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Apple won’t be forced to open up iMessage by EU
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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Not surprising considering iMessage is nearly irrelevant outside the US.
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.
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.
Hmm, maybe you're right :P. But the point is the second half.
The DRM on Blu-rays has essentially been defeated nowadays even on 4K Ultra HD. With the correct drive and firmware you can rip any Blu-ray. Sure it is a bit harder than DVD but the quality increase far outweigh this.
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.
I may have been speaking too broadly when mentioning Nordics - I've only heard some rumors from Norway from an acquaintance that lives there, but for Sweden it's definitely the case. I have not found WhatsApp-use to be common here.
Where in Sweden have you not found WhatsApp common? Or what age group? In Sthlm and nearby towns (ages 25-45) all I ever hear is WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Since I don't use any of those people roll their eyes, sigh and reluctantly agree to SMS, since they don't use any proper messaging apps.
I'm in Stockholm as well, no one outside 'expat communities' has attempted to communicate with me using WhatsApp.
Who knows though, maybe I'm not in tune with the general public any more. I know that basically all of my extended family run on iMessage, and some friends use Facebook Messenger as their lowest common denominator.
To be fair I'm not really in tune with the general public either, but every time I've had to link up with someone, whether old friends, classmates or co-workers they've always gone for WhatsApp immediately. I think iMessage is very popular, too, but I've never heard people mention it by name. Probably because it's just the default iPhone-only SMS replacement.
Just to provide some perspective on the Nordics claim, since I'm Norwegian and worked in a phone store for six years. In my experience, practically no one here uses Whatsapp, except for communicating with people in other countries. It's either Facebook messenger, Snapchat or SMS/iMessage.
I've neverd heard of anyone using iMessage and SMS is only used to confirm doctor appointments lol. Not sure where in the Nordics you're from
Sweden. As I mentioned, I may have been extrapolating a bit too liberally based on what I know from Sweden and Norway - I should probably have been a bit more specific.