There’s a new iMessage for Android app — and it actually works : technology

[+] MagneticFusion@lemm.ee 133 points 11 months ago

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[-] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 39 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Exactly. I don't understand the interest and effort put in these makeshift solutions to integrate into a closed ecosystem managed by a company with so little interest in building interoperable solutions.

They're a cancer to the computing industry that is metastasizing, let's not help them at that.

Fuck apple and their walled garden.

[-] Corgana@startrek.website 16 points 11 months ago

I don't disagree with you, but open source has a long history of this sort of hostile forced-interoperability. Look at stuff like uBlock, there's a real case to be made that it shouldn't need to exist, and yet someone built it. Hostile "patching" of proprietary systems is not ideal, but fix barriers help in the short term.

[-] Udonezo@lemmy.world 13 points 11 months ago

They are going with USB C and RCS messages in the next iphone though. This is good news. The android imessage app is very late, considering.

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[-] Netrunner@programming.dev 66 points 11 months ago

Hate to say it but who gives a fuck?

Just use signal.

[-] PoopMonster@lemmy.world 35 points 11 months ago

The hardest thing about switching communication apps is that you have to convince everyone you talk with to switch as well. I'm stuck in WhatsApp because that's what my friends and family all use.

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[-] guywithoutaname@lemm.ee 19 points 11 months ago

I have to convince every one of my friends to switch because they all use SMS/iMessage. Outside of the US, you would have to convince every one of your friends to switch from WhatsApp.

[-] Ilflish@lemm.ee 18 points 11 months ago

There's been some social discrimination occurring around people who don't have blue messages being excluded, or being seen as poor. Not a great use base but the fact I am even aware of blue Vs green messages means some people do.

[-] Hardeehar@lemm.ee 16 points 11 months ago

This is the only semi-legitimate reason I can get behind. For kids in grade-school.

If anybody outside of grade-school brings this up, I would laugh and ignore.

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[-] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 16 points 11 months ago

iPhone users be like "but I paid $1200 for this blue bubble!"

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[-] phonyphanty@pawb.social 12 points 11 months ago

I'd love to, but none of my friends use it unfortunately

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[-] NounsAndWords@lemmy.world 46 points 11 months ago

I'll just continue to use my old strategy of not voluntarily communicating with people who care about what color my text bubble is.

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[-] DingoBilly@lemmy.world 37 points 11 months ago

Fucking insane a 16 year old kid figured it out.

It's always wild to me thinking how good kids are with tech these days to be able to crack something like this (assuming it's true).

[-] Eggyhead@kbin.social 18 points 11 months ago

Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but it always seems to me that kids are living in a world where they need to as present in their digital realities as much, if not more than, their actual ones. At work it seems like they are trying to be in two places at once sometimes.

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[-] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 14 points 11 months ago

It's what naturally happens when smart people have free time. And teenagers have a lot of that.

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[-] sederx@programming.dev 33 points 11 months ago

im good thanks

[-] slimarev92@lemmy.world 30 points 11 months ago

I don't get why Americans are so obsessed with iMessage. There's like a million chat apps out there.

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[-] Extrasvhx9he@lemmy.today 26 points 11 months ago

Crazy to think this is just because of a different colored bubble

[-] Water1053@lemmy.world 57 points 11 months ago

It's not the color of the bubble. It's the downgraded chat experience: grainy pictures, pixelated videos, and no E2EE.

Our kid was at a sleepover, recently. We got a video of all the kids playing together, but because it wasn't iPhone to iPhone the video was a low resolution pixelated mess.

[-] themoken@startrek.website 38 points 11 months ago

Yeah, my sister-in-law has an iPhone and all of my wife's pics and videos turn to garbage in transit. For the longest my SIL just thought Android cameras were terrible and it locked her in to iPhones at upgrade time - which is exactly what Apple intended.

[-] ripcord@kbin.social 14 points 11 months ago

That's the carrier requiring really rediculously small sizes for MMS.

If I remember correctly AT&T is still limiting videos to 2MB tops. Which is crazy.

[-] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 19 points 11 months ago

And Apple forcing shit quality on ALL MMS, even when the carrier allows higher quality/size.

iOS can't send hi quality videos or images over SMS. It's a choice made by Apple.

I can send large videos (more than 50mb, for sure) over SMS from my Android phone on Verizon to a Verizon iPhone. They receive it in same quality. When they send it back, the iPhone butchers it.

Verizon, unlike other carriers, doesn't seem to have an MMS size limit.

What's really frustrating is MMS is just a web server on the other end. Since the time of data connections (~2005) vendors could've easily made it so MMS on data-capable devices is transported to the web server over data rather than through the voice channel frames (which is what SMS and MMS do).

Though if you had a data-capable device back then, you had to get a data plan to send MMS, so apparently this is what they were doing. They just don't want to upgrade the MMS hosting servers and have the extra traffic.

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[-] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 37 points 11 months ago

Because Apple decided all media over SMS should be sent in a shitty downgraded form.

This is all on Apple wanting to make iMessage look better than SMS, and Apple look better than everyone else (and to be fair, iMessage is the right approach to the SMS issue, just not as a walled-garden version).

iOS can't send hi quality videos or images over SMS. It's a choice made by Apple.

