping were opened up.
Phase 1 of RCS on iOS will be sans E2EE sometime this year. Likely iOS 18 this fall. Phase 2 will roll in the security once the new open encryption protocol is good to go.
All in all, RCS looks like a lock as the next thing. All the major players are in.
The Nordics are an exception to this - SMS and iMessage are prevalent here.
Sms prevalent? Where? All I see is WhatsApp and people get annoyed if you don't have that.
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I'm more disappointed by their decision to not consider Microsoft's Edge and Bing as core platforms, even though the former is being pushed way too hard in Windows and the later is used as part of other search engines' indexes (ie. DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Qwant)
Qwant actually have their own indexer, but even then I feel like Microsoft can push their own products as they want given you are free to ignore it... It's not like there's no alternative browsers, search engine indices or operating systems, and loads of other products are built off shared technology without it being an issue that it's closed off generally
I think the core platform user threshold is a sensible way to determine core platforms. I don't know if bing has so many users and what its market share is.
I think the situation with edge is different though, it should not be allowed to be forced down to windows users by bundling without allowing the user to decide which default browser to use first.
Wait, Duck Duck Go is powered by Bing?
Yep, even when bing censors something, it gets censored by DDG aswell, DDG is just a fancy proxy.
There are only like 4 actual search indexes online (Google, Bing, Yandex, and I can't remember the 4th), and every other search engine just uses one or more of those for results.
I think Baidu, Qwant, Mojeek & Brave all use fully independent indices, but there are likely more. This is excliding eg. Kagi who use a combination of their own and other indices.
I actually thought Brave still used Bing, but Mojeek was what I was trying to think of. I'm sure there are a ton more, but those 4 seem like the biggest players most metasearch engines like to use.
stract.com has their own indexer, fully open-source.
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Too irrelevant to be covered by the law
True but shortsighted.
How so? iMessage isn't getting more popular
Because that way you're always chasing the problem instead of anticipating it. We know how Apple/iMessage behave, there is no point in waiting for them to become a problem.
Ok, agreed with how apple act, but iMessage won't become a problem here, because nobody uses it.
And if they do, which they won't, then apple can be added.
Not sure where you are in Europe but here lots of people use iMessage. If you have an iPhone and want to text another iPhone, it’s usually iMessage.
If they don’t have an iPhone then people fall back to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or hell even Discord…
But you wouldn't text another iPhone. You'd WhatsApp the person.
Not enough people use iMessage for it to be covered by this law. It's not large enough of a messenger.
Fine, but why we should always wait for something to become (evenatually) a problem ?
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Yep. They need to have broad competition rules. Not one per instance of competition issues. It's same damn problem again and again; anticompetitive practices. Somehow the anticompetitive practices moving to the digital world means law makes can't see them.
Whatsapp is europe's iMessage
I have been following the DMA closely, and so far it has been a big disappointment, just as I expected.
The way the EU approaches this walled garden problem, is to try and offer ways for other competitors to tap into the user base of the bigger players instead of trying to allow all EU citizens to chat with any other EU citizen who uses META Products regardless of their host platform. meaning "us" people who wish to self host an xmpp or Matrix servers and chat with facebook friends, It won't be straight forward or entirely possible for us to do so. unless maybe by doing a KYC with META. and signing up very stringent service agreements.
Meta will be creating all sorts of hurdles the DMA laws will allow them to, to cripple interoperability, from making other plateform signing up to special permissions from Meta, to hiding interoperability settings and making them opt-in, and building a scary rhetoric why you shouldn't be allowing other people outside of META to get in contact with you. There are some valid concerns, but I suspect Meta will implement the most spiteful procedures they can get away with, then spin up a rhetoric about proving their users being massing against interoperability.
It's funny how a few short years ago both FB and Google ran with jabber and jingle and we were accidentally chatting between one another.
Seems they just need to roll the code back and they're set.
Makes the upcoming spite just a little more bitter.
Messages on OSX (pre-iMessage) supported ICQ and jabber too if I remember.
Yahoo and MSN too, IIRC.
The way the EU approaches this walled garden problem, is to try and offer ways for other competitors to tap into the user base of the bigger players instead of trying to allow all EU citizens to chat with any other EU citizen who uses META Products regardless of their host platform.
Probably because of spam? I don't think you can open up all the communicators to every self hosted server there is. It would be a disaster.
I don't think I ever got spam from any jabber server even when google and Facebook were running them. You still have to opt in to messages from something. If I had to guess ,I'd guess every chat service is still an xmpp server under a surface level encryption.
That's a very bad call from them. I'm disappointed.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Commission also opted against designating Microsoft’s Edge browser, Bing search engine, and advertising business as core platform services.
Although it designated Apple’s App Store, Safari browser, and iOS operating system as core platform services, it held off on making a final decision on iMessage until an investigation could be completed.
Although iMessage has avoided the burden of complying with rules that comes with the official DMA designation, the period of regulatory scrutiny coincided with Apple announcing support for the cross-platform RCS messaging standard on iPhones, which Google has been pushing for.
Apple has made it clear that it’ll support the cross-platform standard alongside iMessage; it’s not replacing the company’s proprietary messaging service.
Apple’s Safari browser, iOS operating system, and App Store still have to comply with the regulation’s strictest requirements when DMA comes fully into force on March 7th.
Apple recently announced a range of changes it’s making to comply with the regulation, which include allowing alternative app stores and browser engines other than WebKit.
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