I can send large videos (more than 50mb, for sure) over SMS from my Android phone on Verizon to a Verizon iPhone. They receive it in same quality. When they send it back, the iPhone butchers it.

Verizon, unlike other carriers, doesn't seem to have an MMS size limit.

So Apple and carriers are to blame for this.

[-] bratosch@lemm.ee 9 points 11 months ago

So, it's an issue of Apple intentionally withering down the quality if it's not iPhone-iPhone, rather than "incompatibility"

[-] abhibeckert@lemmy.world 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

No... When you send a "blue bubble" photo on an iPhone the file size is around 1.5MB. When you send a "green bubble" photo I think they're resized down to less than 300KB.

Any photo larger than that won't be delivered by some carriers. Also while iMessage photos default to HEIF format - the same compression algorithm as Blue Ray videos - MMS uses JPEG which doesn't have a target file size feature. All you have is the width/height in pixels and an arbitrary "quality" scale.

To guarantee your photo will never be over 300KB you need to set the width/height/quality to a number that will often be under 100KB... and that's what Apple does.

Android has a size setting, and you'll get a delivery failure error if you set it too high for the recipient's carrier... a lot of carriers do support larger photos... But Apple doesn't bother with that - they want it to "just work". Which means 100KB for green bubble photos.

The reality is quality is always going to suffer - converting an image from HEIF to JPEG is a bad idea - it'll never look anywhere near as good as the original no matter what resolution or quality the compression is set to.

Also... iPhones don't even take ordinary photos... by default every "photo" is a short video. When you send those to another iPhone, they get the video. Green bubbles either get a still image or worse a 100KB five second video.

[-] bratosch@lemm.ee 13 points 11 months ago

.... So it's still an iPhone issue ...... Also, i really don't know what this "blue bubble"/"green bubble" is referencing (other than it being chats)

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[-] Zeroxxx@lemmy.my.id 11 points 11 months ago

Only happens in Muricaland.

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[-] construct_@lemmy.ca 24 points 11 months ago

Is this available on iOS?

[-] JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 14 points 11 months ago

Lol

[-] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 18 points 11 months ago

As nice as it would be to have all my messaging in one app rather than across a half dozen, I just can't picture paying a monthly fee to do it.

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[-] negativeyoda@lemmy.world 18 points 11 months ago

I started using it mainly to not have pictures and videos sent get all degraded, it does work.

Anyhow all my friends were like OMG, YOU GOT AN IPHONE because my messages started coming through blue and I was like, why does that fucking matter?

This is like when I started drinking my coffee black and suddenly I knew the secret handshake at every coffee place I'd order at. Baristas would be like, "the way it should be" and wink and shit. Um. I guess I'm cool now or something

[-] sndrtj@feddit.nl 17 points 11 months ago

Can some American please explain this European why this is such a big deal?

[-] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 13 points 11 months ago

Mostly because the iPhone's dominance has led to iMessage being a very popular service over here. But Android users on the receiving end of messages from that service get images and videos in much lower quality, among many other quality losses.

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[-] Defaced@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago

It's not, it's a superficial opinion on color and functionality that apple and Google want you to think is a big deal but in reality it's two companies using two different protocols and they want you to pick up their product over the over. Even Americans don't know why it's a big deal, they see green in iMessage and freak out.

[-] jamon@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

Sounds like you're an iPhone user, or at least someone who doesn't have kids with Android phones and doesn't participate in group activities where the people primarily use iPhones.

I won't bother explaining it all, but the real issues are group chats that contain both iPhones and Androids, and image/video quality, reactions, etc. The issues are bad enough that kids especially get left out of group chats over it, and bullying incidents are widely reported (and I've seen it first hand)

[-] ReluctantMuskrat@lemmy.world 10 points 11 months ago

As an android user with a wife and kids that have iPhone, it's obnoxious that any video my wife and kids attach to a group message gets auto-reduced to sub-potato quality. We send them with Facebook messenger now but I can see where other groups might simply exclude the people with Androids to avoid the need to use alternate apps. Apple k ows what it's doing.

[-] mojo@lemm.ee 17 points 11 months ago

Stop trying to make this a thing

[-] pickleprattle@midwest.social 15 points 11 months ago

Sunbird worked - I was in the beta - but it turned out to have no encryption whatsoever. I am skeptical.

[-] fox2263@lemmy.world 18 points 11 months ago

Sunbird just relayed messages back and forth using a Mac mini in a warehouse. They probably had something that read the messages app on there and sent to their app on the phone through their servers, and seemingly forgot to encrypt anything during this process.

This is actually sending messages as iMessage. It’s been reverse engineered which is an incredible feat, iMessage has been out like …10+ years? And no one figured it out yet until this 16yr old rocks up.

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[-] polluteyourjorts@lemmy.one 13 points 11 months ago

So if the app will be open source like they say, can't we just build it ourselves and not pay $2/mo?

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[-] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago

no, thx

[-] Kumabear@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago

The fact that people are using iMessage for group chats is which a weird concept to me.

That’s what discord, WhatsApp and Facebook messenger are for.

If anyone adds my primary text message service number to a group chat they are being blocked. Gross.

[-] prole@sh.itjust.works 10 points 11 months ago

Facebook Messenger? Dawg... That shit will cripple your phone

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